There are four presidios, having under their protection
the various missions, and pueblos, which are towns formed by the
civil power, and containing no mission or presidio.
The most
northerly presidio is San Francisco; the next Monterey; the next
Santa Barbara; including the mission of the same, St. Louis Obispo,
and St. Buenaventura, which is the finest mission in the whole
country, having very fertile soil and rich vineyards. The last,
and most southerly, is San Diego, including the mission of the same,
San Juan Campestrano, the Pueblo de los Angelos, the largest town in
California, with the neighboring mission of San Gabriel. The priests
in spiritual matters are subject to the Archbishop of Mexico, and in
temporal matters to the governor-general, who is the great civil and
military head of the country.
The government of the country is an arbitrary democracy; having no
common law, and no judiciary. Their only laws are made and unmade at
the caprice of the legislature, and are as variable as the legislature
itself. They pass through the form of sending representatives to the
congress at Mexico, but as it takes several months to go and return,
and there is very little communication between the capital and this
distant province, a member usually stays there, as permanent member,
knowing very well that there will be revolutions at home before he
can write and receive an answer; if another member should be sent,
he has only to challenge him, and decide the contested election in
that way.
Revolutions are matters of constant occurrence in California.
They are got up by men who are at the foot of the ladder and in
desperate circumstances, just as a new political party is started
by such men in our own country. The only object, of course, is the
loaves and fishes; and instead of caucusing, paragraphing, libelling,
feasting, promising, and lying, as with us, they take muskets and
bayonets, and seizing upon the presidio and custom-house, divide the
spoils, and declare a new dynasty. As for justice, they know no law
but will and fear. A Yankee, who had been naturalized, and become a
Catholic, and had married in the country, was sitting in his house at
the Pueblo de los Angelos, with his wife and children, when a Spaniard,
with whom he had had a difficulty, entered the house, and stabbed
him to the heart before them all. The murderer was seized by some
Yankees who had settled there, and kept in confinement until a
statement of the whole affair could be sent to the governor-general.
He refused to do anything about it, and the countrymen of the
murdered man, seeing no prospect of justice being administered,
made known that if nothing was done, they should try the man
themselves. It chanced that, at this time, there was a company
of forty trappers and hunters from Kentucky, with their rifles,
who had made their head-quarters at the Pueblo; and these,
together with the Americans and Englishmen in the place, who were
between twenty and thirty in number, took possession of the town,
and waiting a reasonable time, proceeded to try the man according to
the forms in their own country.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 133 of 324
Words from 68934 to 69476
of 170236
