The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, September 25, 1898, Page 17

BARE, brown plain, burned to the istency of bricks, g etation, save for spreading which = , in spite of the terrible , to keep life in them- selves. r shrive ves drop from the branches, are still green and contrast p with the parched ground, where not a blade of gra nor even a weed can grow. no life on the ranch; the cat- nce left for the high ranges of the Santa Lucia Mountains, where there till some feed. But the day is the 16th of Septem- ber. Though the date has no special ociations to citizens of the United s occurrence is sufficient to long draw long string of buggies and horse n along the dusty trail. They come from Jolon, from all the ranches and far eighborhood, even from fa City. For this is the eighty h anniv ry of the declaration of Mexican independence, and it has been left alone to Jolon, of all towns in the United , to ke green the memory of great n tional event of Mexico. By far the most interesting teristic of the day is Antonio of a sacred rite. year had many more peo- said Father Ferrer, the par- ad out the palms ture of dismay. drought has have no horses we th y cannot come the fathe the ruined m v prints s sepers and ranche there was around re ladies frocks, store dian women and children clad in ry color of the rainbow. Within chapel fioor had been cleared of ris, and the fallen roof timbers, convenient lengths, made he bright- deepest ove , the which med through the spaces in the roof, there wa broken a patriotic element about this forlorn service in a ruined church. Thei seated on benches at one side, were the gaudily clad Indians, the direct descendants of those whom the mission fathers had rescued from savagery and irained with infinite patience to a life of clvil- ized decency. On the other side were ~~ehte better dressed whites, men . ang women of European d :nt, who had succeeded, by sheer force of arms, to the domain which once belonged to the ualid, poverty-stricken Indians. And between, a kind of stepping stone in in the march of empire, were those of Mexican descent, whose forefathers had displaced the Indians, only in turn to be displaced themselves by the more energetic Americans. Yet to-day, being the 16th of Septe ben the people, though of strongly d similar type, united in the worship in order to celebrate an event, which, i this land at least, has long since lost all national significance. Though the ostensible reason for the service was the glorification of Mexican independ- ence, thel was another and more touching side. It was direct testi- mony to the reverence in which the memory of the m ion fathers is still held; it was an appeal to the gener- ous to do thing tc rd restoring and keeping in fair preserv marvelous handiwork of these Christian laborers. To Father Ferrer, indeed, an enthusiast in the cause, this the one and only feature of the celebration. He plaintively ap- pealed to his audience for help in the work of restoration, and reminded his hat all that had hitherto been tion the > pioneer accomplished had been done by his own hands. He told how he had dragged heavy timbers and cleared up debris until, at last, the floor of at le a portion of the sacred structure had been rescued for u He had even living proof of the mis- sion hers’ work to show. Framed in the doorless archway we looked out upon the barren land which once was the fair domain of the mission. Crops and orchards and vineyards flourished here, covering the well - irrigated ground with a carpet of verdure right v to where the fringe of willows ch border the San Antonio Creek, refresh the eye with living green. And bevond, even to the Coast Range, where the topmost peaks melt Into blue haze beneath the dazzling sun, the fathers held sway, cutting their tim- ber and pasturing their cattle on these mountain heights. As we sit on the rude benches gazing out upon the memories of the past, - SAN.FRANCISCO, |- SEPTEMBER 25,1898, there comes to our ears the sound of rude barbaric music. The orchestra enters, a pitiable band, which would excite nothing but ridicule in the streets of San Francisco. But here it excites only sympathy; the ridicule is merged into the pathetic. There are four instrumentalists, and between them they handle, with less than in- different success, two drums, a fiddle and a flute. One must pass over the weakness of their music to gaze upon the personality of their leader. Tower- ing above his fellow-Indians, a majes- tic, white-bearded figure, the man stands as one of the oldest living me- mentos of mission work. His age cans not be found with exactitude, but he is at least 80, and his memory, still good, carries him back to the day when the settlement teemed with when the hum of cheerful filled the air; when handicraftsmen of every description plied their vocations under the supervision of the fathers. He was born on the mission, his par- ents were among the earliest rescued from savagery by the priests. Yearly he comes with his fellows to the cele- bration service, yearly he bangs the drum with more ardor than skiil, for he not oncé a member of the mis- useful WITH LOUD CRIES THEY CAME LASHING 'AND unit of the institution during its most glorious epoch? It was the prettiest, the quaintest re- d. liglous service I have ever witnes: There were no elaborate paraphernali no golden ve gorgeous vest- ments, such as fllumine the altar of a Roman Catholic church. For a screen there was a trellis of green willow boughs, shutting off the ruin end of the chapel, for candles God's glorious sunlight. Yet priests never held a more impressive mass, never was a_ religious function more simply and devoutly performed. The sun shone on the heads of the fathers and lighted up the dusky