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They came for gold and silver
and Catholic converts and a shorter way to the Spicy East, the latter
their main impetus, the Second Nation, for the First Nation were
immigrants, too. They were in a race with other temperate peoples, the
French, the British and Russians especially through much of their
dominant period, and then the Neuromericans and the heralding of the
passing of dominance to the Third Nation that erupted with Manifest
Destiny and the Gold Rush. Their prosperity and destitution waxed and
waned with the triumphs and travails of their mother country, often in
inverse correlation with their opponents. Although they failed to find
the storied river of Anian, of Buenaventura,
and a shorter route to the Spicy Lands (nor El Dorado, though it was
there hiding in plain sight in the Sierra streams), their efforts in
their grand ships, guided by magnetic compass and crude maps and stars
and sun and moon alone, to traverse thousands of miles of featureless
ocean, reflected a remarkable confidence, zest, resilience, and
resourcefulness incomprehensible to most of today’s coddled minds. They
found some converts for their gaudy religion, though often through
dishonorable and disrespectful and duplicitous means, often nearly
indistinguishable from slavery, and they left a travesty of tears of
disease-killed First Nation persons. Arrogant and imperious and
dismissive and condescending and bigoted, all behaviors they were
guilty of. But a minority of the first people likely heard their
calling with the second, the segundo,
and rose to relatively prominent positions, and obviously some
accommodation was reached given rise of the mestizos. Many of
the communities established, introducing a domesticated way of life to
a landscape that previously had seen only mildly cultivated and wild
lifestyles, were impressive in how they were built nearly from scratch
– also beyond the comprehension of today’s Internet-addled mind. Their
legacy remains, etched in names all along the coast, penetrating inland
in the southern and central parts of the insane state of California,
giving my home mountain ranges of the Sierra Nevada and San Bernadinos
their current appellations; found in the beautiful remnants of the
missions, their remaining existence proof of the skill by which they
were built; and in the golden skin and obsidian eyes of so many people
of this insane state, fusion of first and second peoples to mingle and
fuse with the third people to become a fourth and then beyond and only
to end come the final blast from the sky, whether from god or man or
space.
Yep, they are reviled today as pure
evil, lusting for precious metals and gems and jewels, gold and opal,
they’re seen as greedy, racist, sexist whities, and they did condescend
towards others based partly on genetics, and dudes were frequently top
dogs, but, as in all life, nothing is absolute, and such a perception
is woefully, distortingly incomplete. Precious metals really aren’t,
but they still have value for art as well as science (combined, to me,
most beautifully in my gold- and silver-plated spoons and spinners that
allure king salmon and steelhead like no other lures), so not a totally
frivolous enterprise to till the earth for such rarities to at least a
mild extent. Lest we forget, it was at the genesis and during the bloom
of exploration when mighty Elizabeth reigned and ruled England with
incomparable skill and energy, and Isabella was viewed as vital (or
even more so) as her husband in Spain and oversaw the Reconquista. While
often bigoted to peoples of their world new to them, many at least
acknowledged the truth that these were humans, too, they’d some
empathy, otherwise Isabella wouldn’t’ve condemned slavery, nor would
there have been such an effort to bend the new peoples to Spanish
traditions – yeah, a condescending view – via the softer route of the
church and missions rather than the brutal shackles of secularism and
plantation slavery. And so – the efforts, the effectors, a mosaic of
the good and bad nearly all persons, all peoples, have the potential to
express.
And so the spearhead of the Second
Nation, those mariners who first penetrated to California and have
their names reflected in, appropriately, a sea, a beach. Hated too by a
disproportionately loud minority these days, even more so since they
were the first of the segundo,
and so the genesis of the disruptions and diseases that so decimated
the primo.
Indeed, that was tragic, but certainly not premeditated, and that does
not erase how remarkable were their voyages. So many of those haters –
and yeah, some of the hate is justified, but harboring hate alone is so
very incomplete – are coddled, babied, nannied, can’t even drive 10
miles from their urban center to another without the fuckin’
smart-phone, can’t change the oil in their ride, can’t fix a faucet
leak, can’t grow a herb in a pot or kill a rabbit for a stew, and
somehow can’t at least acknowledge that the successful voyages of the
Spanish so long ago with no electronics, no good maps, no supermarkets
or light bulbs or any convenience of these over-domesticated days, only
a featureless ocean of thousands of miles with only compass and
astrolabe and celestial sky-marks to guide, and with only manpower, no
computer power, to build and maintain their ships – fucking incredible.
