Volume 90, Number 1 - California Historical Society

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In the summer of 1847, the surveyor and draftsman William Rich Hutton illustrated this section of the
Santa Barbara mission’s water works. Along with agriculture, the Franciscans taught the Chumash irrigation.
They constructed a dam in Pedregoso Creek, high above the mission, and diverted water to the
mission via aqueducts. Some of the water system’s ruins are visible today.
Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California
Hispanic California and saw little to admire in
the spiritual conquest of the padres, dismissed by
some critics as slave drivers. 15 Were the missions
good or evil? This question, which remains with
us today, was hotly argued long before the American
takeover of California. That event, in turn,
contributed to a larger historical debate about the
virtue of conquest in general, whether intended
to assimilate Indians and save their souls or to
further democracy and extend what Jefferson
called an empire for liberty across the continent.
The fact that American expansionists saw it as
their manifest destiny to seize California from
the descendants of Spanish colonists—who had
regarded their own conquest as pious and providential—raised
doubts about such competing
California History • volume 90 number 1 2012
claims. Skeptics wondered why God would favor
one imperial venture over another, or bless either
party with success when neither had motives as
pure as they professed. What Josiah Royce said
of his own assertive countrymen in the insightful
history of California he composed in the late
1800s could be said as well of earlier Spanish
colonizers: “The American wants to persuade not
only the world but himself that he is doing God
service in a peaceable spirit, even when he violently
takes what he has determined to get.” 16
For Alfred Sully, praising the missionaries was a
way of paying tribute to Manuela and the world
that nurtured her. He did not stop to consider
that the good done by the padres might be linked