Spanish Missions in California Begin
The Spanish began building missions in Alta California in 1769, when Junípero Serra founded San Diego de Alcalá, the first of twenty-one strung along the coast to Sonoma. The motive was strategic. Spain had claimed California since the sixteenth century and had never settled it, and Russian fur traders working south from Alaska and British interest in the Pacific made the claim look vulnerable. The Sacred Expedition under Gaspar de Portolá and Serra was sent to occupy it cheaply, with soldiers and Franciscans rather than colonists. The mission system was the instrument. Each mission was a self-supporting agricultural estate worked by baptised Indians, with a presidio garrison nearby, intended to be handed over to the converts as a parish within ten years — which never happened at any of them. Once baptised, a person could not leave. Runaways were pursued by soldiers and flogged on return, and Serra defended corporal punishment in writing as necessary and paternal. The demographic effect was catastrophic. Around 310,000 people lived in California in 1769, among the densest non-agricultural populations in North America; roughly 100,000 lived within the mission system over its life, and death rates from measles, syphilis, dysentery and the conditions of confinement exceeded birth rates at almost every mission throughout. Mexico secularised the missions in 1833 and the land went to rancheros rather than to the Indians it had been held for. Serra was canonised in 2015 over the objections of California native nations, and statues of him have been removed since 2020.
- Year: 1769 CE
- Category: Cultural
