Why Father Serra?

 I've been doing some reading and attending a lecture series on California history by Chris O'Sullivan. He is not to blame for what I write below.

Spain (and later Mexico) had no interest in early California, which they called Alta California. Spain settled Baja California, after a fashion, but it ignored the California that today stretches from San Diego to Crescent City. No one lived there but 300,000 apparently contented Indians, about 25% of the Indians in what is now the United States.

Then, in 1770, Spain finally put together a military and religious expedition to take control of its California territory. A Franciscan, Father Serra, led the religious contingent. It was his job to turn the Indians from contented hunter/gatherers into Christians who ate corn and could be whipped into control. A few decades later, about 90% of the Indians had died of European diseases, but Serra had erected a string of missions that eventually ended in the new town of Sonoma. Today the Catholic Church is considering making Serra a saint.

The reason for the Spanish burst of energy was that the Russians had come down the coast from Alaska, hunting sea lions and sea otters. They'd installed cannon at Fort Ross. The Spanish decided that the Russians had to be stopped. No one thought Alta California was worth fighting over, but the Spanish had silver mines in Northern Mexico. They suspected the Russians wanted those mines. The Russians had to be pushed away.

The Spanish and Mexicans who settled in Alta California soon found themselves forgotten. The Russians sold their cannon to John Sutter and left. This purchase by Sutter ruined him financially. Mexico became independent of Spain and lost interest in California, to the point where the Californios decided to shake loose of Mexico and find some other arrangement, maybe with France, a Catholic nation. Meanwhile, in the 1840s, citizens of the United States began to sidle into California through the Sierras, entering a foreign country without permission and without passports. They were unwanted illegal aliens. The rest is history.