Chapter 3

California: a troubled territory

• In 1821, Mexico achieved her independence, and word of this event reached Alta California the following year. The colonial policies of the republic were to be quite different from those of the Spanish monarchy. Not only were Californians allowed to trade with foreigners, but foreigners could also now hold land in the province once they had been naturalized and converted to Catholicism. Under Spain, land grants to individuals were few in number, and title to these lands remained in the hands of the crown. Under Mexican rule, however, governors were encouraged to make more grants for individual ranchos, and these grants were to be outright. Most important, the new Mexican republic was determined to move to "secularize" the missions, to remove the natives and the mission property from the control of the Franciscan missionaries.This process began in California in 1834. In theory, the Franciscans had administered the mission lands in trust for the natives living there when the missionaries arrived, but few Native Americans benefited from the end of the mission system: although each family was to receive a small allotment from the former mission lands, the few who tried to make a living from these plots gave up after few years. Most of the missions' adobe churches and outbuildings soon fell into disrepair, although priests at some missions struggled to continue their ministry to the Mission Indians. Most of the missions' lands were disposed of in large grants to white Californians or recently-arrived, well-connected immigrants from Mexico. In the ten years before the missions were dismantled, the Mexican government had issued only 50 grants for large ranchos. In the dozen years after the missions were secularized, 600 new grants were made.

• A new culture sprang up now in California: the legendary life of the ranchero and his family in a society where cattle-raising and the marketing of beef and hides became the central factors of economic life. With the end of the missions, most local attempts at manufacturing stopped. The California ranchers, their lands generally close to the southern California coast, became more and more dependent on the goods brought by the foreign merchants who came in search of hides. As British, Canadian, and United States settlers moved to Oregon, there was also an inevitable encroachment of non-Mexicans in northern California across that border. And more and more trappers and daring "mountain men" followed their taste for adventure and their search for furs in northern California and across the Sierras further south.