The Mission Bell and the People It Rang Over

Junípero Serra reached San Diego on the first of July, 1769, on a leg so infected he could barely stand, and the expedition he had joined was in worse shape. Of the three hundred or so people who had set out from Baja California that spring, only about half were still alive. Scurvy had gutted the crew of the San Carlos, and the supply ship San José had vanished at sea. On the shore, the Kumeyaay fishermen of Kosoy mended their nets and watched the strangers come off the ships.

On July 16, on ground that belonged to Kosoy, Serra blessed a cross made of two timbers and founded Mission San Diego de Alcalá, the first link in a chain that would reach as far north as Sonoma. Over the next half century the missions drew Kumeyaay, Tongva, Chumash, Ohlone and dozens of other peoples into a world of baptismal registers, rationed corn and compulsory labor, and soldiers went after the ones who ran.

That world outlasted the earthquakes of 1812 and the Chumash revolt that held La Purísima for nearly a month in 1824, but not secularization. After 1833, Mexican rancho grants handed mission land to settlers rather than to the people who had worked it. Later Californians turned the missions into a romance of gentle padres and red-tiled roofs. The descendants of the people who built them tell it differently.