Mission San Miguel Arcángel and Its Untouched Salinan Murals

Mission San Miguel Arcángel. Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress.

Spain founded 21 Franciscan Catholic missions in a line through Alta California in the 18th and early 19th centuries, to expand its empire, settle the Pacific coast and convert the local American Indian tribes to Catholicism. Many still stand. Mission San Miguel Arcángel, the 16th of the chain, is a National Historic Landmark, and its interior murals, painted in the 1800s with Salinan people who had converted to Catholicism, have never been retouched or repainted.

Founding

Father Fermin Francisco de Lasuén founded the mission on July 25, 1797, on the Salinas River, a site chosen to ease travel between Mission San Antonio and Mission San Luis Obispo; missions were generally placed a day's walk apart. Its grounds reached 18 miles to the north and south, 66 miles to the east and 35 miles to the west: room to grow crops, plant vineyards, raise cattle and sheep, and graze horses and mules for trade and to sustain the community.

The mission stood on El Camino Real, the main overland route linking the Spanish missions, presidios and pueblos of Alta California, right beside a large Salinan village. Its first padre, Buenaventura Sitjar, had ministered to the Salinan for 25 years at Mission San Antonio and spoke their language; he baptised 15 Salinan children on the day the mission was founded. Relations between the Salinan and the padres began on friendly terms, and in time more than 1,000 Salinan people lived at the mission.

The church and its murals

A temporary church and other buildings went up in 1797. In 1806 a fire destroyed them, along with all the stored farm produce. Work on a new, larger church began immediately: for the next 10 years, Salinan converts (neophytes) made nearly 36,000 roof tiles and adobe blocks for it. Its foundation was laid in 1816, and by 1818 it was finished, with adobe walls six feet thick and a long colonnade of arches in varying shapes and sizes. Esteban Munras of Monterey designed the interior murals and had them completed, with the help of the Salinan people, by 1821.

Inside Mission San Miguel Arcángel. Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress.

After the mission era

• Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821 and, strained by the cost of maintaining the missions, began to secularise them, turning church property into private property. San Miguel, secularised in 1834, was one of the last. By then about 30 Salinan people and no Spanish padres remained, and a Mexican administrator took over.
• In 1846 Petronillio Rios, a retired Mexican military man, and William Reed, an Englishman with a wife from Monterey, bought the mission buildings. The Reeds lived there until three Irish sailors who had deserted their ship attacked the household and killed 11 members of the family and staff.
• After the murders, and because the mission was a stopping point for gold miners travelling between Los Angeles and San Francisco, its buildings and grounds were turned to commercial use: at various times shops, a hotel, a saloon and a dance hall.
• President Buchanan returned the mission to the Catholic Church in 1859. By 1878 a newly assigned resident padre, Father Philip Farrely, was running it and had established a new parish. Fifty years later, in 1928, it was officially returned to the Franciscans, who made it a novitiate training school and a centre for retreats and meetings.

The altar of Mission San Miguel Arcángel. Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress.

The mission is still an active parish and a novitiate. Visitors can see its restored and reconstructed buildings, and murals that offer a rare, untouched view of mission life in Spanish California.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Mission San Miguel Arcàngel: Home of Indigenous Salinan Art." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/mission-san-miguel-arc%C3%A0ngel-ca.htm
• Corrected: the mission's name is spelled "Arcángel", as in the original's picture captions, not "Arcàngel".