And while the haters sit at home and moan and mire on the couch because
they’ve suffered “trauma” from a childish name-calling post on their
social-media account, those mariners persevered through hot and cold
and scurvy and starvation and infection, hauling sails and ropes and
banging nails and hot metal on anvils. They could’ve only succeeded in
such marvelous odysseys by harboring a healthy resilience,
resourcefulness, and courage. And, I have to think, a healthy faith as
well.
Their main drive was, proximately, the
pursuit of the flowering of taste and fragrance and healthfulness of
the spices, with secondary but also important motivations of more
converts for their church, more ore to exalt both themselves and their
country above that of their rivals. But, really, just as exercising and
thereby growing one’s legs allows a broadening of ability to traverse
more lands, just as a lush larder of energy storage in the form of fat
reserves or cached food facilitates experimenting with more foods, so,
too, did the union and streamlining of Spain under the formidable rule
of Izzy and her dude foster a rich environment to explore beyond the
confines of the Iberian, and that surge occurring in a fortuitous time
window. It was, at core, the evolutionary impulse of flourishing life
that cast off the ships for such lands and waters unknown.
And they exhibited quite the zeal, the
urge, to explore during the 1500s, Spain’s most golden time, although
California of today, yester-century’s Alta California,
remained largely a mystery, remained almost solely the domain of the
First Nation, the Americans. The segundo
just touched the coast of California here and there, mainly in a search
for the arrowy Anian River supposed to slice through North America and
be the shortest route to the Orient’s riches. But the Spanish weren’t
the only ones plying the waters – the English were, too, and Drake’s
appearance fomented in the Spanish an ever-greater concern to claim
California lands and beyond, both to thwart the English from plundering
Spanish ships sojourning from the western Pacific and returning to the
mother country around the Americas and then across the Atlantic, which
would require pausing during the journey for retrofit and resupply,
possibly to occur in California, as well as to claim the mythical Anian
for future, faster voyages. But the flame of their zeal for California
had dwindled to ember by the end of their golden century, snuffed by
both their disastrous defeat dealt to ‘em by Liz’s navy and the
increasing degeneracy and stagnation of the monarchy that rippled
throughout Spain’s society. The latter, certainly affected by the
increasing inbreeding of the royalty, could mount nothing more for
California throughout the 1600s, attaining its nadir during the reign
of that pathetically misshapen, inbred man - who deserves some sympathy
- Chuck the Second of Spain, the last of the Habsburg line.
The roil after Chuck II’s demise and the
vicarious usurpation of the throne by the lordly Louix XIV through his
grandson, despite all the horror of war exceeding a decade, breathed
new life into Spain via less-inbred blood – some freshness with the
Bourbon replacement. As always, conditions of the mother country
rippled to the daughter country, and Alta California
experienced renewed interest through the 1700s. By now, they’d enough
experience with Alta
to realize the resemblance of this New World region to those of the Old
World, France and Spain and Italy. In other words – very welcoming to
southern Europeans. Although errors regarding the geography persisted
throughout the 1700s, belief in a Californian Anian River subsided to
dust and dream. Interest shifted then to holding as much territory for
the mother country as possible, once again a competitive reaction to
the acquisitiveness of Spain’s rivals, France and Russia but especially
Great Britain. So exploration once again increased, more sorties along
the coast but now accompanied by more-difficult land surveys, searing,
arduous treks from arid northern Mexico through the xeric Colorado
Desert, across the Lagunas and other southern ranges, and, eventually,
up the coast to the limit of Spain’s dominance, the bay of Saint
Francis, and the many saltating locations from the south and then along
the coast also bearing Spanish names, echoing the long-ago travels.
They could see the towering Sierra Nevada and thus gave the mighty
range her name, but they penetrated little into interior central and
especially northern California, that region largely remaining the
domain of the First Nation ‘til the Third Nation began trickling in
after severing of the territory from the mother country in the early
1800s. To garrison their New Spain, they sought to alter Alta to better
resemble the home country, and that included bending the First Nation
to segundo.
Had they achieved their fantasy, they’d’ve had a much larger population
to thwart the rival Eurasian nations as well as the new North American
one increasingly threatening from the continent’s east.
An understandable desire, to recreate
Spain, in part with First Nation blood to expand the Spanish tribe,
very complex, this change, this evolution, which exhibited the range of
human endeavor – atrocity, dismissiveness, humaneness, resourcefulness
beyond the remarkable oceanic voyages, and even some beauty. Seems not
an instant was given to considering the wild and semi-cultivated
lifestyles of the First Nation successful for the landscape, nor that
their mere presence held claim to the land, on which the Spanish were
trespassers, and which, a double standard, the Spanish then claimed
ownership of and accused the Russians perching at Ross of trespassing.
