TRAVELS IN THE C A L I F 0 RN I A S . 
285 
the missions, and the Padres resident commanded to in¬ 
struct them in the Indian languages and other matters 
which would prepare them to supplant their teachers. The in¬ 
fluence and usefulness of these excellent men was, by these 
measures, rapidly undermined, till the year 1827, when two 
of them, Padres Repol and Altemira, of the mission Santa 
Barbara, fearing for their personal safety, secretly left the 
country in an American vessel bound to Boston, and sailed 
from that city to Spain. In the year 1835, others left with 
passports from Government, and went through Mexico to 
Spain; and others, worn out with labor and sorrow, died in 
the country and were buried under the churches of their 
missions. 
In the same year a body of Franciscan monks from the Col¬ 
lege at Zacatecas, were sent into the Californias by the Gov¬ 
ernment. To these were assigned the rich missions lying 
north of San Antonio. The old Padres retained the poorer ones 
lying to the South. Thither these good old priests retired, 
banished from the missions they had reared, and deprived of 
the means of comfort which they had procured ; and now, in 
those inhospitable places, they continue to perform their spirit¬ 
ual functions, deprived in their old age not only of the com¬ 
forts, but of the very necessaries of life. Aged men, tottering 
grey-headed men; rnen who had in youth left the abodes of 
civilized life ; who had forsaken father, mother, kindred, and 
for forty years toiled in the Californian wilderness; plough¬ 
ed the soil, built churches and dwellings ; brought into life, 
justice and hope and music and prayer to the God of the Uni¬ 
verse ; under whose hands the trees of virtue and civilisa¬ 
tion flourished, adorning the hitherto barren wastes of mat¬ 
ter and soul; such were the men condemned by a selfish 
anarchy to wretchedness and want. But a policy so blind 
brings evil as its legitimate result. 
In 1835, the whole power of the priests over the temporal 
affairs of these establishments, in both the Californias, was 
transferred to officers of government called Admmistradores. 
