The Gabrielinos: Aftermath

The Spanish originally planned to turn the missions over to Indian leaders and non-missionary clergy after 10 years. That didn't exactly happen.

Mexico's fight for independence from Spain affected California's missions very little. But after the war, ownership of the missions transferred from Spain to Mexico, and California became a Mexican province. In a document titled "Provisional Regulations for the Emancipation of the Mission Indians," issued on July 15, 1833, then-California governor José Figueroa proclaimed that the missions would become parish churches, and half their lands would go to the Indians.

That didn't exactly happen either.

Few Tongva, also known as Gabrielinos, got any land. Some administrators sold land cheaply or gave it to friends and relatives. One of these administrators, appointed by Figueroa to oversee secularization, was Pío Pico, who later became the last Mexican governor of California.

Gabrielinos who received land had a hard time keeping it. Some tried farming, but failed in debt or had their lands confiscated and given away by the Mexican government. Some even turned down land, as the concept of land ownership wasn't part of their culture.

One person who received a land grant was Doña Eulalia Pérez de Guillén, who was not a Gabrielino but who said she received the land for her service to the mission Indians. Her job at Mission San Gabriel was "mayordoma," teacher of girls and women. Her land grant was the huge Rancho San Pasqual. For a time she resided at the Flores Adobe, which still stands in South Pasadena. She lived to be 112 years old and is buried at Mission San Gabriel.

A Gabrielino who received land was Bartholomea of Comicrangna, or Comcrabit, who was Doña Eulalia's pupil at Mission San Gabriel and who may have been aided by Doña Eulalia in receiving her land. Bartholomea was a young widow when she married Scotsman Hugo Reid and took the name Victoria. Historians reference Reid's 1852 letters to the Los Angeles Star as an important resource on the Tongva. Reid's resource was his wife.

The Mexican government divided mission lands into ranchos, the names of which remain today. Parts of Rancho San Pasqual and Rancho San Rafael make up South Pasadena, Pasadena and Altadena. Santa Anita was part of Bartholomea's dowry. She also owned the 128-acre Rancho el Huerti del Cuati in what is now San Marino. Because of a lake on the property (fed by the stream that ran through El Molino Viejo), the rancho became known as Wilson's Lake when Benjamin Wilson bought it in 1854. Nowadays, we call it Lacy Park.

The structure and sustenance provided by the missions, though not their original way of life, had been in place for the Gabrielinos for 62 years. When it began to disappear, some stayed at the missions. Some found jobs on the rancheros as domestics or livestock handlers, though they were ordinarily paid in food or goods instead of money. Some moved to the barrios of 19th-century Los Angeles.

Some found other tribes to take them in. There were Indian settlements in Eagle Rock and Highland Park as late as 1889 and on the Palos Verdes Peninsula into the early 1900s. But through intermarriage (mostly with Mexicans), the pure-blooded Gabrielino-Tongva population decreased and their language began to disappear through assimilation.

When hundreds of thousands of easterners flooded California seeking their fortunes in the Gold Rush of 1849, the native population was reduced by half, says Bruce W. Miller. The Indians were "...starved, harassed, jailed and murdered." Those who remained were scattered to different parts of California and adopted different ways of life.

Today the Gabrielino-Tongva are splintered by disagreement. As many as four groups claim to be the sole representative of the tribe. Though they finally achieved California state recognition in 1994, the tribe isn't officially recognized by the federal government, and disunity is part of the problem.

Modern Gabrielinos halted construction in an area of a new cultural center in downtown Los Angeles, in defense of their ancestors buried there. The dead were surely Christianized Indians, as before Christianization the Tongva cremated their dead, scattering the ashes to the winds. Perhaps that scattering is fittingly symbolic for a tribe that remains divided today.

Read Petrea Burchard's previous two articles in the series: "" and "."