american-holocaust

136 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTpopulation of California had been slashed to 150,000 (down from manytimes that number prior to European contact) by swarming epidemics ofinfluenza, diphtheria, measles, pneumonia, whooping cough, smallpox,malaria, typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, dysentery, syphilis, and gonorrhea-alongwith everyday settler and explorer violence.l3 6 As late as 1833a malaria epidemic brought in by some Hudson's Bay Company trapperskilled 20,000 Indians by itself, wiping out entire parts of the great centralvalleys. "A decade later," writes one historian, "there still remained macabrereminders of the malaria epidemic: collapsed houses filled with skullsand bones, the ground littered with skeletal remains." 137Terrible as such deaths must have been, if the lives that preceded themwere lived outside the Spanish missions that were founded in the eighteenthcentury, the victims might have counted themselves lucky. Two centuriesearlier the Puritan minister John Robinson had complained to Plymouth'sWilliam Bradford that although a group of massacred Indians nodoubt "deserved" to be killed, "Oh, how happy a thing had it been, if youhad converted some before you had killed any!" 138 That was probably theonly thing the New England Puritans and California's Spanish Catholicswould have agreed upon. So, using armed Spanish troops to capture Indiansand herd them into the mission stockades, the Spanish padres did theirbest to convert the natives before they killed them.And kill they did. First there were the Jesuit missions, founded early inthe eighteenth century, and from which few vital statistics are available.Then the Franciscans took the Jesuits' place. At the mission of NuestraSenora de Loreto, reported the Franciscan chronicler Father Francisco Pal6u,during the first three years of Franciscan rule 76 children and adults werebaptized, while 131 were buried. At the mission of San Jose Cumunduduring the same time period 94 were baptized, while 241 died. At themission of Purisima de Cadegom6, meanwhile, 39 were baptized-120 died.At the mission of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe the figures were similar:53 baptisms, 130 deaths. The same held true at others, from the missionof Santa Rosalia de Mulege, with 48 baptisms and 113 deaths, to themission of San Ignacio, with 115 baptisms and 293 deaths-all within thesame initial three-year period. 139For some missions, such as those of San Jose del Cabo and Santiagode las Caras, no baptism or death statistics were reported, because there. were so few survivors ("nearly all are ill with syphilis," Father Pal6u wrote)that there was no reason to do any counting. Overall, however, duringthose three years alone, between a quarter and a third of the CaliforniaIndians died who were under Franciscan control. We will never know howmany died during the earlier decades when the Jesuits were in charge.However, "if it goes on at this rate," lamented Father Pal6u, "in a shorttime Old California will come to an end." 140Old California, perhaps, but not the missions. Not if anything within