The Californians

about fifteen thousand persons of more or less purely Spanish blood in California. European settlements began to be established there in the middle of the eighteenth century, in 1769, by the Padres of the Franciscan Order. These settlements, " missions" as they were called, scattered here and there, from San Diego in the south to Sonoma in the north, consisted each of a few soldiers from Mexico, and of a few priests, who gathered as many native Indians round them as could either byforce or wile be induced to come into the fold in each district provided. In time the soldiers, Spanish or Spanish-Mexican, reared families, wives of their own race joining them sometimes, or, as it often happened, wives of Indian blood having been appropriated or bought. In 1822, Mexico revolted from Spain, and in 1836, following this example, the sub-colony of California, after a bloodless revolution, "a tearless victory/' and a due issue of pronunciamientos, became virtually independent of Mexico. Ambitious native hidalgos followed each other in quick succession as chiefs of the new republic; but the country was in fact a wide Abbey of Theleme, not exactly in the sense of being an educational establishment, but in that of being a place where every one did pretty much what was right in his own eyes. Foreign politics were discussed in a kind of Dover Court, where all spoke and none listened; and as to matters of internal government, every patriarchal hidalgo ruled his own s...