previous next
[116] Santa Clara, living on the soil, more or less settled, earning their bread by labour, with the males and females taking on themselves an equal share. They owned twelve hundred horses, thirteen thousand horned cattle, fifteen thousand sheep, hogs, and goats. The other missions were like Santa Clara; each had her colony of converts, and her wealth of kine and sheep.

Where are these converts now? Too many of them are scattered to the woods, or laid beneath the grass.

What other order or society has ever put out hand to help these people? Mexico dispersed their teachers, and divided the common lands. In five or six years those lands were gone. A free man, holding an estate, can sell it; and the only use ever made by these Indians of their freedom was to sell their lands and purchase drink.

When the United States came in, these tribes were overlooked, and down to this moment they are virtually overlooked. Within the districts covered by the old Catholic Missions, there is only one small agency; a mere farm on Tule River. The Indians have neither lands nor cows; the flocks

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: