The South-Eastern Forgotten History

Most people assume that anything east of the Appalachian divide and south of Quebec was once strictly the domain of the Thirteen Colonies.  Never minding that one cannot help but run into a Dutch name in any given mile of the Hudson River Valley, or that the lower Delaware was once the going concern for a Swedish colonial venture, the fact remains that Atlantic North America was a pretty busy place for Scotland (careful now, the parliaments were not joined until 1707), France, and Spain.  Until the 1750's, anything north of New England (except for half of Newfoundland), meaning even Maine, was pretty much Francophone, and everything from Jacksonville on South until the early nineteenth century was a very interesting frontier world of Spanish and First Born cultures that never really managed to dominate one another.  Long before England became a dominant power even in Virginia or Massachusetts there were colonies and missions set up by the other two major European players on the continent.  Ultimately, mostly due to wars between them and the remoteness of these settlements from their main colonial ventures making logistical support very difficult, the other colonial ventures failed and receded into the fog of history.

36 years before the foundation of Jamestowne, in fact, there were Jesuits who tried to set up camp among the Powhatan of the Chesapeake.  These southern Algonquins did not think much of or against the newcomers in any way, mainly because the Jesuits had by even this early adapted a missionary style that tried to learn about the cultures they were going to evangelize in; such an effort took a lot longer to set up than the approaches favored by other orders such as the Dominicans.  They never had the chance to get to know them; the priests were killed by Paquiquino, a Powhatan man who was claiming to be in league with them.  Far from being a true betrayal, Paquiquino was responding brutally to brutally being kidnapped and culturally assimilated by Spanish conquistadors nearly a decade before.  Needless to say, the Spanish had already been in town before the Jesuits ever tried to set up shop at their mission of St. Mary's.  No trace remains of this mission, nor do we even have any record of where it was specifically located other than somewhere between the York and James rivers.  We do know a bit more about the conquistadors, however.  They set up the earliest European settlement inland in eastern North America, Fort San Juan.

Like St. Mary's, we are not entirely sure of the location of San Juan, but we do know that it was deep into North Carolina, possibly even within a few dozen miles of Asheville.  We tend to think of Spanish ventures in the South as being limited to colonizing parts of Florida and De Soto making a complete ass of himself in his explorations, but Spanish ambition was a pretty huge thing.  An empire had thus far been made extending from Peru to Cuba.  Size was not a problem for a Spain that wanted more and more, and the possibility of success by Protestant rival England and the better chefs known as the French meant that whatever gold lay in store for the taking in mysterious North America could no longer remain behind the veil of a northern mystery.  The French and English, in turn, saw what was happening with Spain in the South and started to get an idea that maybe a future was to be had in settling these lands; in fact as a result I consider the Spanish incursions in this part of the continent to actually be one of the most important events in North American history.  But why this far inland, why in the heart of the Blue Ridge mountains?

Truth be told, this is a story still being written and read, and close to home at that.  Researchers at the University of Michigan, of all places, are trying to figure out just how far the Spanish were trying to go.  One thing is certain: they were pretty serious about the whole affair.  Whenever the French would set up shop, be it at Fort Caroline (the, ahem, secret French origin of Jacksonville, Florida) or Charlesfort on Parris Island, the Spanish would practically come to try and devour whatever had been achieved.  Part of this might have been religiously inspired, as many of the French colonists in these places were Hugenot refugees.  Regardless, the Spanish won and evicted France from ever having more than a commercial and exploratory presence on the Atlantic coast.  The French retreated north to where they had been fishing and trading with the Micmac for half a century, and would later return to ply the rivers of the South from a base in Louisianne.  But the Spanish...

They wanted colonies here.  They founded a few down in Florida, most notably St. Augustine, but they also liked the paradise that the French had found among the Sea Islands south of modern Charleston.  To this end, they founded Santa Elena, built on the ruins of Charlesfort of Parris Island.  They knew, like the French did, that having an outpost so far afield from the main ventures was going to be difficult.  As such, attempts were made to connect the whole thing together overland to Mexico, and Fort San Juan was part of that concept.  This was still the northern land of mystery, however, and not even a mental map of directions had thus far been conceived.  When in doubt, as so many explorers in North America would later find helpful, the Spanish followed the rivers.  The First Born, after all, had for centuries used the waterways to pass goods from coast to coast, and the newcomers were well aware of this.  As the visitor center of Congaree National Park delightfully points out, De Soto did indeed pass through the breadth of the land this way, and those road-dreamers who founded San Juan after him took to the Congaree and associated rivers as part of the first leg of their journey to possibly connect with the Tennessee and then Mississippi and further western waterways. 

But then they left behind that land of mild winter that is the Lowcountry South and hit some heavy snow in the Appalachians, their first true taste of a winter that even northern Europe was unlikely to provide.  This, combined with the sheer distance they had now put between themselves and even the nearest part of their empire in Florida meant that the Spanish would follow suit to the French and go back to more familiar territory.  Were it not for English initiative in the following century, however, they might have been back in force.  They certainly did just that in Tejas, Nuevo Mexico, and Alta California, roughly at the same time that the Carolinas were getting underway in the early 1700's.  Were it not for the threat of war and the serious competition that England was capable of, the South might have looked very different.  As it is, Carolina came and even divided into two Carolinas.  Georgia, designed as a buffer, became a true colony in its own right.  Even without these developments, the aggressive expansion and political culture dominated by almost constant warfare that has come to encapsulate British and American history means that these places would have become part of the United States anyway.

But imagine if the cultural foundations had been... from someone else.  Florida still has a historical memory of being something New Spain, just as Louisiana still has French-speakers.  There might have been more than just a museum or visitor center pointing out that such places once had different flags flying overhead...

The multi-cultural South... not what we expected, eh?

"I Don't Understand You": A History Of Linguistic Diversity In Colonial North America: Part One, Mexico.

Aside from the multitudes of languages and language families that existed among the First Born before colonization, popular imagination tends to view North America as being divided between a Spanish south, English center, and French north which has been largely confined to modern Quebec.  In fact, there was a decent concentration of Dutch, Swedish, Russian, German, Gaelic, and even Greek speakers who settled the continent alongside the "big three".  This resulted, along with settlement patterns and military control of territories, in a severe disruption of communication in what was otherwise a complex network of trade corridors and relatively stable alliance set-ups that could ultimately bring people, goods, and ideas from one ocean to another.  Whereas Geronimo and his Apaches found themselves imprisoned in Florida in a different world, looking at a Gulf of Mexico and sweating in the humidity, something they could not even imagine from living in their distant Arizona, the Apaches a few hundred years before would have been decently informed about and may have even seen on some trade or military expeditions.  Colonization resulted in the continent becoming very compartmentalized, ironically an issue which affects politics in relation to language in the present day.

Let's explore who came and what happened piece by piece.  First we can take a look at New Spain.

This portrait of San Bartholome de Las Casas hangs, suprisingly, in the Senate wing of the United States Capitol Building.  More on this man below.

Spanish colonization did not take over everything from San Francisco to Cape Horn overnight.  The Caribbean islands were the first lands in which settlement and language dispersal happened, with the Spanish making their first concentrated and serious colonization efforts in Cuba after having made minor settlements in Columbia and Venezuela.  The Spanish desire for conquest was primarily fueled by lusting after gold and riches, but colonization was based off of taking advantage of trade with interior peoples and establishing a foothold for Roman Catholicism in the New World. 

While on the surface, the spread of the Spanish language would seem to be a practical way of standardizing trade and commerce and making conversion to a new faith much easier, such cultural domination happened only gradually.  Missionaries trained themselves to speak various languages and traders simply relied on existing trade networks and set-ups.  Part of this was due to the work of one man, San Bartholome de Las Casas.  Simply put, Las Casas was disgusted by what he saw as the brutal conquest that Spain was participating in against the people living with him, admittedly as his own slaves, in an exciting New World where he pledged to make a life of freedom and prosperity.  His viewpoints were hard to keep to himself, and he eventually spearheaded efforts to protect the native population of Mexico from cultural annihilation.  Together with the effects that Malinche had previously had on softening the heart of Hernando Cortez, this meant that Spanish colonization started to become a much more complicated affair than just mere conquest.

Missionary efforts were helped quite a lot by this mutual exploration, though sometimes they resulted in Catholicism simply being absorbed into existing religious practices.   Due to this and other reasons, Spanish efforts did start to turn toward cultural dominance.  Spanish did not become imposed on the populace of New Spain until 1696, but legislated cultural transformation became policy throughout the 18th century, and missionary efforts which went along with military expeditions into the northern frontiers of Alta California, Tejas, and the Rio Grande valley followed this policy, especially after the Jesuits were expelled from all Spanish dominions.  While the Franciscans who followed them were not particularly fond of cultural domination, they followed the law in spreading the take-over of Spanish language and customs.  Mexican independence, followed by strong native democratic participation in the new nation, eventually resulted in a reversal of imperialistic cultural and linguistic directives.

Thus the Spanish language has not completely replaced common usage of indigenous languages in Mexico even in the present day.  While most if nearly all non-Spanish speakers in Mexico are functionally bilingual, the majority of pre-conquest languages have survived with enough speakers around to keep them alive.  The Mexican government, in fact, recognizes 68 languages in addition to Spanish as national languages, complete with all the legal rights for those language users shared by Spanish users.  This has been law since 1917.

Native culture has indeed remained dominant in some areas of southern Mexico, and Mexican culture would not be the same without them, to say nothing of how it would be without heavy infusions from the languages of those cultures into Spanish. While efforts to diversify and protect different languages have met with, let's be honest and say completely racist efforts of suppression in the United States and Canada, Mexico simply has such an inter-mixed population that such a thing would be unthinkable there.  The same cannot be said for the rest of Latin America, but that is another story for a different day, and beyond the scope of this blog, at least for now.

Next post we travel 2,300 miles northward to New France and see what happened with French in the New World.

Who were the Jesuits of New France?

Ever since the first of the second born of this continent arrived here, religious transformation of the continent had been at the forefront of a new destiny for North America.  The Spanish and French would bring with them an exclusive Roman Catholicism.  The English, Dutch, Swedes, and Danes would bring with them a Protestantism that excluded this Catholicism in return.  The Russians would bring their Orthodox Christianity.  In any case, the soldiers and merchants came hand in hand with various missionaries.  Nearly all of them were as concerned with replacing as much of the culture as the religions of the peoples they encountered.  The loving message of Christian transformation for the world, sadly, often came hand in hand with a pointed gun.  The missionaries would cry out "shame, shame" or at least shake their heads in silent disapproval, but nothing really changed as a result of their weak disputes with colonial domination.

One group, however, was quite different.

Ever since their foundation in 1534, the Jesuits were drawing some of the keenest and brilliant minds in Europe into their world.  These men were scientists, philosophers, politicians, artists, even warriors, but they all shared an intense zeal for spreading their faith and love of Jesus Christ to others.  They were explorers as well, just as much concerned with evangelization as with roaming about the world and embracing its beauty and offerings.  Very often, this brought them into conflicts not only with non-Catholics Christians, but also with the other missionary orders within the Catholic Church.  By the early 1600's, such was the negative attention that they had received that other missionaries made active efforts to keep them out of new territories.  One notable exception was New France.

The Franciscans in Quebec were finding that the rough country and alien cultures of the Algonquins and Montagnais were a far cry from the so-called civilized frontiers of the Arab and Oriental worlds that they had thus far been called upon to engage in conversion efforts.  Though they had started to gain experience with the first born of North America in Mexico, such evangelization efforts in the Spanish New World were augmented with steel and gun-smoke.  French efforts to colonize and economize on the New World were an altogether different affair; the native peoples were trading partners rather than subjects, and the missionaries were warned not to get in the way of the bottom line.  As the Jesuits were certainly available, willing, and capable of engaging cultures on their own terms, the Franciscans called them in for assistance.  Pretty soon, they were running the missionary effort, as well as the exploratory and diplomatic efforts on behalf of the French expedition.  They were among the first Europeans to learn the languages of the first born, and among the only to report back to the mother countries about a richness to cultures otherwise considered savage and backward.  They did, however, heavily impact any people they came across.  New France, from Quebec to Louisiane, as well as the deserts of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States, and the upper Missouri river basin were all regions that bore the mark of passing Jesuits: native peoples who had a somewhat neutral meeting with Europeans.  Their churches still stand and are in use, monuments to healthy missionary efforts:

http://www.sanxaviermission.org/

Feast of the North American Martyrs

On this day in the Roman Catholic Church are commemorated the Jesuit martyrs of New France.  Each of them endured a pretty brutal death at the hands of the Haudenosaunee, who at the time were mortal enemies of the Wendat and French.

They are commemorated in two shrines, one in Auriesville, New York, and a grander one in Midland, Ontario, which rises over a reconstructed Wendat village.  Love them or hate them, these people had a significant role in the development of North America, particularly in the conversion to Christianity of the first born sons and daughters of this land.  Together with Matteo Ricci, who worked as a missionary in China, they are largely responsible for helping to form centuries of Jesuit missionaries.  The Society of Jesus, through the experiences and sacrifices of these missionaries, learned how to carefully introduce their religion to a culture that might otherwise be somewhat worlds away from it.

So how is this for a crazy idea?  Let's spend the next week looking at what they did.

In the meantime, enjoy this fictional, but somewhat accurate, clip of a movie that spoils the ending for you.  Hint: Mortally speaking, it was not the most pleasant of endings.

The (Anti) Quebec Separatism Post, Part One: Historical Background

On September 4th, 2012, the people of Quebec elected Pauline Marois as the new premier (provincial leader, like a governor) of Quebec.  Madame Marois is also the current leader of the Parti Quebecois, a provincial party in Quebec dedicated to the cause of Quebec sovereignty.  She has already blamed Prime Minister Harper for promoting Queen Elizabeth II as a symbol of Canadian nationalism and motioned for the removal of the national flag from swearing in ceremonies of provincial legislators.  Quebec nationalism, it seems, has emerged like a diseased bear from a burnt out forest it was supposed to have banished to in 1995.

Before I go on, a little background on your author is necessary to understand his biases.  My father's side of the family is largely highland Scot with Canadian ancestry dating back at most a century if less, while my mother's side is Irish and French, with the Irish presence being here since the 1880's and the French presence pretty much having arrived on the ships with Champlain as far as we know.  This is where things get complicated...

Ever since time began, English folks and French folks have not really gotten along.  Sure, England was almost constantly at odds with other powers, especially their Celtic co-inhabitants of the rainy islands, but the arch-enemy of all things English has largely been considered French.  During the Protestant Reformation, when things French tended to stay Roman Catholic for the most part, this rivalry turned into bitter hostility.  While racial and cultural bigotry that grew into the Black Legend pretty much focused on southern European, and particularly Spanish culture, the people of England and English-speaking North America learned to despise the "freedom-hating, overly Catholic" French as if such hatred were a religion.  The Catholic-centric policies of absolute ruler Louis XIV and his would be allies among the deposed Stuarts did little to dispel the Franco-Black Legend, and Americans, to be fair, had every reason to be concerned about French competition in North America, as it hemmed them in and threatened their nice colonial existence with possible annihilation, if not by the French, then by their native allies.  Even after the French were defeated, the Quebec act of 1774 still threatened to make the thirteen colonies prisoners of their lands.

