The Mission System and Its Cost

On a July morning in seventeen sixty-nine, Father Junipero Serra drove a cross into the earth near present-day San Diego and established the first of what would become twenty-one California missions. The Spanish crown had two goals: to secure Alta California against Russian and British encroachment, and to convert its inhabitants to Christianity and reshape them into agricultural laborers for the empire. The missions stretched along the coast like beads on a string, spaced roughly a day's walk apart, from San Diego to Sonoma.

Inside their walls, tens of thousands of Indigenous Californians were baptized, given Spanish names, and assigned to fields, tanneries, and workshops. Many entered voluntarily at first, drawn by food during drought years. Others were coerced.

Once baptized, leaving without permission was treated as desertion and punished. The consequences were catastrophic. Measles, smallpox, and respiratory diseases, against which coastal populations had no immunity, moved through mission dormitories with lethal speed.

Birthrates collapsed as mortality rates soared. Historians estimate that the combined Indigenous population of coastal California fell from roughly seventy-two thousand in seventeen sixty-nine to under eighteen thousand by eighteen thirty-three, when the missions were secularized. Some scholars set the decline steeper than that.

Resistance never stopped. At Mission San Gabriel in seventeen eighty-five, a Tongva leader named Toypurina was convicted of organizing an armed uprising and exiled north to Carmel. At Mission Santa Cruz in the early eighteen twenties, the neophyte Pomponio escaped repeatedly and raided coastal trails for years before his execution in eighteen twenty-four.

The missions are a complicated inheritance. Their bells and whitewash appear on road signs and wine labels across the state today. For the descendants of the people who worked and died within those walls, the legacy is less ambiguous.