The Journal of San Diego History
SAN DIEGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY QUARTERLY
Summer 1997, Volume 43, Number 3
Richard W. Crawford, Editor
Sociopolitical Aspects of the 1775 Revolt at Mission San Diego de Alcala
During the night and early morning of November 4-5, 1775, a force of Native Americans surrounded Mission San Diego de Alcalá, set fire to its fragile wooden structures, and attacked a small contingent of stunned Spaniards. The attack gave Alta California its first Catholic martyr and weakened Spain's already tenuous hold on its northern territory. In spite of the efforts of Spanish missionaries to convert the native Diegueño (Kumeyaay) people of San Diego to Christianity after 1769 and of the presidial forces to subdue them, large segments of the Kumeyaay population resented the European intrusion.
In the more than two centuries since that early morning violence, academic and popular writers have provided numerous and sometimes bewildering accounts of the insurrection. The most common view holds that a large number of native villagers from throughout San Diego banded together to belatedly resist Spanish intrusion. Historians also agree that Father Luis Jayme and two other Spaniards were slain and that the survivors were forced to withdraw to the uncertain safety of the presidio six miles west. 1
In spite of our generalized knowledge about the mission sacking, insufficient attention has been given to why the revolt actually occurred, what villages took part in the raid, who led the revolt, and what military and social alliances may have been formed. An ethnohistorical approach to contemporary Spanish documents provides a fuller explanation of these issues and offers an insightful glimpse into California Indian resistance. When viewed from contemporary accounts and weighted with an understanding of Kumeyaay culture, the revolt can be seen as a reasoned reaction to the danger posed by the Spaniards. As defined by Trigger in his analysis of approaches to Native American responses to European contact, viewing the revolt as reasonable is a rationalistic stance as compared the more standard "romantic" stance that fails to understand the insurrection in a truly cultural context.2
Given over six years of tension between the struggling Spanish settlers and the native people in San Diego, it is hardly surprising that the 1775 insurrection occurred. The first two years of contact passed uneventfully, marked by no baptisms and several minor skirmishes including native attempts in August 1769 to pillage a ship anchored offshore and an attack on the sick camp near San Diego Bay.3 That attack resulted in the death of Father Junipero Serra's Indian servant from Baja California. In spite of these hostilities, trade was apparently reciprocal, if slow-paced, given the paucity of Spanish supplies. If the native peoples were aware of the lasting threat posed by the newcomers, they did not initially exhibit obvious fear or outward resentment. Historical events on both sides of the presidio garrison walls soon changed all of that.
Beginning in 1771 the Spanish priests, Luis Jayme and Vicente Fuster intensified their conversion efforts and pushed farther into the interior of San Diego. Previously unaffected native band leaders apparently became increasingly alarmed as the missionaries and soldiers made forays from their little adobe and thatch fortress that sat on what is now Presidio Hill. Relocation of the mission in August 1774, six miles east of the presidio complex to the present site of Mission San Diego de Alcalá, and closer to major rancherías, no doubt raised native anxiety.
Religious Rationale for the Revolt
With less than one hundred converted neophytes by the end of 1774, Father Luis Jayme and Vicente Fuster began a concerted effort at winning converts during the summer and fall of 1775.4 Between July and late September almost four hundred natives were baptized including native leaders (kwaipai) at relatively remote villages.5 Several historians have made a strong case for the rapid increase in baptisms, and thus of forced contact, as a primary cause of the revolt.6 Certainly local Indian people in general, and religious leaders in particular, increasingly felt the threatening presence of the European intruders as summer turned to fall. Shipek has noted that some Kumeyaay believed the priests to be powerful and potentially dangerous shamans.7 Father Francisco Palóu remarked on the growing resistance of the natives, although he believed that the Devil himself was the problem. Palóu wrote:
The enemy, [Satan] envious and resentful, no doubt because the heathen in that territory were being taken away from him, and because the missionaries, with their fervent zeal and apostolic labors, were steadily lessening his following, and little by little banishing heathenism from the neighborhood of the port of San Diego, found a means to put a stop to these spiritual conquests.8
It is interesting that Palou saw the firebrands of insurrection held in the bloodied hand of the Christian devil rather than sparked by the more secular and earthbound resentment and hatred of the Kumeyaay people. This tendency to blame the omnipresent forces of darkness rather than the native people has been suggested for at least two other major rebellions, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and the Tepehuan Revolt of 1616-1620.9 This approach by the priests and their superiors offered the security of minimal self criticism and explained the native's actions in clearly understood, if mystical, terms.
