Lands Never Trodden by John J. O'Hagan

Author:John J. O'Hagan [John J. O’Hagan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780870045745
Publisher: Caxton Press

* Stanislaus County and the Stanislaus River, flowing down the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, are named after him.

Santa Clara was one of the last missions to be secularized, but in 1836 the inevitable blow came. Mission Santa Clara escaped the worst ravages of secularization, but when the decree was carried out it was a prime example of the disconnect between the ideal and the practical. At Santa Clara, 66,000 acres was distributed, 12,000 to Indians and 54,000 to others. The church building remained in the Franciscans’ hands, but all other land and buildings were appropriated. The church at Mission Santa Clara was never abandoned, and always had a priest in residence, sometimes good priests, oftentimes very bad priests.

Arriving in 1844, Father José Maria del Refugio Suarez del Real was one half of a somewhat infamous pair of brothers in the Franciscan order. Each of them had a reputation for drunkenness and licentious living. Father del Real came to Santa Clara with a reputation for scandalous conduct well-established from his previous posting at Monterey. He was known to his superiors to have lived at various times, and sometimes contemporaneously, with three different women. He maintained the women and his children by them in houses he built with mission funds. James A. Forbes, British Vice Counsel in Monterey, himself baptized into the Catholic Church by Father Suarez de Real, described him as “reeking with concupiscence... [the] padre had the woman he lived with, and from whom he had several children ... across the street from the Mission church.”[5] Apparently “sins of the flesh” were not the only failings of Father del Real. Forbes leaves a dark hint that the priest was suspected of poisoning another priest sent to investigate his behavior.

Something about Santa Clara seems to have drawn the worst of the Franciscan order. Besides Father del Real, Father José Vinals (1794) and Father Jesus Maria Vasquez del Mercado (1839-1844) were all accused, with some fair amount of evidence, of fathering children while at Mission Santa Clara.

Mission Santa Clara played a very small part in the Mexican-American War. On May 13, 1846, the U.S. Congress approved a declaration of war with Mexico. The immediate issue leading to the declaration was a strip of land between the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers in Texas. The war and its consequences would have a dramatic impact on California, the other major Mexican territory. For several years there had been, an increasingly large number of American citizens settling in the Santa Clara Valley. In January of 1847, a force of United States Marines and volunteers under Captain Ward Marston engaged in a brief skirmish at Mission Santa Clara, with Mexican forces led by Don Francisco Sanchez, a prominent rancher in the Santa Clara Valley. Sanchez was holding several Americans he had taken prisoner when the news of hostilities between Mexico and the United States reached him. After a desultory and inconclusive battle, a truce was arranged and prisoners exchanged. Sanchez returned to his ranch,

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