Fortunately, the French came to the aid of the Americans in the American war for independence, and Britain now became the grand enemy.  Things French slowly became more acceptable in English speaking North America, more so when the country changed hands and became a European bastion of democracy (stop laughing, I know that the Revolution and Napoleon made a mockery out of this).  Of course, try telling your average American or newly minted Canadian loyalist of 1800 or so that things French in North America were not still the enemy.  Les Canadiens, you see, were still Catholic and might even be out to help France get a new foothold on the continent should the tables ever turn back in Paris.  The loyalists in Ontario were particularly concerned that any freedoms that the habitants of the lower St. Lawrence valley might get would somehow undermine their own existence, less an actual concern (because, you know, the government in charge was British) than a continuation of some old bigotry.

As time went by and English Canada became more of a dominant feature of British North America, this fear and bigotry, which should have simply evaporated, grew stronger.  Though insurrections by some elements of French Canada did occur in the 1830's and later in the century under Louis Riel, they were usually accompanied by a general dislike of the ruling government (English Ontario also saw rebellion in the 1830's). By and large, French-Canadians, Quebecois included, knew that their survival as a culture depended on the existence of Canada.  Had they remained under French control, they (we) might have been sold out as easily as Louisiana was in 1803 (to say nothing of what would have happened to Catholic Canadien culture under Revolutionary rule)!  Had the United States ever gained control of Quebec either in the invasion of the 1770's or the War of 1812, well, we can see how well things went over for Californios and Tejans when Mexico lost a lot of her territory.

For a while, then, French-Canadians, including Quebecois, knew that they had a good spot for themselves.  Confederation had even been really kind to Quebec, what with all the strong provincial powers being given to help maintain her unique status.  Still, resentment, especially on the English side of the Ottawa river, remained.  Now, remember back up there where I said things were going to get complicated?

My maternal great-grandmother was as French-Canadian as French-Canadians could ever hope to be.  Back at the turn of the 20th century (and until the 1960's), however, French-Canadians outside of Quebec could expect little advancement socially.  She married one of the Anglais, actually a Scottish-Canadian gentleman, Mr. Wilson of Smiths Falls, Ontario.  Smiths Falls, like much of eastern Ontario, is about as high United Empire Loyalist as any part of the old empire outside of Britain could hope to be!  Needless to say, in order not to "create scandal" or make things rough for the family, my great-grandmother had to stop going to Mass, work on flattening out that accent of hers, and was expected to fly the Union Jack off the front porch. She was, however, a little too proud of her grand heritage to abandon it completely.  To some of her children she secretly taught a Catholic catechism and spoke French with, one of whom was my grandmother.  Though my grandmother, Lillian Cassidy (nee Wilson) was raised Presbyterian and sounded politely Canadian English (despite being Scottish too), she found that when she married an Irishman, "conversion" to Catholicism was a rather simple affair.  The French language, however, was a different matter altogether.

My mother was never raised speaking French, because even if sleepy little Orillia, Ontario could ensure peaceful domestic bliss for an Irish-Catholic family (which was remarkable in a town that featured Orangemen parades until recently), being this deep into English-speaking Ontario, even in the 1950's, meant that any domestic use of French would earn a few raised eyebrows.  French, they said then, was for the nuns at the local Catholic school to use back at their convent and maybe in class.

Back to non-family history for a moment...

In the 1960's, this sort of thing changed.  Vast societal changes were taking place throughout North America.  Racial boundaries were being openly and defiantly broken, youth culture was emerging as a fighting force rather than a deviant minority, suits and ties were giving way to jeans and t-shirts, and peace was slowly becoming more attractive than war for the first time in human history.  Quebec took part in this upheaval in what has since been known as the "Quiet Revolution" in which the Catholic Church lost her place as a cornerstone of French-Canadian society and nationalistic tendencies rose up for the first time since confederation.  All of a sudden, even deep into Ontario, things French became cool and exciting, especially among progressive-minded youth yearning for a new society and world, more so when Parisians started transforming the artistic bent of their city, especially in the Sorbonne.  Montreal, long the crown jewel of Canadian commerce and cosmopolitan vitality, was looking to join the ranks of such cities as New York, London, Paris, etc.