Secular Reasons for the Revolt
Sheer numbers of baptisms that weakened shamanistic power or raised the hackles of native jealousy were not the only source of growing friction between the two cultures. Father Jayme reported rapes of Indian women at the rancherías of El Corral (Tapin) in the San Luis Valley region of present-day El Cajon and at Rinconada (Jamo) on the coast near present-day Pacific Beach.10 In at least one case, the rapist murdered his victim. Jayme also wrote to his superiors that "lazy and indolent" soldiers grazed cattle upon native fields and grasslands (assumedly in the San Luis Valley) prompting cattle thefts and armed skirmishes. Other threats to native food supplies came from outright theft of supplies and from barters turned sour.11
Perhaps more compelling, one informant reported that one underlying motive for the sacking was fear that villagers would be seized and made to work in the mission fields.12 In fact, Yguetin, whose baptismal name was Mariano, told Lt. Ortega that he and others visited the mission and saw Kumeyaay from Rinconada working in the fields and that this raised the Indians' fears that they too would soon be subjected to the same work.13 While it does not appear that the workers from Rinconada were forced to labor in the mission fields, the sight of them toiling away in the summer of 1775 must have made a negative impression on other inland Kumeyaay. As Kroeber noted regarding the Diegueño (Kumeyaay):
The spirit of the Diegueño toward the missionaries was certainly quite different from the passiveness with which the other Californians received the new religion and life. They are described as proud, rancorous, boastful, covetous, given to jests and quarrels, passionately devoted to the customs of their fathers and hard to handle. In short, they possessed their share of resoluteness. Not especially formidable as foes, they at least did not shrink from warlike attempts.14
In other words, the Kumeyaay were a people who could and would resist threats to their religion, culture, and life ways.
The Role of Disease in the Revolt
Regarding the spread of non-native diseases into the West and Southwest, Reff has noted, "Old world disease did spread in advance of the mission frontier, destroying or altering the fabric of Indian society prior to sustained contact with Spaniards."15 More specific to California, Preston has debunked the myth that at the dawn of contact with Europeans California Indians were unaffected by Spanish diseases that ravaged northern Sonora, New Mexico, and Arizona.16 The degree to which pre-contact Kumeyaay were affected by introduced diseases is uncertain; what is known is that the post-contact Kumeyaay suffered terrible losses because of diseases borne by the Spanish intruders. A comparison of mission population and deaths for Mission San Diego reveals a death rate average of 56 per 1,000 over a fifty-year period. While this rate is significantly lower than the 78 per 1,000 experienced throughout the California missions during the same period, it reflects a relatively high mortality rate.
The degree to which the introduction and spread of diseases played a role in the insurrection is uncertain. Reff, in his analysis of revolts in New Spain, has argued that the Tepehuan and Pueblo revolts of the seventeenth century were "millenarian movements that stemmed in part from disease-induced population collapse."17 In all probability, the San Diego Mission revolt did not receive quite the stimulation from a rapidly declining population as did the Tepehuan and Pueblo insurrections. While disease and fears of contagion may not have been a primary causal effect of the mission revolt, when coupled with the resistance to conversion, they formed a potent witches brew. The revolt can be seen as an attempt to both stem the tide of mission religious influence and to stop the concomitant spread of disease.
The Revolt
The fires of revolt were smoldering in the summer of 1775. Reportedly, native runners carried word of the pending insurrection far afield. According to Father Francisco Garces, who was with the Anza exploration party in the eastern deserts, the Colorado River tribes were aware of the brewing revolt and had been invited by the locals to join -- an offer they refused. Ironically, Garces, who would die six years later at the hands of desert Indians, boasted that the eastern Indians refused to join the revolt because of their loyalty to him.18 As the San Diego priests persisted in their unwanted conversions, October came and went amid a heightened air of tenseness and a flurry of native restlessness.
When the attack came shortly after midnight on November 5, 1775, the Spaniards were ill-prepared. Eleven men represented the entire force at the mission itself and a similar number of soldiers constituted the garrison at the presidio six miles to the west. While the presidio guards apparently dozed through the early morning hours, warriors from at least fifteen villages attacked the thatched and brush mission.