faces of the little orchestra; occasionally it stole through the broken tiles and touched the de- vout countenance of some fair listener, or struck a gleam of glancing color from her bright summer frock. There was a brief sermon, 1 suppose appro- priate to the occasion, because it was a still briefer exhortation from Father Ferrer in English, in which he uncon- sciously struck a note of humor. He appealed to his audience not to cele- brate the 16th of September with a too exuberent cordiality, advice which many of them, I am afraid, sadly neg- lected later in the day. Then came the crowning feature of the ceremonial, when the Indian moth- ers brought their black-haired, beady- eyed infants to be christened. Of course, the bables cried, but the rite was none the less cheerfully performed. Then we were treated to an Indian wedding of a somewhat peculiar char- acter, and the priest had to appeal to his congregation to take the service se- of Jesus Christ.” By Gentiles he riously, and to remember that they meant, of course, the Indians. Yet, were in a consecrated building. The strangely enough, the good father was bridegroom was &t least sixty years old, the bride a maid of fifteen sum- mers. I suppose I should have said blushing, but her skin was so dark that one could not detect the tell-tale flush. An audacious American girl, pretty as a picture, steals close up with her cam- era, determined, despite all, irreverently to obtain a snap shot. “I got them,” she laughingly cried afterward, “just when they- were trying to put the ring on the wrong finger, and it wouldn’t fit. Wasn’t it funny.” The elderly bridegroom got very drunk at the hotel that evening, but all the other Indians did the same thing. The mission priests of a century ago were a practical, hard-working set of men, and when one thinks of all they accomplished with the primitive means at their disposal, one marvels that every trace of their handicraft should have been allowed to disappear. All around the mission inclosure you will find the ruins of adobe buildings. These piles of brown earth were once a long row of huts where the Mission Indians Awelt: here was the flonr mill. turned by a primitive waterwheel, here was not the first, by more than a century, to speak words of hope in this heathen land. An aged Indian woman, over a hundred years, S the ceremony and ready to astonish the father with a reminiscence. Her mother, she asserted, remembered two white men who came to the country years ago and who talked exactly as the father had done. Probably these were the priests sent north by Father San Francisco in 1631. The secular part of the celebration held at Jolon presented many aspects of a distinctly humorous character. For the brief period of twenty-four hours Jolon emerged from its custom- ary obscurity and became a center of vast importance to the neighborhood. Few people in San Francisco have numbering present at ‘v; Yoy 504 -’/// ,‘,// A 7, (g o 3 i I e h 17 A T A (A LU the storehouse, the blacksmith shop and 80 on. All these bulldings are practically leveled to the ground and in a few years every trace of their existence will have disappeared. On the slope of the hills just below is a more melancholy relic, the Mission graveyard. Here, in a great square Inclosure, lie the undis- tinguishable dead of a century—Indians and half-breeds, Mexicans and Span- iards, sleeping, many of them, three or four deep, for the fathers were not particular about using the same grave several times over. Being covered with tiles the walls which surround the in- closure are still fairly intact, but within ever heard of Jolon. Yet Jolon, though small, is lively and knows how to surround a festival with all needful accessories and trimmings. It is a straggling little town of a few white- painted houses, picturesquely situated under the shelter of the Coast Range. Once it was a stopping place on the stage line from Kings City to Los An- geles but the advent of the railway has changed all tlat and few rangers ever find their way along the dusty high road. Jolon, however, has age to Justify its existence, as the magnificent grape vine in front of one of the two hotels testifies. Traces of the San Antonio mission, all distinguishing marks have disap- only «ix miles distant, are visible peared and there is nothing to show everywhere at Jolon. The landlord, a Where the graves are. very old resident, possesses quite a Even the large wooden cross in the small museum of mission curios. There SPURRING THEIR HORSES DOWN center has fallen under the prevailing influence of decay, and waves its hori- zontal arm wildly in the air, at an alto- gether irreverent angle. This scene of ruin and desolation is all that is left of the work begun by Father Junipero Serra 127 years ago and so ably completed by his success- ors in office. In point of age the San Antonio mission ranks third. First there was S°n Diego, then Monterey and a year later San Antonio. Travel- ing painfully over the mountain ranges with his mule trains, Father Junipero gave war to a dramatic impulse when he reached the evot. Taking the bells from his mules’ necks he hung them on a tree and rung them violently with his own hands, exclaiming. “Come, all ye Gentiles, come and receive the faith are the huge wooden cart wheels cut out of a solid piece of wood on which the cumbersome, creaking ox wagons of the pioneer days were mounted. There are upper and nether milistones rudely shaped from black volcanic ba- salt; there are wooden statues, now sadly dilapidated; there are plows, saws, queerly fashioned tools of every description, copper vessels beaten out by hand and a host of other articles of primitive manufacture, all of which were contrived by the ingenious priests. There are even