DIVISION ONE — PRE-PASADENIAN. 37 



dam and sawmill at the lake, the stone grist mill was erected. Prior to this, 

 the Spanish people of the Mission had depended for their breadstuff on In- 

 dians who still used th-eir old primitive metate and raealing-stone imple- 

 ments to supply meal for the entire Mission populace. But now, with a 

 water-power grist mill of their own, the first one ever built in California,* 

 they would be independent of the uncertain ship supplies from L<ower Cali- 

 fornia or Mexico, and would make breadstuff for their own use and some to 

 sell. So hauling and handling the grain, operating the mill and delivering 

 the flour employed a distinct lot of both men and women. The mill pro- 

 duced only coarse unbolted meal, whether of wheat, corn, or barley, and this 

 was carried to store-rooms where Indian women put it through a rude pro- 

 cess of sifting, and so furnished some "sifted flour" for the Mission bakers. 

 [See article entitled "The Story of the Mills," farther on.] General John 

 Bid well, a California pioneer of 1841, writing in the Century Magazine oi 

 December, 1890, describes an Indian harvesting scene thus: 



" Imagine three or four hundred wild Indians in a grain field, armed, 

 some with sickles, some with butcher knives, some with pieces of hoop iron 

 roughly fashioned into shapes like sickles, but many having only their 

 hands with which to gather by small handfuls the dry, brittle grain, and as 

 their hands would soon become sore, they resorted to dry willow sticks, 

 which were split to afford a sharper edge with which to sever the straw. But 

 the wildest part was the threshing. The harvest of weeks, sometimes of a 

 month, was piled up in the straw in the form of a mound in the middle of a 

 high, strong, round corral ; then three or four hundred wild horses were 

 turned in to thresh it by treading, the Indians whooping to make them run 

 faster. Suddenly they would dash in before the band at full speed, when 

 the motion became reversed, with the effect of plowing up the trampled 

 straw to the very bottom. In an hour the straw would be thoroughly 

 threshed and the dry straw broken almost into chaff. In this manner I have 

 seen two thousand bushels of wheat threshed in a single hour. Next came 

 the winnowing, which would often take another month. It could only be 

 done when the wind was blowing, by throwing high into the air shovelfuls 

 of the grain, straw and chaff, the lighter materials being wafted to one side 

 while the grain, comparatively clean, would descend and form a heap by it- 

 self. In this manner all the grain in California was cleaned. At that day 

 no such thing as a fanning mill had ever been brought to this coast." 



Such scenes as the above were yearly enacted in the grain fields of San 

 Gabriel Mission, under padres Zalvidea and Sanchez. 



Carpenters — This trade comprised wheelwrights, cartmakers, boxmakers 

 and fence builders, as well as those who did such woodwork as was necessary 

 about their buildings — laying floors, joists and rafters, putting in doors and 

 windows, making bench seats, and the like. Their "carretas " were great 

 clumsy ox carts with wheels made of blocks sawed or chopped off from the 

 end of a large round log, then abig hole bored, chiseled and burned through 



*Davis, " Sixty Years in California," tells of a gristmill built at Verba Buena [San Francisco] in 

 1839, and calls it Va^ first one in California. Big mistake, by twenty-five years at least. 