Then the walls came crashing down.  Rather than ride the wave of new-found popularity, the nationalistic elements of the Quiet Revolution formed the Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ) and started committing terrorist acts in the name of Quebecois freedom.  In 1969, they bombed the Montreal Stock Exchange, and in 1970 started murdering and kidnapping government officials.  Ever since this time, the unity of Canada has been called into question by many on both sides of the internal border between Quebec and the rest of the nation.  I call these people extremists and just plain dumb.   Come by tomorrow when I explain the current (post 1980) situation of independence, but stay for now as I finish the personal history.

While my mother was largely kept in the dark about her cultural inheritance (she did know who her grandmother was and was taught French in school, to be fair), the fact that social pressures against French-Canadians was largely dead and gone by the early 1980's meant that my grandmother was quite eager to not see her heritage disappear.  She fed me lots of tourtieres, pea soup, and things both burnt and made of too much butter.  We read through saint picture books that prominently featured Joan of Arc, King Louis, and a number of Jesuits.  She sang Silent Night to me en Francais when I was a baby and spoke the mother tongue around me whenever we were alone together.  By the time I learned how to speak, I was becoming simultaneously bilingual.  Because the rest of my family and the majority of my existence in Ontario and other English-dominated parts of my early years surrounded me in English, I pretty much always spoke it without moving between the two languages, but the inside of the noggin was a different matter entirely, and I was a terrible speller until high school, mainly because of the battling languages going on in my head.  I laugh at the linguistic dueling, because it is so emblematic of what I strongly identify with as a "home" culture, that of being a Franco-Ontarian.

The Franco-Ontarian flag.  The above on is flown proudly alongside the Canadian and Ontarian flags in Mattawa, Ontario.

You would think I would thus be all for Quebecois freedom, non?  I again give you a resounding NO/NON to this tragedy of a concept, despite my heritage.  Why?  Because Quebecois freedom is oppressive to French-Canadian freedom.  By no means do some malcontents in politics have a monopoly on the cultural identity of our people.  Again, come by tomorrow as I expound on this.

Old California: The Missions

California.  The word conjures up images of a vast urban landscape, mountains with towering trees in them, a pleasant climate, dramatic looking beaches, orchards and vineyards that seem to go on forever, and depending on one's political views, either a paradise or a cesspool.  Both in state and abroad, the left focuses on what they deem to be progress, while the right focuses on what a mess progress has made of things.  The past gets ignored quite well here, dismissed either as backwards or a pointless exercise in nostalgia.  Here and there, historical memory can be a bit hard to ignore.  Many of the names of the cities of California bear witness to both a colonial Spanish and Mexican past, and many recall the peoples who once dwelled for thousands of years here.  In some places, the names remain unchanged or slightly altered from older designations that identified them as missions.

First, a little history.  In the push northwards into the deserts and mountains, colonial Mexico stopped sending forth armies to subdue the frontier, and instead encouraged missionaries to introduce Christianity to the various peoples there.  The Franciscans and the Dominicans were usually the first to heed the call, but they were not extremely successful in adapting to very foreign cultures.  Though they would not give up, these orders knew that they were not making steady progress in evangelization.  They were proud of their histories, and proud of the work they were doing in the name of their faith.  Needless to say, when an upstart, young, and fancy religious order came along that seemed to improve on their work everywhere they went, well, rivalries developed into heated debates.  This new group, of course, was called the Society of Jesus, known commonly as the Jesuits.

