Referaat Spanish California (0)

Spanish California
Sten Endrik Mihkelsoo
MM-14
California's contact with Europeans began in the mid 1530s when Cortez's men ventured to Baja California. Not until 1542 did Spaniards sail north to Alta California, and Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo's expedition of that year made landings as far north as modern Santa Barbara . The Spaniards, of course, were hardly the first to discover this land of wonder and extremes. The earliest Californians were adventurous Asians who made their way across the Bering Straits to Alaska thousands of years ago when a warmer climate and a now-vanished land bridge made such travel easier . These men and women and their descendants settled North and South America, spreading out to form the various nations and tribes whom the first European visitors to this hemisphere dubbed "Indians." The mountain ranges of the Pacific Coast isolated these early settlers from the cultures that developed in neighboring Mexico and the western United States .
Still, more than two hundred years passed before Spain made any concerted effort to colonize the coastal regions Cabrillo claimed for the crown . Coastal winds and currents made the voyage north difficult, and Spanish captains failed to find safe harbors for their crafts. Baja California became the northwest limit of Spanish colonization, and even there , efforts to settle the area and bring native tribes to Christianity and European ways were halfhearted at best . Not until the Seven Years War (1756-1763) realigned European alliances and their colonial empires did Spain seriously attempt to assert control of Alta California.
This was to be done through a combination of military forts (presidios) and mission churches overseen by Franciscan fathers led by Junípero Serra . In 1769 , the first parties set north from Baja California, and the line of Spanish settlement along the coast was inaugurated when soldiers and priests established a presidio and mission church at San Diego . By the end of the Spanish colonial period , Alta California had three more presidios (at Monterey, San Francisco , and Santa Barbara) and no fewer than twenty -one missions . In addition to the missions, where the Franciscans ministered to local converts, and the military presidios, small towns or pueblos sprang up. The earliest of these were associated with the missions and presidios, but in 1777 an independent civil pueblo was created at San Jose, and others followed. The pueblos tried to attract settlers with land grants and other inducements and were governed by an alcalde (a combination of a judge and a mayor ) assisted by a council called the ayuntamiento. After 1769, the life of the California natives who came in contact with the Spanish was reshaped by the mission fathers, not the townspeople of the pueblos or the soldiers of the presidios. The Franciscans came to California not merely to convert the tribes to Christianity but to train them for life in a European colonial society. Conversion was seldom an entirely voluntary process , and converts (neophytes) were not left to return to their old ways but were required to live in the walled mission enclosure or on rancherías, separate settlements sponsored by missions although located some distance from the mission proper. There they were taught Spanish as well as the tenets of their new religion and trained in skills that would fit them for their new lives : brickmaking and construction , raising cattle and horses , blacksmithing, weaving, tanning hides, etc.
In theory, the neophytes were to live at the missions only until this process of education was complete . Then they would establish homes in the nearby pueblos. As the native people of one region were Christianized and educated, the missionaries were to move on, leaving the old missions behind to become parish churches as they built new missions in more distant locations peopled by non-converted tribes or "gentiles." In fact, neither the Spanish government nor the Franciscans ever judged any of the neophytes ready for "secularization" or life outside the mission system, and Christian natives or "Mission Indians" and their descendants remained at the missions until the system was abolished in 1834.
By then, sixty- five years of exposure to Europeans had reduced the number of California's native peoples by half to about 150,000. Although outright warfare cost few lives, Spaniards had introduced not only Christianity but also new diseases to which the neophytes had no resistance , and thousands died in epidemics. Crowded, harsh living conditions at the missions contributed to the Indians' health problems, and infant mortality and death rates among young children soared. It was the tribes of the coast, the "Mission Indians," who were most drastically affected. Tribes like the Modocs in the northern mountains had little or no contact with the Spanish and suffered little.