The Spirits of ‘76
There’s a story—probably apocryphal, but we’re doing didactics, for the moment, not history—that King George III jotted down in his diary for July 4, 1776 (or, as they say in the United Kingdom, 4 July 1776): Nothing important happened today.
Padre Francisco Palòu’s journal (now we’re doing history) is similarly blank for that date, and, indeed, for most of the month of July. But even where documents are silent, history keeps on happening. While the events that July of 1776 usually call to mind for most USAians were transpiring in Philadelphia, the mission and presidio that would eventually become the city of San Francisco saw their foundation… and with them, the beginnings of the city’s history of forced displacements.
While history is usually written by the victors, we’re especially hard up for documentation from the conquered Ohlone peoples of the Bay Area—partially because they did not pass down all that much local history through Spanish, Mexican, and US conquest, and partially because the Spanish missionaries were so terrifyingly effective in their inadvertent, but equally inexcusable, genocide. The Spanish account is the only remaining record of the first interactions between the original locals, and the people who built the settlements that became San Francisco.
Palòu arrived with the expedition of Captain Don José Joaquin Moraga—one sergeant, two corporals, ten soldiers, their families, seven settler families, Fray Pedro Benito Cambon, four servants, three neophytes from Carmel and Baja California, a few mules, and approximately 300 head of cattle. They made camp on June 27 at the edge of Laguna Dolores (one of San Francisco’s many vanished bodies of water), performed mass on the 29, and then Palòu’s diary is silent on the daily events until July 26, when the colonists, tired of waiting for supplies from Monterey, moved out of their tents and began to construct cabins from tule.
The Ohlone people that the Moraga expedition met en route and on the San Francisco peninsula, according to Palòu, “marvelled over the livestock bovines, which they had never before seen.” The peninsulars probably had no way of knowing that these cows would in large part contribute to their ouster:
In 1834, when the Mexican government mandated the secularization of all mission holdings, the mission lands surrounding Mission Dolores and the other Bay Area missions ought to have returned to the various native peoples who had preceded Spanish/Mexican occupation by over a millennium. (In fact, this land was scheduled to be returned to Ohlone people in 1786, but was not.) Instead, most of the land became privately owned ranches. This situation would continue into US rule.
But by 1834, irreparable damage had already been done to Ohlone society. In addition to the frequently inadvertent pan-American plague of European diseases, the Franciscans were to wreak much more deliberate havoc on their mission wards.
Palòu’s disgust toward his hosts is manifest: “These natives are well formed; many of them with beards, bald, and quite ugly; they have a practice of removing their eyelashes from the root, which makes them ugly. They’re poor indians, with no more house than a frame of branches to protect them from the prevailing, bothersome winds…”
This condescension made easier the forced labor to which Palòu, Padre Junípero Serra, and the numerous other priests of the Alta California missions would subject native Californians. Sexual reproduction was supervised (in one case in Santa Cruz, a priest demanded that a sterile woman and her husband engage in coitus in his presence—they refused). Women were cloistered, and rarely permitted adequate access to fresh air. Mission residents who decided to return to their villages were forced back to the missions. Rape and beatings were not uncommon. All these factors contributed to a phenomenal mortality rate that resulted in the near eradication of Bay Area Americans.
History is usually written by the victor, but sometimes it gets written by the last person standing. In 1877, Santa Cruz ex-neophyte Lorenzo Asisara recorded his account of struggles between Ohlone mission residents and Franciscan and civil authorities. Multiple times, upon punishment or the threat thereof by Franciscan priests or the soldiers who protected them, Ohlone neophytes took up arms to defend themselves, in one case actually assassinating the particularly punitive (and possibly perverse) Padre Andrés Quintana. After the corrupt secularization of Mission Santa Cruz, former mission neophytes drove one civil administrator out of town.
There has been displacement on this peninsula for longer than there’s been a San Francisco. But the Bay Area is lucky to have an almost equally long history of popular resistance.
This article draws heavily on the research of Edward D. Castillo and Randall T. Milliken.
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