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Show BY PATH AND TEAIL. 139 to call on Charles F. Lummis, the editor of ' i Out West, ' ' and the author of the " Spanish Pioneers." With the possible exception of Rudolfe Bandelier, Mr. Lummis is the best informed and most reliable living authority on the tribes of the southwest and the early missions of California. In answer to my request for his opinion on the manhood and sincerity of the priests who fought the wilderness and evangelized the tribes of the Pacific coast, Mr. Lummis took from a shelf his " Spanish Pioneers," and, placing his finger on a passage, asked me to read it, and this is what I read: " Their zeal and their heroism were infinite. No desert was too frightful for them, no danger too appalling. Alone, unarmed, they traversed the most forbidding lands, braved the most deadly sav ages, and left on the minds of the Indians such a proud monument as mailed explorers and conquering armies never made." Before the " break up" of the Lower California mis sions, caused by political jealousies, disease among the tribes and civil wars, the Catholic church had established sixteen missions or parishes for the Indians, extending from Tia Juana at the north, to Cape Palmas of the south. Notice that I mention disease as contributory to the reduction of the missions. The passage of a primi tive people from savagery to civilization, is like in its effects on human systems, to the influence of an entirely new and unaccustomed climate and is generally followed by a decrease in numbers during a transition period of more or less duration. What this transition costs we may estimate by analogy from lower organic kingdoms. For instance, spring wheat has been changed into winter wheat, but the ex periment entailed a loss of nearly three harvests. |