The Jesuits started off a little differently from the older religious orders.  They did not have a cloistered division, they were not founded for any particular reason to reform or combat the enemies of Roman Catholic Church, and they centered themselves on a theme of "contemplation in action", meaning they existed to bring otherwise secular experiences and disciplines into a religious and theological context and understanding.  Needless to say, they drew in many different kinds of men, but most if not all of them shared a common intellectual fire.  As such, when missionary opportunities presented themselves, the Jesuits leaped at the chance.  Evangelization, you see, was not only a chance to spread the faith, but to explore the world, and even more exciting, to explore cultures outside of the European theater.  This got them into trouble in China, when the Dominicans insisted that religious conversion had to go hand in hand with cultural assault.  The Pope sided with the Dominicans, and, well, China did not see significant missionary activity again until the 19th century.

On the other side of the world, as the doors to China were closing, the gates in New France were thrown open by the Franciscans who were daunted by the wilderness and seemingly savage native cultures before them.  They invited the Jesuits to join them, who proved to have far more vigor in engaging the mysterious forests of Quebec and Ontario than they could have imagined.  In 1629, both orders were thrown out of New France by the English, who briefly held Quebec.  When the dust settled in 1632, the Franciscans did not return.  The Jesuits, on the other hand, threw themselves into their efforts.  In 1639, they founded Sainte Marie on the southern shores of Georgian Bay, the eastern enclosure of Lake Huron.  By 1642, they had founded a mission at Windsor, which would later become Assumption Parish.  This work among the Hurons (Wyandottes), Algonquins, Muskegon, Ottawa, Montagnais, and Iroquois was extremely difficult.  Flexibility aside, the two worlds were very different from one another, with entirely different outlooks on civilization.  The Iroquois openly attacked the Jesuits and French, the Muskegon, Ottawa, and Montagnais tolerated but largely ignored their efforts, and the Algonquins and Hurons suffered greatly for supporting them.  In 1649, the Society of Jesus learned a very painful lesson in adaptation: their first major loss.  Saint Marie was burned to the ground.  Today a church stands over the long lost ruins, which, in the opinion of your author, is one of the holiest places on this planet.

The Jesuits would later return, and push further inland.  Far to the south, they opened up a second front in the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts.  Running the length of Baja California, as well as along the western slope of the Sierra Madre Occidental and north into Arizona, there are a series of missions founded by the Jesuits, many of which remain intact and in use as parishes.  One of the most famous remains as Tumacacori, south of Tucson.  The Jesuits had a significant impact on the local culture, offering the "northern" peoples a different look at Spanish and Mexican civilization than they had otherwise become forcibly accustomed to.  Unfortunately, again, this would not last.  On the 21st of July, 1773, after decades of struggle with European monarchs regarding human rights, the Society of Jesus was suppressed.  Overnight, the black robes in the missions were replaced with grey and brown robes of the Franciscans.  Fortunately, much had changed in the relations between the two orders by that point, and the Franciscans, while not abandoning their methods, knew that the walk in this frontier world did indeed require adaptability.  Perhaps more strikingly, they also continued the Jesuit tradition of evangelization through art, and embraced the exquisitely ornate Baroque and Rococo styling of the Jesuit missions.  They built their missions in this style as they moved up the coast of California under the leadership of Junipero Serra.  Here is the most famous of their missions, San Juan Capistrano, built in 1782.

As you can see, Alta California never really disappeared, even under the smog and glitz.  Sorry if the image was a bit blurred, I had issues keeping the camera steady because I was in a state of awe, and this is after having been throughout some pretty amazing churches in Europe.  The smell of cedar wood and countless flowers outside, in gardens planted by the friars (who are better horticulturalists than Jesuits... well... maybe), combined with the wooden beams of the ceiling and hanging chandeliers absolutely shout "Alta California".  I half expected Zorro to jump out at me!  San Juan Capistrano lies mostly in ruins, having been damaged by an earthquake in 1812.  The above "side chapel" is intact, while the main sanctuary forms some of the most impressive ruins in the United States.

This is far from the end of the story, however.  The rest of the mission is largely intact.  In 1833, the mission was secularized, but a parish was formed later, and President Lincoln returned the property to the Church in 1865.  The parish here lives on, having been rebuilt in present form in the 1980's.  Come by tomorrow to see it, and be prepared to be shocked in a good way.