some of the altar deco- rations and sacred vestments as well as the cross which once stood over the grave of the last ruler of the mission, Father Ambris. ‘When this holy man died, in 1883, the mission, already shorn of its lands and Jie i fallen sadly into decay, soon went to pieces altogether. The Indfan residents had dwindled to a mere handful, and the Land Commission had only left the mission the ground it had actually im- proved, some ‘thirty acres. Hencefor- ward - the Roman Catholic Bishop troubled no more about-this precious relic of early settlement, though as earnest 'men are now ad- vocating the restoration of all the mis- slons, it is possible that something may be done before it is too late—that is to say, within the next two or three vears. The old traditions, however, die hard. Spanish is spoken quite as frequently as English; it is universal among the many half-breeds and Indians to be seen about the town. The celebration of the 16th of September remains the one great festival of the year, far over- shadowing in importance the Fourth of July or Thanksgiving day or any of the THE STRETCH. national holidays. The people there, whether American or Spanish, speak of keeping the 16th of September as we would do of keeping Christmas, and make their prepara- tions for a glorious jollification which lasts from midnight on the 15th to sun- rise on the 17th. It is always the same story. “If you had only been here last year,” every- one says. ‘“We had over a thousand people in town. We never had such a time,” ete. This year, owing to the failure of the crops, the attendance was described as small, but still there were quite enough people to make things hum. The proceedings, according to im- memorial usage, began at midnight on Friday, when the Mexican flag was ceremoniously hoisted. The loyalty of the people to the republic was shown, however, by the fact that the stars and stripes fioated above the red, white and green banner. Indeed, though the fiesta being kept was purely a Mexican one, none of the revelers forgot that the United States had first claim to their citizenship. “We all pull together,” said a resi- dent—“Americans, Mexicans, Span- jards and Indiaps—and though we keep a Mexican celebration we don’t forget Uncle Sam.” This was the spirit of the thing, for when the flags were hoisted and the bonfire blazed merrily, cheers were given indiscriminatelv for the United States and Mexico, for anybody and everybody, of whatever nationality. As nobody in the place possessed a can- non, a gentleman obligingly fired off char: of giant powder in an adja~ cent field, to the imminent danger of a valuable bird dog. This intelligent ani- mal, hearing guns, as he deemed them, being fired, imme commenced’ to retrieve imaginary and in the course of id the giant powder departing to the canine happy Thus the 16th land. opened and the crowd adjourned to the hotel to auspiciously, continue the event. To the credit of the Jolon cit s only the Indians got very drunk, a circumstance which was hardly surprising. It seemed to be a point of honor on thi as much whisky as po: Indian, partly from a pure spirit hospitality and partly to induce them to dance or cut ludicrous anties. The forenoon of the 16th was occu- pied with the religious ceremonial at the Mission, but though it was a very hot day the energy of the people was by no means exhausted. They held a barbecue in the afternoon in the bed of a dry creek, where a fringe of cot- tonwood trees and willows gave some slight protection from the blazing sun. It was holiday making under the most difficult circumstances. The stony creek looked 2s if it had never known the meaning of the word water, the under- brush was burned to a cinder, and the various picnic parties were hard-pushed to find enough shade ‘to cover.them- selves. Still, there were many girls and comely matrc sober farm- ers and eloquent politician The lat- ter gentlemen, aspirants for couhty of- fices, took advantage of the opportunity to press their claims upon the voters, and one could hardly walk a yard with- out having a.card thrust into o hands announcing that Mr. Surething was a candidate for some lucrative State position. But, though much politics was talked, the spirits of the people remained- un- dampened and they adjourned to the race course to conclude the aftérnoon’s there, pretty sport. The race course was simply a level stretch of ¢ road, half a mile long. The horses start from one end and in due course arrive at the other; that is all there is about it. There was no public betting or any of the ordi- nary sporting accompaniments of the race course. As the riding was of a purely amateur character the contests did not lack itement, frorh a local point of view, and the finish of each race was welcomed with warm cheers from the friends of the winner. Toward the close of the afternoon the revelers retired to prepare for the great ball, which was to crown the festivities of the day. Th: tamale booths, cool and refreshing with their covering of green willow boughs, concocted an extra sup- ply of this favorite edible in readiness for the night's demand. Every room in the hotel was crowded with ladiés pre- paring their ball dres: a stri of buggies drove up with fresh arrivals. Need I say that the ball was a briltant success? It was the one opportunity of the year for many of these people and they made the most of it. “Strange,” remarked an indignant storekeeper, surveying the scene, “though these small ranchers can never find money enough to pay their store bills they can always discover a few dollars to spend at the ball.” Jolon kept it up until long after day- light. Then the visitors departed and Jolon went to sleep for another year. J. F. ROSE-SOLEY. RRER'S SERMOM,