STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 279 



exemplified by the enterprise of the Mission Fathers, who could procure 

 no other textile with which to clothe the hordes of rude savages 

 which they collected at the various mission establishments. Indeed, the 

 fact that the Fathers no more cultivated cotton, flax, and hemp, than had 

 the natives of the country, is cumulative evidence that textiles of vege- 

 table growth could not be succossfidly produced. Hence, with that sin- 

 gular intelligence which rendered every enterprise the Mission Fatliers 

 uudei took a practical success, they at once commenced sheep husbandry 

 on such a scale of magnitude that, in no long time, the rude inhabitants 

 who flocked to the missions were clothed in garbs more fitting their 

 advent among those of Christian civilization. 



The extent of sheep husbandry conducted by the Catholic priests at 

 the missions may be realized when it is stated that at seventeen of the 

 establishments located on a line near the sea coast, and extending from 

 San Diego to San Francisco, a distance of about five hundred miles, there 

 were, in eighteen hundred and tAventy-five, the period when the missions 

 were at their greatest height of prosperity, an aggregate of one million 

 three thousancl nine hundred and seventy sheep. This does not include 

 the flocks of sheep owned by the rancheros, which were, doubtless, quite 

 as numerous as those possessed by the church. Besides sheep, there 

 were grazed at the missions enumerated eighty-eight thousand four hun- 

 dred and eighty-four horses and mules, and one million one hundred and 

 eighty-eight thousand three hundred and ninety-six head of cattle, while, 

 within the same narrow strip along the coast, private rancheros herded 

 far more numerous droves. 



This wonderful exhibit of pastoral industrj^ was all contained in a 

 limited district of California, because at that time the great San Joaquin 

 and Sacramento Valleys, the coiintry north of San Francisco Bay, and 

 the foothill regions of the Sierra Nevada, were in the occupancy of the 

 hostile tribes of savage's. This thrift, too, marks the last decade of , 

 Spanish vice-regal dominion in California, and its subsequent rapid 

 decline may be traced from the commencement of Mexican misrule, 

 when the ri"ch accumulations of the Mission Fathers fell an easy prey to 

 irresponsible military and civil oflicial raj^acity. 



When the United States took possession of the country, it was seen 

 that a quarter of a century of Mexican misgovernraont had been suffi- 

 cient to accomplish the ruin of the missions, by the annihilation of 

 nearly everj^ vestige of the remarkable industry planned and put in suc- 

 cessful execution by the sagacity, courage, and persevei'anco of the 

 priests, and in no other feature was the destruction so total and disastrous 

 in its consequences to the helpless Indians as was the sudden extinction 

 of their sheep husbandry. By this, the hordes of savages who had been 

 gathered around the missions, looking solely to the Fathers for food and , 

 clothing, were deprived of their only source of supply, and having 

 acquired scarcely any other feature of civilization than dependence and 

 some of its worst vices, were, when thrown back to savage life, swift 

 victims of hunger and nakedness, disappearing from view as if swej)t 

 from the earth by an all devouring pestilence. 



Tlie sadden rise and temporary prosperity of sheep husbandr}^ under 

 the care of the Mission Fathers, was owing to a local exigency in which 

 commercial considerations had no influence. The isolation of the country 

 frotn the outside world was a bar to all thought of foreign tralllc. The 

 Mission Fathers reared their flocks of dumb brutes, scarcely more dumb 

 than the people they were trying to christianize, solely for the purpose 

 of obtaining a textile from which to fabricate garments for the savages, 



