TRAVELS IN THE CALIFORNIAS. 
279 
of their herds, saving the hides, and leaving the tallow to rot 
on the plains; because it was an article difficult to preserve 
until foreign ships should begin to visit them and furnish a 
market; and thus untold quantities of it were lost. One of 
the Padres, however, who had a little more chemistry and 
other worldly wisdom than his brethren, caused his Indians to 
dig a very large and deep vat in the earth on a shaded spot, 
and line it well with brick and a durable cement, in which 
from year to year, as his bulls were killed, he stored his tal¬ 
low ; and thus continued to do, till the trading ships called for 
the deposit ; when it was found that his vat contained three 
large cargoes of excellent tallow. 
The cattle in the missions at this period were very numerous. 
Most of them had from eighty to one hundred thousand each. 
They also had bands of horses and other kinds of stock pro- 
portionably large. The Padres of a single mission not unfre- 
quently purchased an entire cargo of goods from American 
merchants—and such were the known resources of their es¬ 
tablishments, and their uniform punctuality and honesty, that 
these cargoes were frequently delivered to the priests with 
no other security than their verbal promise to pay. Indeed, 
these old Franciscan Friars, who entered this wilderness clad 
in their grey habits with sandals on their feet and the cross in 
their hands, were men for whose equals in mental power, in 
physical courage and moral intrepidity, we shall seek in vain 
in these days of vapid benevolence, of organizations which 
spend their money in sustaining a system of denunciation, 
instead of applying it with day-laboring energy for the extir¬ 
pation of the evils against which they inveigh. These men had 
not made addresses before the assemblies of anniversary occa¬ 
sions, but had wielded the pruning hook of holy truth and of 
the principles of the social state, and of the refining and ex¬ 
alting virtues, upon the unpruned territories of degraded 
human nature. They had not bewailed the woes of men at 
the point of a goose-quill, and from the dark walls of a com¬ 
plaining heart shut up in an indolent body, sent forth a sack 
