The Founding of San Francisco

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 35, 16 September 1925, Page 17

The Founding of San Francisco

(By Michael Williams, in America.)

If cities celebrated their great days of .commemoration, as indeed they should do, September 17 would bo held in honor by San Francisco as the feast day of its nativity. For it was on that day—which is -' also that of the Impression of the Stigmata of Saint Francis in the year of Our Lord, 1776, that the foundation of this city was accomplished by the blessing'and the solemn taking possession of the Presidio, with the rites of the Cross and the Sword, those symbols of the two forces which Spain conquered its world empire. It was near the place now known as Fort Point, not far from the Golden Gate, and close to the shore, that the ceremonies were - held. The colonists, Franciscan Friars, soldiers, workmen, with women and many children, had marched overland from Monterey several months before. They had settled in two places. The headquarters of the Sword, the Presidio,. was fixed at the site selected in the spring of that year by Anza, at the conclusion of his most amazing journey - from Mexico across the sun-drenched, unknown deserts of the Colorado and the icy passes of the Sierra Nevada; while the central seat of the Cross, the Mission, had been "V .chosen in the plain by the little lake called Lag, de Nuestra Senora de lon Dolores, the Lagoon of Our Lady of Sorrows. Also there had come the ship San Carlos, bringing church goods, house furniture, and farm implements, sent from Monterey by Father Junipero Serra, the Apostle of California, chief founder of its civilisation, and by the whimiscal and vacillating Captain Rivera, the comandantr. At the presidio site buildings had been erected after a plan'drawn by Jose Canizares, pilot of the San Carlos. They were ranged about a square ninety-two varan, or about two hundred and fifty feet, on every side. There was a chapel, always the first to be raised, rooms for the officers, " barracks for the soldiers and their families! fertile families abounding in lusty youngsters, store houses, guardhouse, and apartments for the civil population, the colonists proper, who were greatly out-numbered by the military. The walls of these buildings were of timber palisades; the roofs were deeply thatched with tiles. Quarters for the : missionaries and a. permanent chapel had likewise been erected by the lake of Our Lady of Sorrows. Soldiers and Colonists. Lieutenant Jose Joaquin Moraga was in |lig^. man d- Under him served Sergeant Pablo , '|i*'^i alva > two corporals and sixteen soldiers. pi There were seven colonists. Nearly all the ■"lj, soldiers and the colonists had their wives, and there were babies at the breast, toddlers - clinging to 3 the skirts it and a troop of boys •

and girls of the elder age. Fathers Francisco Palou, Benito Cambon, Thomas de la Pena, and Jose Noeedal, Franciscan Friars, with a few Indian neophytes and servants, represented the spiritual conquest which Spain with varying success at all times attempted to carry through simultaneously with that of force and of commerce. The Sword and the Cross! They that wielded the sword by it have perished, and their conquests have been conquered by others; but the work of the Cross has remained; it is part and parcel of the civilisation of California. Father Palou was the celebrant on that memorable day. Assisted by his fellowpriests, he first set up, blessed and venerated, the Holy Gross, for with that sign the story of San Francisco begins, like a tale of the quest of the Grail. Then he sang the first High Mass ever offered up by the Golden Gate, closing the service with a Te Drum. "Te Deum lanlamusl" he chanted. "We praise Thee, 0 God!" Fathers Cambon, Nocedal, and Tomas la Pena led the response, in which swordsmen and colonists, women and children, and Indian neophytes joined: "Te Domiwum confitevmrV' "We acknowledge Thee to be Our Lord!" "Te aeternum. PatremV proclaimed the celebrant. "0 Father everlasting!" "Omnis terra veneratur.l" was tile answer. "All the earth doth worship thee!" Beauty of the Surroundings. The high hills, Tamalpais, their lord, were robed in autumnal purple and gold. They were made mystical with a filmy veil of seafog, through which the warm sunshine streamed a tempered heat, underneath the high vault of a sky of sapphirine blue. They formed a. cloud of noble witnesses. The sea upon the long sands of the beach and against the rocks and cliffs surged and clashed its briny cymbals. And through the forest of pine and cypress from which the timber for the chapel had been hewn, the wind muttered strangely, as if the gods of the heathen, ( which are devils, were discussing the ominous invasion. Seals bellowed from their swarming places off-shore. Gulls hovered high, curious, and scared. For scores of miles southward stretched the jumble of hills and sand dunes, fantastic as a dream. And the great bay opened up from the narrow entrance, studded with islands, and the high, heavily wooded mountains of Marin formed a basaltic background for its hazy blaze of blue and steel and bronze, the bronze formed by the muddy staining of huge rivers that from the east' and north poured their swift waters to the sea. Lonely as..a lost child, yet), gallant as } a

