OLD GABRIEL.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XVIII, Issue 12, 18 July 1890, Page 5

OLD GABRIEL.

(From the Pilot.)

At the little Catholic church of Stlinus, in the county of Monterey, California, funeral services were held, on the 17th of last March, over tbe body of a Tulare Indian, who, if all reports are true, must have lived longer than any of the modern race of men. This was Old Gabriel, to wh'>m pjpular belief asenbed 151 yean.

His age can only be estimated, because, in tbe case of all California Indiaos, their method of computation scarcely runs beyond so many " sinnips," and so many mooes. There are many correlative facts, however, which pnne Old Gabriel to have been a patriarch of patriarchs.

The Padre Junipero Serra is said to have baptised this same Indian "Gabriel" at Moateny in 1769. Father Sorrentine, the parish priest of Salinas, came to Ca lfornia with Bishop Amat nearly forty years ago, and Old Gibriel w.ts then living with his sixth wife, and was reported to the priest to be 110 years old.

'' He w»e bright and intelligent, though bent and wrinkled," said Father Sorrentine recently, "and conversed readily in Spanish. I asked him quesiions about events that happened here in the last century, and he answered them all. He was particularly bright about the landing of Junipero Serra. I merely mentioned the missionary's Damn to him, and he at once began to talk of bis friend and teacher of a hundred years ago. He told me how he first saw t^e Father's vessel approaching, and with his people gathered around to watch the landing. He described the Mass that, the Father performed under a tree neir the beach. Then hd told how Father Junipero got him to become a Christian, and baptised him first of all the Indians, giving him the name of Gabriel, and then baptised his follower.*. — He pointed out to me the spot where these incidents to k place, and mentioned many details that he couid only have known through being there at the time. Gabrid t ild me that he had buiiea cne wife, and was living with his secoud when he was taptued.

The mother of the ex-tax collector of Monterey county, Manuel Castro, died a year or two ago, aged ninety five, and she used to say

that when she was a child the Indian was gray and wrinkled, and everybody then called him " Old Gabriel." Another aged HispanoMexican lady of Monterey, Dona Catalina Moras, herßelf nearly 100 years old, as proved by the church register, has said the sime thing ; while an old Indian who had known Gabriel all his lifetime, and who himself looked a swart Father Time, recollected Gabriel as an old man when he was a boy.

Seven times married, Old Gabriel remained faithful to each wife as long as she lived, then decently buried her and married another as speedily as possible. He had children by his sixth wife, and grandchildren and great-grandchildren by the score, but he outlived them all. With him dies a tribe of Indians once suffi-iently powerful to keep the Spanish colonists out of the great rich central valley of the State.

The Indians of the neighbourhood all attribute Gabriel's longevity to his having been the first convert baptised by Serra, but it is a simpler fact of much pertinency that few men have lived as virtuously as this old Indian. He never smoked tobacco, and did not know the taste of the white man's fire-water. One curious quality, for an Indian, he possessed, was a passion for cleanliness. As long as he was active he had a sweat-box on the banks of the river, and he had his bath as regularly as the sun rose, When he became too feeble to bathe he would strip himself every day or two and scrape his skin with an old knife from head to foot. This he kept up till a very short time before his death. Sickness was unknown to him, and he maintained his usual good health up to within two days before his death, when his stomach refused food. On Sunday morning he appeared better, and after partaking of a bowl of mush and milk dropped his head upon the pillow, his eyes and mouth closed as though he was preparing for a quiet sleep. His attendant, thinking he would upon wakening want some water, left the room for that purpose, but upon returning found him asleep, but the sleep was death. Thus suddenly but quietly Gabriel was gathered to his fathers. Gabriel was, on the whole, a peaceable creature, ignorant and faithful. It is true that he embraced Christianity, which was brought to him by the self-sacrificing missionaries of the eighteenth century, but beyond that he retained the same instincts rooted in tne wild life of his infancy 150 years past. Until a couple of years ago he attended church regularly, but his religion was only a matter of form. At times the savage would assert itself, and, discarding all clothes, he would stalk around naked, as when be was a young brave. The old man never spoke any language (except, it may be, his native Indian) correctly, and for thac reason it was always difficult to understand him. Of late years every word of English he had known had gone from him, and though for decades and decades his only intelligible language was Spanish, even that faded from his memory, so that he could only talk, in his original Indian dialect. When Gabriel was baptised by Junipero Serra he is said to have been a stalwart brave over six feet high ; when he died he was but five feet four inches tall. His fase was black as coal, and furrowed and seamed in every direction with a thousand little wrinkles. His eyes were small and deep-set, and he still retained a tooth or two. Putting all these facts together, the conclusion is inevitable that Old GHbnel, the Tulare Indian, was a striking instance of longevity. He may not have been 151 yeais old, as the coffin plate claims, but there is no doubt that he was a lad running wild about the unknown West when King George's soldiers were reddening the East ; that he was a man when Pontiac captured the Eoglish forts, and old and wrinkled when the Thirteen States declared tbeir Independence ; that he carried adobes for the building of a missiou church in California five years before these same States revolted ; that he would be George Washington's senior had the General lived to this time, and that he was older than Uncle Sam.