The story of the Spanish missions in California isn’t always what it seems. By delving into Mexico’s National Archives, Dr. Marie Christine Duggan uncovered facts that provide a unique inside view of mission life. From murder trials to Indian militias, we talk about some of the lesser-known aspects of California mission history.
Marie Christine Duggan
Marie Christine Duggan is an economic historian and Professor of Global Economic History at Keene State University in New Hampshire. She studies how market forces shaped human lives in 18th century Spanish California and 19th century Mexican California.
Dr. Duggan grew up in Berkeley, California and finished her education at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 1995, Dr. Duggan located account books for nine California missions in Mexico’s National Archives, which were the basis for her 2000 PHD dissertation, Market and Church on the Mexican Frontier. She received in 1997 the Maynard Geiger Fellowship for research at the Santa Barbara Mission Archive Library and the Haynes Foundation Fellowship for Research at the Huntington Library.
In 2017 she received the Norman Neuerburg Award from the California Missions Foundation for her contributions to scholarship on California’s missions, presidios, pueblos, and ranchos.
Highlights of Part 1:
- Early research Into trials murder trials at the California Missions.
- How mission communities exerted pressure on their members.
- How were missionaries spending their money? Account books as a view from inside the missions:
- Native Americans as blacksmiths and cowboys.
- Franciscans and Indian militias
- Why missionaries resisted teaching Spanish to Native Americans.
- What constituted a missionary’s power? The case of Antonio Peyrí in San Luis Rey.
- The town in Catalonia that produced three California missionaries.
- The radical transformation of the missions after 1810.
- Conflicts between missionaries and the military over land grants.
- Misconceptions about the size of missions.
- Conflicts between mission communities over boundaries.
To Learn More
- Marie Christine Duggan at Keene State University
- Book: The Chumash and the Presidio of Santa Barbara by Marie Christine Duggan
- Mentioned in the interview: “With and Without an Empire: Financing for California Missions Before and After 1810” from the Pacific Historical Review (2016).
- Other articles by Marie Christine Duggan
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I am interested in the militias that Marie mentions. She indicates that padres used them for the purpose of providing protection and were to a degree an offset that the padres used against the Spanish military. I may not have that quite right, but wonder if she can be more specific how these militias were used. For example, she has mentioned that the Indian militias were used to bring back Indian fugitives. We also know that militias also worked in cooperation with the Spanish military–at least there is example of this happening during the Bouchard raid.
Marie is always interesting to listen to and perhaps you will have her back to talk about Indian involvement with the livestock at the missions. I am particularly interested in the huge number of sheep that exceeded in number horses and other domesticated animals. Even though there were thousands of sheep at many of the missions, there is no evidence apparently of any exporting of wool and wool products. I read recently how much wool it took to make Indian blankets and it seems likely that wool from CA could have been used entirely domestically to provide for Indians, soldiers, their families and other settlers. I am fascinated by the fulling process in producing wool, and anything she knows on that subject would be of interest to me.
Thank you for the information , its makes me feel like the real life experience shadows the reality of the human kinds efforts to live day to day …
Interesting! I had never heard of an Indian Militia or any mention(s) of battles here in S.L.O. I do wonder if they might have given pursuit to the Chauguanosos raiders that drove off the Mission’s San Gabriel, San Luis Obispo, and San Bernardino’s horse herds in 1840?
Thank you so much for sharing this Dr. Bacich!
Thank you, Manny. Yes, most missions had militias made up of the Indian people who lived there. I don’t know about Chauguanosos raiders — sounds like an interesting story! Of course by the 1840s the missions had been secularized, so I don’t know if those militias were still in place.
Damian