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Mission Dolores’ dark legacy for Indians: From salvation to subjugation and death

Mission Dolores is by far the oldest and most historically significant building in San Francisco. The white adobe church on Dolores Street was once celebrated as a testament to the faith and courage of the Spanish colonizers who built it — a reverential attitude enshrined in the 1894 statue “Early Days,” which depicted a preaching priest looming over a crouching Indian.

Today, however, the mission’s legacy is seen as far more problematic. The shift in attitude was reflected in the city’s decision last fall to remove the “Early Days” statue from the Pioneer Monument in Civic Center, as well as the unsuccessful 2014-15 battle to prevent the canonization of Father Junipero Serra, founder of the first California missions.

The story of Mission Dolores began March 27, 1776, less than four months before colonists on the other end of the continent declared their independence from England. On that day, a Spanish party under the command of Capt. Juan Bautista de Anza arrived in San Francisco after a 1,200-mile trek that had begun in Sonora, Mexico. Anza set about finding sites for the two indispensable institutions of Spanish colonial settlement: the presidio, or fort, and the mission.

The presidio’s purpose was to defend the settlement. The mission, far more important, would turn native people into gente de razon (“people of reason”) — civilized Christians like their Spanish masters.

On Oct. 9, 1776, work was completed on the first, crude mission, to celebratory cannon fire and bell ringing. Construction on a permanent mission — the one that still stands — began in 1783 using native labor. Mission San Francisco de Asis was dedicated in 1791. It was the sixth of the 21 missions the Spanish erected in Alta California, each about a day’s ride apart.

The native people “civilized” at the missions were to become farmers, raise cattle and otherwise sustain the colonial undertaking. But economic motives were secondary to spiritual ones. The Spanish believed it was their sacred responsibility to save the Indians’ souls.

In 1777, a 20-year-old Ohlone man named Chamis became the first adult Indian to be baptized at Mission Dolores. The next year he became the first Indian to be married there, taking a woman named Paszem as his wife.

Over the next 50-plus years, thousands of other “gentiles” (unconverted Indians) came into the mission. They included not just some of the 300 or so Yelamu who lived in what is now San Francisco, and the larger Ohlone population of which the Yelamu were a part, but members of a number of other tribes. As Randall Milliken notes in “A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the Bay Area 1776-1810,” the Indians were drawn in for a variety of reasons: hunger, disease, awe at European technology, gifts given by the monks, depopulation and the loss of their lands.

The neophytes, as baptized Indians were called, were forced to adapt to a way of life radically different from the one they had known. Before the Spanish arrived, they had roamed freely through their lands, working only when they needed to. They had an open attitude toward sex, enjoyed communal celebrations and were famous for their incessant singing. In the mission, they had to rise at dawn, go off to work, say prayers and take religious classes. They had no free time until 8 at night. Men and women were segregated in different dormitories.

Not surprisingly, they became deeply depressed. A number of foreign visitors commented on how sad the Indians looked. Louis Choris, an artist who was part of a Russian expedition that visited San Francisco in 1816, wrote, “I have never seen one laugh. I have never seen one look one in the face. They look as though they were interested in nothing.”

Worst of all, the neophytes were not allowed to change their mind and return to their old way of life. Once the Indians were baptized, the Spanish regarded themselves as responsible for their salvation, and if they ran away, the Spanish would track them down and punish them.

Many tried to escape anyway. In 1796, no fewer than 200 of the 872 neophytes at Mission Dolores ran away. This led to an official investigation. Asked why so many fled, soldiers at the mission said it was the three muchos: too much work, too much punishment and too much hunger. Six of the recaptured Indians confirmed this, saying they had run away because they had been whipped by Father Antonio Danti, a priest at the mission who had already been reprimanded by the governor for cruelty toward the Indians.

Trivia time

The previous trivia question: What San Francisco institution was created after Hull House founder Jane Addams visited the city in 1894?

Answer: The South Park Settlement House, a pioneering attempt at live-in social work.

This week’s trivia question: How did San Francisco writer Ambrose “Bitter” Bierce die?

Editor’s note


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But while some priests treated the Indians harshly, most did not. Within the limitations of their worldview, their intentions were good: They regarded the native people as their children, and were often genuinely kind to them.

Yet as the pioneering anthropologist Alfred Kroeber pointed out, “The brute upshot of missionization, in spite of its kindly flavor and humanitarian root, was only one thing: death.”

The death rate for Indians was higher at Mission Dolores than in the rest of the chain because of cold weather and inadequate food. So many became sick and died that 200 replacement neophytes had to be sent in every year between 1800 and 1820.

By 1825, most local Indians had come into the mission. The Indian population at Mission Dolores peaked that year at 1,252, of whom only 90 were Ohlone speakers, and only 18 of those Yelamu. Most of the rest had died — of measles, tuberculosis, syphilis and other diseases brought by the Europeans. By 1847, 13 years after the missions were secularized under Mexican rule, only 34 Indians were found on the entire San Francisco Peninsula.

Mission Dolores is a testament to the faith that sustained the Spanish colonists. But its cemetery, and the lands near it, are also a monument to something darker. For buried there are approximately 5,000 Indians, who died during the 50 years that the mission was trying to save their souls.
