Native American Devotion at Mission Carmel Ruins

 What Robert Louis Stevenson Saw on the Feast of St. Charles Borromeo November 4, 1879

“I have never seen faces more vividly lit up with joy than the faces of those Indian singers. It was to them not only the worship of God, nor an act by which they recalled and commemorated better days, but was besides an exercise of culture, where all they knew of art and letters was united and expressed." — Robert Louis Stevenson in The Old Pacific Capital

In 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson, the often-sick but determined much-traveled young Scottish writer, , who was later to become world famous for Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, among many other works, made his way to California and sojourned in Monterey County for a few months. Stevenson later wrote an essay called “The Old Pacific Capital,” in which he described with great sympathy the plight and deep Catholic faith of native converts who had been turned out after the Mexican government secularized the missions—which he had witnessed for himself when he attended a Mass at the old stone church at Mission Carmel, which was then roofless with walls that were barely standing.

From the California Historical Society: Father Angelo Casanova leads a group of worshippers, including an aged Indian choirmaster, towards the sacristy of he old mission church of San Carlos Borromeo for a celebration of the Mass on November 4, 1879, the anniversary of the founding. Joseph Strong, the artist of the work, was a friend of the writer Robert Louis Steven, who also attended Mass that day. 

Mission Carmel had been the second mission founded by St. Junipero Serra in Alta California, in 1770 (some sources say 1771), initially located in Monterey. Serra named it Misión de San Carlos Borromeo in honor of St. Charles Borromeo (a great 16th-century archbishop of Milan, who was renowned for both his learning and his great charity; for example, he had supported up to 3,000 people a day at his own expense during a plague and personally tended to plague sufferers' needs).

St. Charles Borromeo (d.1584), by Philippe de Champaigne (1664) from the Bollandists

The mission was moved soon after its founding to a better location about six miles south of Montery Bay at the Carmel River and was given the full name of Misión de San Carlos Borromeo del Rio Carmel. The river itself had originally been named Rio del Nuestra Senora del Monte Carmelo after Our Lady of Mount Carmel in 1603, about 150 years before the mission was established, probably because three friars of the Carmelite Order were members of the Vizcaíno expedition that discovered it.

The river's name was eventually shortened to Rio Carmelo, and it is now known in English as the Carmel River, and, similarly, the mission's name came to be shortened to Mission Carmel.

St. Junipero Serra died in 1784, and it is said his last wish was for a new stone church to replace the original adobe chapel. Serra’s successor Father Fermín Lasuén directed the skilled work of Native American converts (conversos) in the building of the current stone church, which was finished in 1797.

Painting of the Stone Church without its Stucco Facing, Provenance Unknown

The conversos were proud of their contributions to the beauty of the mission, and it is recorded that mothers would vie foer their children have the honor be taught to sing and play instruments for the Masses.

In the frame are these words: Robert Louis Stevenson visited this mission in 1879 and recorded in his book, "Across the Plains," the yearly return of the carmel indians to the ruined mission to celebrate the old patronal feast of San Carlos and the playing of this violin by a blind Indian, part of a choir using the gregorian chant taught by [the missionaries]. And the label at the base of the clarinet reads, "Clarinet from mission indian band."

From About the Mission at the Carmel Mission Basilica website.

"The Mission lands and buildings under the Mexican Government were secularized in 1834 and the Mission Indians and Franciscan Fathers were required to leave. By the start of the American Gold Rush in 1850, California had officially become the thirty-first state of the United States, and the Mission fell into disrepair. . . . The Christian Mission Indian families continued to preserve the site as a sacred space, and services during secularization were held for the community in the Mission Church sacristy yearly on the feast day of San Carlos."

This Jules Tavernier painting from 1875 depicts this annual celebration just four years before Robert Louis Stevenson attended and wrote about it in his essay on Monterey, "The Old Pacific Capital." 

In the following snippets from Stevenson's essay, we can glimpse how strong the faith was among the remaining former natives of the Carmel Mission and how much they loved and treasured the Gregorian chant they had learned, and also how badly the mission had decayed after secularization. In his essay, Stevenson also deplored the lack of civic interest in preserving the historically significant mission. His description led to the first restoration of the mission in 1884, when a roof was put over the church to save it from further ruin.

“The history of Monterey has yet to be written. Founded by Catholic missionaries, a place of wise beneficence to Indians, a place of arms, a Mexican capital continually wrested by one faction from another, an American capital when the first House of Representatives held its deliberations, and then falling lower and lower from the capital of the State to the capital of a county, and from that again, by the loss of its charter and town lands, to a mere bankrupt village, its rise and decline is typical of that of all Mexican institutions and even Mexican families in California. . . . 