knight of the Table Hound, the little San Carlos, with towering, poop and lofty brow, of the galleon 'type, the first craft' ever to enter the Golden Gate (its first entrance had been on August 18, of the previous year, 1775,. when Lieutenant* Ayala had explored the bay) was anchored in the channel. It discharged salvoes of cannon, while the soldiers ashore fired off their queer muskets, and the bells of the chapel rang and clanged and pealed, as Lieutenant Moraga and his officers performed the solemn act of taking possession in the name of Carlos, King of Spain.. The Sword, in this manner, with pomp and circumstance, and parade of power, set its. seal upon the ceremony of the Cross; a seal that crumbled and disappeared. '■'■■ l\ Founding the Mission. :,/ On the ninth of October following, the Mission itself was founded. The site was blessed, the Cross set up, there was a procession in honor of St. Francis, an image of the little poor man of Assisi being carried on a platform and afterwards placed on the altar whereat Father. Palou sang the first High Mass, and preached, taking as the theme the life of St. Francis, patron of mission and of presidio and the pueblo vet to be founded. The people of the presidio were present, as well as the sailors from the San Carlos, and again the salvoes thundered and the bells pealed through the vast emptiness of the land.

Yet despite the formal and substantial nature of these celebrations, perhaps it were not too fanciful to venture a claim that March 28 should also be placed by San Francisco among-, days of commemoration, as the feast of its conception. For it was on March 28, 1776, that Father Pedro Font, he who bora the Cross before the sword of Anza across the deserts and mountains from Mexico to the Golden Gate, conceived the idea which had vaguely stirred the souls of many others but which he was the first firmly to shape, the idea of the city of San Francisco. Site for a Presidio. Anza had chosen a white cliff (Fort Point), just within the Golden Gate, as a site for, a Presidio, and Padre Font wrote in his diary as follows: "The commandante decided to fix the holy Cross, which I blessed after Mass, on the extreme end of the steep rock at the interior point of the mouth of the port; and; at eight o'clock he and I went there with four soldiers, and the cross was fixed at a/ suitable height to be seen from the entire entrance of the port and', from some distance. ... On departing we ascended: a short hill to a very green flowery tableland abounding in wild violets and sloping somewhat toward the port. From it the viewis deliciocisima. There may be seen a, good part of the port' with its islands, [and] the mouth of the port and the sea, whence the prospect ranges even beyond the Famllones.

“I judged that if this site could he well populated, as in ‘ Europe, there would b& nothing finer in the world, as if was in every way fitted for a most beautiful, —one of equal advantages by land and water, with that port so re maid: hie and '■ capacious, where-

in could be built ship-yards, quays, and n-katever might be desired. . . I examined ~4he : ! mouth of the port. . . and I tried to -.">. sketch it, and here I place the sketch. .." :;■ \ - ' Sons of St. Francis. Oh, 1 these Franciscans! Poets and lovers of nature were they, partaking of the spirit [\~. ,of their founder in this respect as in his zeal;for the conquest of souls. St. Francis, ,/ who in the gaiety of his heart fiddled upon :■■■■'■ a stick picked up on the road; and trolled )<;' the love ditties of his turbulent youth, only ; y now in honor of a greater love, he who chan- ;. ted incomparable psalms to his brother the y ' Sun, bequeathed an undying sympathy with ;v> natural beauty and joy to his followers. Think of heroic Serra, marching with his lame leg all over the wild land from Mexico City to San Francisco, full of enormous : * cares and responsibilities, not only a great . coloniser, a prince of missionaries, but engaged all the while/in the even more arduous pursuit of personal sanctity (Serra can never be properly appreciated save by those who see ;/ ' in him the saint as well as the pathbreaker

and the founder) think of him pausing to note in his hurried letters to his fellowworkers that he had found "flowers many and beautiful . . . and to-day we have met the queen of them all (Iteyiia de ellas), the rose of Castile. As I write, I have a branch before me with three full-blown roses, others

in bud, and six unpetalled," * t So, too, Father Pedro Font. In his vision of the great city of the future, he sets down a charming vignette, the •very green, flowery tableland abounding in Mild violets.'' The view is "delieheUima." If the port showed wondrous opportunities for shipyards and quays, it likewise was beautiful. Thus from the beginning, beauty in San Francisco was recognised and honored. It was a primary value. And if the soul of a city, like the soul of a man, contains inherited strains of temperament from its progenitors, then the joy and the delight in beauty and the gay spirit of San Francisco —ah. yes, she has other moods as well!— may be traced to the little poor man of Assisi. And San Francisco is still Franciscan in this respect at least.