Subtraction of self-evident facts from truth, leaving only ink on paper
as sources of legitimacy. The latter, while of course useful and
valuable, is incomplete, insufficient, and the persistence that only
ink on paper – or its modern-day facsimile, dots and lines on
electronic screens – means anything continues to contribute to the
burgeoning absurdity of the modern technocracy. But they did express
humaneness along with the imperiousness, reflected in part by the
Spanish leaders realizing that secular interests were liable to enslave
rather than convert the First Nation, and this they attempted to
circumvent with their Catholic church, through the persuasion of their
Christian fathers. Some, such as Padre Garces, seemed remarkably
open-minded and appreciative – that father seemed more converted to the
heathen ways than vice versa. Like nearly all groups of people, some
veered the other way, being little more than ordained slave-drivers,
with flogging and all, though much censure of this intolerant faction
again reveals a greater concurrent humaneness. And the extolling of
persuading First Nation people to Catholicism, in practice, seemed more
a deception, in that once the Americans were within the padres’ power,
they were basically governed as if children, hunted down if they left
their masters, having to seek their masters’ permission for tasks no
responsible adult should. Despite such efforts at humaneness, and no
doubt a small minority of First Nation persons who heard their calling
more in the segundo
than their own, overall, it fuckin’ sucked for most of ‘em, many of
whom died from disrupted health or newly arrived diseases, many of whom
suffered from the slash of lash, girls and women locked up at night,
jailed, and reflected in the many rebellions and deserters.
And it’s a shame that the theater of
much of that abuse is so beautiful, the mission. Amazing, and a
testament to the skill and resourcefulness of the builders, that enough
of so many remained to be restored. Although hazy now here in the later
days of my desultory life, I can still recall images of a field trip or
two to the San Fernando Mission, a worthy education expedition, though
I fear these days, if they’re even undertaken, the edifices are
explained purely as chambers of horrors rather than reflecting all
facets of human experience. And that is, since so many of insane-state
California derive from blood of Spain and America, kind of at least
partially, implicitly insulting. Digression aside, I remember walking
through the stately, graceful corridors, the chapel that I have to
think had wonderful acoustics and would’ve been an awesome amplifying
resonator of music, the coolness of the shade proffered by the thick
adobe, contrasting the blasting, heaving sun of that searing valley.
And a rather elegant expression of a self-sustaining domesticated life,
with spaces for repose of residents and travelers, for crafts, for
community, for transportation. Sure seemed a fuckin’ pretty appropriate
building type for the place, no need for air conditioning, reflecting
that, of possible European trespassers to excel in such a place, the
Spanish were probably the best – hard to see how a Norseman would’ve
flourished in such a place, like a lake trout trying to persist in a
weed-choked largemouth bass pond.
The mission, though, wasn’t alone in
settlement types, complemented by the presidio, the
warriors’ nest, and the pueblo,
largely the farmer’s village. Together with the mission a triad, much
resembling such organization that persisted from hundreds of years
previous, the Medieval Period, when European life was dominated by the
peasants, knights, and holy people – farmer and soldier and priest –
who, together, provided all the domesticated people of a place needed:
sustenance, protection, and wisdom. (Yeah, I know, and I agree –
Christianity in its most virulent literal forms is absurd, but as
metaphor, as with all religions, some more than others, much value to
be gleaned. Too, lest we forget, the universities originally emerged as
religious organizations – they’ve kind of reverted back to that role,
though the dogma promulgated these days is a harsher version than those
of so long ago – at least grains of creative behavior can be quarried
from Christianity, as well as acknowledgement that we all have spirit,
whereas the postmodern shit inculcated now – spirit dead, and you’re
just a dehumanized fuckin’ number on the intersectional scale. Gross.)
To the bone they were in Alta,
often down to the bare necessities, and so a worthy organization to
consider in these disorienting days. So many so bummed out in the
modern world, over-connected and yet famished for connection, feeling
so worthless, so many lives so fuckin’ homogenous and rote, stuck
inside a room where the weather never changes, stuck so many hours
staring passively, stolidly, at the flattening, circumscribed screen,
on repeat, and to quell the worthlessness, a drug bonanza with the
legal often worse than the banned, and then overblown reactions of
ignorant outrage, blown up and financially feasted on by vultures
fanning the fires. I’m pretty goddamn sure that shit didn’t exist in
the pueblos,
where the citizens had their own small adobes, where they could be
alone or with their families, intimate, space to reflect, but then had
communal halls where they gathered in real connection, not diluted by
flashing screens, then worked their own plots but, together, also had
some common grounds should one person’s private plot prove a failure –
good insurance. They raised food, they worked stone and metal and wood,
were magnificent equestrians (i.e.,
they knew their transportation well), had their hands and feet in the
flesh and bones of Mother Earth, in life, and that – that don’t give ya
time to be bummed out and seek the downward-spiral conundrum of
ever-unsatiating gluttonizing of social media. The more people eat that
shit, the less it fills.