“In a comparison between what was and what is in California, the praisers of times past will fix upon the Indians of Carmel. The valley drained by the river so named is a true Californian valley, bare, dotted with chaparal, overlooked by quaint, unfinished hills. The Carmel runs by many pleasant farms, a clear and shallow river, loved by wading kine; and at last, as it is falling towards a quicksand and the great Pacific, passes a ruined mission on a hill. From the mission church the eye embraces a great field of ocean, and the ear is filled with a continuous sound of distant breakers on the shore. But the day of the Jesuit [Ed: Stevenson incorrectly referred to the banished Franciscan missionaries as Jesuits] has gone by, the day of the Yankee has succeeded, and there is no one left to care for the converted savage. The church is roofless and ruinous, sea-breezes and sea-fogs, and the alternation of the rain and sunshine, daily widening the breaches and casting the crockets from the wall. As an antiquity in this new land, a quaint specimen of missionary architecture, and a memorial of good deeds, it had a triple claim to preservation from all thinking people; but neglect and abuse have been its portion. 

"Only one day in the year, the day before our Guy Faux, the padre drives over the hill from Monterey; the little sacristy, which is the only covered portion of the church, is filled with seats and decorated for the service; the Indians troop together, their bright dresses contrasting with their dark and melancholy face; and there among a crowd of somewhat unsympathetic holiday makers, you may hear God served with perhaps more touching circumstances than in any other temple under heaven.

“I heard the old indians singing mass. That was a new experience, and one well worth hearing. There was the old man who led and the women who so worthily followed. It was like a voice out of the past. They sang by tradition, from the teaching of early missionaries long since turned to clay. And still in the roofless church you may hear the old music.

"Padre Casanove, will, I am sure, be the first to pardon and understand me when I say the old Gregorian singing preached a sermon more eloquent than his own. Peace on earth, good will to men so it seemed to me to say; and to me as a Barbarian, who hears on all sides evil speech and the roughest bywords about the Indian race, to hear Carmel Indians sing their latin words with so good a pronunciation and give out these ancient chants with familiarity and fervor suggested new and pleasant reflections.” 

“An Indian, stone blind and about eighty years of age, conducts the singing; other Indians compose the choir; yet they have the Gregorian music at their finger ends, and pronounce the Latin so correctly that I could follow the meaning as they sang. 

“I have never seen faces more vividly lit up with joy than the faces of those Indian singers.It was to them not only the worship of God, nor an act by which they recalled and commemorated better days, but was besides an exercise of culture, where all they knew of art and letters was united and expressed.  

“And it made a man’s heart sorry for the good fathers of yore, who had taught them to dig and to reap, to read and to sing, who had given them the European mass-books which they still preserve and study in their cottages, and who had now passed away from all authority and influence in that land—to be succeeded by greedy land thieves and sacrilegious pistol-shots. . . . 

"All that I say in this paper is in a paulo-past tense. The Monterey of last year exists no longer. A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert by the railway. .  .  . Monterey is advertised in the newspapers, and posted in the waiting-rooms at railway stations, as a resort for wealth and fashion. Alas for the little town!" 

Stevenson had rejected the Scotch Presbyterian faith in which he was raised, and he might have been expected to share the prejudices against popery that were common in those days, but from what he wrote about the Mass at the Mission, it is clear he held in high estimation the work of the Catholic missionaries and the gifts of faith and culture they had given to the native peoples they had served.

Stephenson saw the converted natives who held onto their faith as orphaned and impoverished by the expulsion of the Franciscan missionaries from the missions, who had been exploited first by the Mexicans who tricked most of the conversos out of the mission’s former lands that should have belonged to them and had established ranches and then by mannerless Americans who exploited both the conversos and the Mexican land holders and until neither natives or Mexican former-ranch owners owned any land any more. He certainly did not see the abandoned Native American converts as freed slaves, as slanderers of the Franciscan missionaries like to portray them.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Age 25, 1880

I saved the following quote from a Facebook post defending St. Junipero Serra, but I didn't remember to record who wrote the comment or note the actual post it's from. But it's an appropriate end to this essay.

"And speaking of the defense of Our Saint, California Mission Music is a big argument against the wholesale slander that both Our Saint and the Missions in general have to endure. Anyone who heard the music--performed correctly, as it would have been back then, not as one hears it on modern recordings--and who has read accounts of the Indian families vying for a chance to send their sons to learn orchestral instruments and how to sing; who has read the descriptions--by hostile parties--of the devotion and high skill with which the Indians performed this music--would never believe the lies that are told of the Missions and of St. Junipero."