THE CALIFORNIAN PENINSULA. 393 
possible to make them work like the country people and mechanics in Germany ! 
How many knaveries and vices would have been ayoided every day! The 
work always commenced late, and ceased before the sun was down. At noon 
_they rested two hours. It is certain that six laborers in Germany do more 
work in six days than twelve Californians in twelve days. _ And, moreover, all 
their labor was for their own or their countrymen’s benefit; for the missionary 
derived nothing but care and trouble from it, and might easily have obtained 
elsewhere the few bushels of wheat or Indian corn which he needed for his 
own consumption. 
For the rest, the missionary was the only refuge of the small and grown, 
the sick and the healthy, and he had to bear the burden of all concerns of the 
mission. Of him the natives requested food and medicine, clothing and shoes, 
tobacco for smoking and snuffing, and tools, if they intended to manufacture 
anything. He had to settle their quarrels, to take charge of the infants who 
had lost their parents, to provide for the sick, and to appoint watchers by the 
dying. I have known missionaries who seldom said their office while the sun 
shone, so much were they harassed the whole day. Fathers Ugarte and Druet, 
for instance, worked in the fields, exposed to the hot sun, like the poorest 
peasants or journeymen, standing in the water and mire up to their knees. 
Others carried on the trades of tailors and carpenters, masons, brick-burners 
and saddlers; they acted as physicians, surgeons, organists, and schoolmasters, 
and had to perform the duties of parents, guardians, wardens of hospitals, 
beadles, and many others. The intelligent reader, who has so far become 
acquainted with the condition of the country and its inhabitants, can easily 
perceive that these exertions on the part of the missionaries were dictated by 
necessity, and he will, also, be enabled to imagine in what their rents and reve- 
nues, in California not only, but ina hundred other places of America, may 
have consisted. 
CHAPTER X.—THEIR LANGUAGE. 
The account thus far given of the character and the habits of the Califor- 
nians will, to a certain extent, enable the reader to form, in advance, an esti- 
mate of their language. A people without laws and religion, who think and 
speak of nothing but their food and other things which they have in common 
with animals, who carry on no trade, and entertain no friendly intercourse with 
neighboring tribes, that consist, like themselves, only of a few hundred souls 
and always remain within their own small district, where nothing is to be seen 
but thorns, rocks, game, and vermin, such a people, I say, cannot be expected 
to speak an elegant and rich language. A man of sixty years ran away from 
my mission with his son, a boy of about six years, and they spent five years 
alone in the Californian wilderness, when they were found and brought back to 
the mission. Every one can imagine how and on what subjects these two her- 
mits may have conversed in their daily intercourse. The returned lad, who 
had then nearly reachéd his twelfth year, was hardly able to speak three words 
in succession, and excepting water, wood, fire, snake, mouse, and the like, he 
could name nothing, insomuch that he was called the dull and dumb Pablo, or 
Paul, by his own countrymen. The story of this boy may almost be applied 
*to the whole people. 
Leaving aside a great many dialects and offshoots, six entirely different 
languages have thus far been discovered in California, namely, the Layména, 
about the mission of Loreto; the Cotshimz, in the mission of St. Xavier, and 
others towards the north; the Uéshiti and the Pericéa in the south; the still 
unknown language spoken by the nations whom Father Linck visited in 1766, 
during his exploration of the northern part of the peninsula; and, lastly, the 
Waicuri language, of which I am now about to treat, having learned as much 
of it as was necessary for conversing with the natives. 