1. Hubert H. Bancroft, History of California (San Francisco: The History Company, 1884), 1:254; Vicente Fuster, Register de Defunciones: 1775. Ms. on file at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Richard Pourade, Time of the Bells (San Diego: San Diego Evening Tribune Publishing Company, 1961), 28.
2. Bruce G. Trigger, "Early Native North American Responses to European Contact: Romantic versus Rationalistic Interpretations," Journal of American History 77 (March 1991): 1195-1198.
3. Bancroft, History of California, 1:137-138.
4. Ibid., 239; Francisco Palou, Historical Memoirs of New California, ed. Herbert E. Bolton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1926), 4:62.
5. Libros de Bautismo, Mission San Diego de Alcalá, baptismal records on file at the Mission San Diego Diocesan Center.
6. Florence Shipek, "California Indian Reactions to the Franciscans," The Americas 41 (1985): 53-66.
7. Bancroft, History of California, 1:249, 253; Florence Shipek, "Kumeyaay Socio-Political Structure," Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 4 (1982): 296-303.
8. Palou, Historical Memoirs, 1:62.
9. Daniel T. Reff, "The Predicament of Culture and Spanish Missionary Accounts of the Tepehaun and Pueblo Revolts." Ethnohistory 42 (1995): 73, 80-81.
10. Luis Jayme, Letters of Luis Jayme, O.F.M., ed. Maynard Geiger (Los Angeles: Dawson's Book Shop, 1970), 43.
11. Bancroft, History of California, 1:254-255.
12. Ernest J. Burrus, ed., Diario del Capitan Comandante Fernando de Rivera y Moncada con un Apendice Documental, (Coleccion Chimalistac de Libros y Documentos Acerca de la Nueva Espana, Vol. 2, Madrid, Ediciones Jose Porrus Turanzas, 1967), 447-453.
13. Francisco Ortega, "Revolt of the Indians, Burning of the Mission, Death of the Missionary, November 30, 1775," Provincial State Papers, Benicia, Military, 1:473, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California.
14. Alfred L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin No. 78. (Washington D.C., Smithsonian Institution, 1925).
15. Daniel T. Reff, "Contact Shock in Northwestern New Spain." 1518-1764. In Disease and Demography in the Americas, ed. John W. Verano and Douglas H. Ubelaker Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 272-273.
16. William Preston, "Serpent in Eden: Dispersal of Foreign Diseases Into Pre-Mission California," Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 18 (1): 2-37.
17. Reff, "The Predicament of Culture," 65-66.
18. Bancroft, History of California, 1:254-255.
19. Burrus, Diario, 2:429-481.
20. Palou, Historical Memoirs, 4:78
21. Burrus, Diario, 1:227-237.
22. Shipek, "Kumeyaay Socio-Political Structure."
23. Kenneth Hedges, "Notes on the Kumeyaay: A Problem of Identification." Journal of California Anthropology 2 (1): (1975) 71-83;. Gifford, Edward W. "Clans and Moieties in Southern California," University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 14: (2) 155-219; Luomala, Katherine. Tipai-Ipai, In "California," ed. Robert F. Heizer, Handbook of North American Indians (Washington, Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 592-609.
24. Shipek, "Kumeyaay Socio-Political Structure."
25. Ortega, "Revolt of the Indians."
26. Ibid.; Bancroft, History of California, 1:252-253.
27. Shipek, "Socio-Political."
28. Reff, "The Predicament of Culture," 65-66.
29. Antonio Tibesar, (ed.), Writings of Junipero Serra (Washington, Academy of American Franciscan History, 1955), 2:407.
30. Provincial State Papers, Archivos de California, Provincial Records Ms, 1:143, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California.
31. "Provincial State Papers, Archivos de California, Benicia, Military," 1:223-226, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California.
32. "Provincial State Papers," 1:224-226.
33. Trigger, "Early Responses."
Richard L. Carrico is an adjunct instructor at San Diego State University and Mesa Community College and is a partner in the environmental consulting firm of Mooney & Associates. He has B.A. in history and a B.S. in anthropology from San Diego State University, and a Master's in history from the University of San Diego. With an area of specialization in Native American history and ethnohistory, Mr. Carrico is the author of two books on local history and is a frequent contributor to anthropological and historical journals.





