Show 30 STUDENT LIFE known to us now as “Old Mission Bells” were swung: from trees and rung: to attract the neighboring: Indians If any came they were welcomed hospitably and given presents According: to the historians two of the Brotherhood were left in charge of the place with a few soldiers to guard them The duty of the two monks was to make friends with all the Indians in the region around them win them to their religion baptize them and teach them The supplies at the mission were few until more could reach them Then from the nearest neighbor several head of cattle some tools and seeds would be sent and most important of all an image of the Crucifixion and one of the Holy Mary with sacred vessels for the church services The Indians were friendly as a rule and soon became attached to the kind Padres willingly helping them in erecting the rude stockades and dwellings that first sheltered them and also in planting the seeds and caring for the crops While the good Fathers were interested in the temporal welfare of the Indians and endeavored to look after their physical comforts their spiritual welfare was the first consideration They must be baptized and saved to the Church of Rome Father Juniperro was so zealous a worker that during the twenty years that he lived and labored in the California missions he baptized with his own hands more than one thousand Indians It almost beyond belief that these savage people of the Western World should be so easily subdued that they could be brought from their wild free life to the restraints of civilization and that too without military power or force other than the strong personality and wondrous faith of the devoted Franciscan Monks From the rudest most ignorant life these Indians were brought to a condition if not of intelligent citizenship at least to that of industrious tillers of the soil weavers of cloth and workers in metal as well as worshipers of a Christian God and singers of sacred hymns Not less wonderful than this change in the Indians was the change in the mission itself The growth of the buildings from the rude booths of boughs and reeds to the ‘Stately stone churches with their arcled corridors and pillars that have given California her distinctive architecture seems a marvelous change to be brought about under such unfavorable conditions in less than half a century of time The increase in material wealth was seems no less great Massive stone churches had been built also other mission buildings large enough to shelter hundreds of Immense tracts of land people had been brought under cultivation one mission alone having thirty thousand acres under irrigation Grains and fruits of the cooler regions grew beside the luscious fruits of the tropics The less than two hundred head of cattle sent from |