Only good to kick people outdoors and
sink their hands and feet into Mother Earth, get a fuckin’ sunburn,
sweat, strain, elevate ‘em to citizens of the pueblo.
Statement of the obvious, or at least
that which should be – societies are of people, people are life, life
evolves, and so are societies never static – they’re flows. And the
flow of Spain once again stalled, paradoxically to both stagnation and
chaos, a swirling whirlpool dammed, come the turn to the 1800s. The
country dragged along and embroiled in the massive clashes of the ages
of the French Revolution and Napoleon, spurned in part by the
Enlightenment and the smaller clash that occurred on the east side of
the northern New World. As always, the shockwaves of the Old World
reached the New, and the desire to bash the castes, of both market and
state, erupted. Likewise the diminution of religion, and that reduction
originating and expanding from France reflected a similar feeling with
the missions – yeah, they’d converted some of the first peoples, but
not all, and many who had accepted that change clearly found it
distasteful and returned to their former lifestyles of hunter and fire
steward and fisher. (Such desertions drew the segundo inland into
the southern Central Valley more than they likely would have, and thus
Spanish names adorn far more of the places there now than in the
northern valley.) And so, to the clamor for social and economic freedom
was added religious freedom, the most obvious act of which would be
transformation of the missions, failed in their primary mission, to pueblos –
“secularization.”
And so the shift from an overseas
monarchy to an independent republic; the evolution of the missions to pueblos and depots
and, for some, ruins, accompanied by increased ranching, the reign of
the vaquero
and the rancho
(their colorful dances must’ve been so beautiful, to eye and ear); an
honorable elevation in humaneness, with emancipation of the
Catholicized first peoples to citizens (something the nation on the
east took decades more, plus early deaths of hundreds of thousands of
lives, to achieve, at least on federal documents) and moderation of
punishments doled out to lawbreakers; and the severing of ties with the
mother country. But divisions remained, typical of newly born
organizations, as was the case with the other toddler New World nation
of the east that bickered about power invested in state versus country
as well as how much dough the government rightly was owed, manifested
in whiskey. In Alta,
a division was sown that persists to this day, that between north and
south, though the argument today stems not from political quibbles of
legitimacy but from water. The turmoil never quite ceased – some births
are tougher than others, the recovery period longer, or, in some cases,
certainly more so in those older times than today in the developed
world, the new life suffers a very early death. And so Alta as well as the
rest of the second Spain, Mexico, was vulnerable to an easy defeat and
territorial swiping by the United States, the latter, like a wolf
sniffing bleeding prey, so willing to pounce. (Grant thought so.) And
so they did, like grown-up children baying that “he hit me first” to
justify a subsequent bashing, gussied up in glossy language that
ethically and organizationally, the US was superior to Mexico. Given
the violence of the cartels and flood of immigration north these days,
their imperious argument – well, seems partially verified. Then again,
had peace reigned, perhaps Mexico and therefore Alta may have
evolved along a different trajectory that would’ve realized a greater
potential than of today. Regardless, the segundo was soon
superseded by, enveloped in, the Third Nation, the trickle turned into
a massive flood come the Gold Rush, and then their dominant period that
persists to this day.
It seems impossible that any society is
truly newborn, just as a species doesn’t just suddenly appear without
an antecedent. They evolve, as life. Similarly, very few seem capable
of death, of total obliteration, though vestiges of some very old ones,
due to the distance of time, are no longer discernable, though perhaps
fossilized yet to be unearthed. And so with the segundo, yeah,
minimized by the Third Nation and the smaller peoples that arrived
after and have stamped their history on modern California (the Chinese
notably – their remarkable industriousness I view in their flumes and
railways each ride up and down the Sierra, in their Heaven tree found
alongside their infrastructure), but still discernable, in the cool,
surreal atmosphere of the restored graceful missions, in the florid,
poetic place names of the south and coast (even if mangled, such as
“Loss Anjewless”), in the wonderfully balanced, full flow of a tight
mariachi ensemble, and in the obsidian eyes and golden skin of the mestizos who still,
after centuries, reap harvest from the land once known as Alta.
REFERENCES
Guitierrez,
R. A., and R. J. Orsi. 1998. Contested
Eden: California before the Gold Rush.
California, University of California Press.
Richman,
I. B. 1911. California under Spain and
Mexico
1535-1847. New
England,
Houghton-Mifflin.