Native American Experience At The San Bernardino Asistencia

San Bernardino Asistencia

San Bernardino Asistencia

In 1810, Father Francisco Dumatz, a Franciscan missionary intent on converting as many of the natives in the New World as he could to Christianity, set out from the San Gabriel Mission with a retinue of assistants and explorers into the San Bernardino Valley. Because he arrived in what is now San Bernardino in time to observe the feast day of St. Bernardino of Siena, he named the area San Bernardino Valley. In time, the name would be applied to the mountain range to the north, the city and when the time came, the county. In 1819, the easternmost extension of the San Gabriel Mission network was established near present day San Bernardino, consisting of a single rectilinear chapel where Mass would take place, the celebration of the Eucharist, what faithful Catholics consider to be the mystical transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. The placement of this first San Bernardino Asistencia was calculated as most accessible to the local element of the population that would be present to assist the Spanish settlers in their raising of cattle.
There was extensive exploration of the San Bernardino Valley by missionaries and other Spanish explorers in the period of 1812 to 1814. The interaction with the Indians in the valley was generally positive. When the explorers and the missionaries ventured up and over the Cajon Pass into the Mojave Desert, the natives there were less friendly, and, on occasion, downright hostile. As early as 1810, the Mojave Indians, who were highly distrustful of the Spanish settlers, conducted a raid against the holdings of the San Gabriel Mission, stealing livestock.
This mission satellite, or Asistencia, would be relocated some 11 years later, four years after the Mexican Revolution that freed Mexico and its California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah possessions from Spain, to the current site at 26930 Barton Road between Loma Linda and Redlands.
Involved in the original establishment of the asistencia was Carlos Garcia, a Spaniard. Garcia involved himself in not only the construction of an enramada for worship and an office from which the asistencia’s activities could be administrated and a storeroom, but an irrigation ditch, called a zanja, which was to bring water to the Asistencia from Mill Creek, about twelve miles away.
The intent of the missionaries was to Christianize and Hispanicize the local population, whom the Franciscans and their assistants considered heathens whose mortal souls were in danger because of their ignorance of the Christian message. The missionaries endeavored to convert the natives to Catholicism, instill in them a European work ethic, teach them the value and efficacy of tools, have them master tool-making, learn how to till the land and cultivate crops, have them familiarize themselves with the use of horses, change their mode of dress, accept European social mores and even change their diet.
To many of the missionaries, the natives appeared carefree and undisciplined , unencumbered by the concerns that typified the European settlers. And many natives were willing to learn what the missionaries had to teach them. Upon conversion, however, the Native Americans were placed under certain restrictions, including ones they did not accept gladly. The missionaries expected the converted to accept that the missionaries were in a position of ascendency over them. When the Indians chaffed at this arrangement and fled the mission, the missionaries considered them deserters and vectored the area’s military commander, Pedro Fages, to hunt them down and return them to what was essentially thralldom at the mission asistencia.
In this way, there is some disagreement among historians as to whether the missionaries’ true intent was to convert the Indians to Christianity or to exploit them as cheap labor to maintain the San Gabriel networks of farms and factories, where carpets, leather goods, horseshoes and adobe bricks were manufactured.
In 1831 and again in 1834, the San Bernardino Asistencia came under attack by desert and mountain Indians. Livestock were taken and the buildings damaged. In what was the first 1834 raid, the chapel was desecrated. In the second siege that year, the Indians killed fourteen of the Indians who had converted to Christianity who were in residence at the Asistencia and they set fire to one of the buildings and took hostage other Indians.
Many assume that life for the Indians improved under the spiritual guidance, care and tutelage of the missionaries. That, however, may not have been so. In the larger venue of California as a whole, available figures indicate that between the founding of the first mission in Alta California at San Diego in 1769 and the initiation of operations at the mission in Sonoma in 1834, 81,000 Indians were baptized. During the same period, 60,000 of those died from diseases or illness, most notably smallpox, diphtheria and measles which accompanied the European settlers. Smallpox decimated the Indian population that had never encountered the disease and therefore had no immunity whatsoever to it. The experience of the Indians in and around San Bernardino Valley was not atypical of what occurred with the native population statewide.
Moreover, the European diet that was foisted upon the Indians did them little good. Previously, they ate fruits, nuts, vegetables, acorns and fresh meat and fish. The missionaries shifted them to eating higher concentrations of carbohydrates. This, too, took a toll on their health.

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