Communion of Sinners
My first mystery includes a long-overdue expose of the historic California Mission system. Armed with extensive research, including eighteenth-century eyewitness accounts, I explode the romantic myths surrounding the so-called benevolent Franciscan padres and their Native American converts, lifting the “Adobe Curtain” to reveal a world of slavery, deprivation and cruelty. Once you read Communion of Sinners, you’ll never see the famous missions in the same light again. The plot unfolds quickly as New Orleans travel writer Sam Crockett drives across country to visit friends in Carmel, California. He stops along the way to explore isolated Soledad Mission and ventures into the campo santo where he stumbles upon what he believes is an ancient skeleton. When local...
Read MoreDoomed or Damned?
When I began researching the California Missions for my first mystery, Communion of Sinners, I discovered the system was problematic from the earliest days. The often inhumane treatment of the Indians by the Franciscan padres and Spanish soldiers (the subject of two previous blogs), made me wonder how much wretchedness the Missions brought on themselves. The question of karma arose when I learned how much Mother Nature heaped atop the man-made misery. The very first Mission, San Diego del Alcalá, founded on its present site in 1794, was around barely fifteen months when the Indians avenged their people’s abuse. Some six hundred warriors attacked the compound and burned it to the ground in a blaze intense enough to melt the communion chalice. Father Luis Jayme was...
Read MoreBehind the Adobe Curtain
My recent post, Missions: Impossible! garnered more responses than any of my previous blogs. Most were strongly positive, but a few readers were upset by my comparison of the California Mission system to Nazi labor camps and asked for more information. Proof of my claim is evident in a number of books as well as journals, diaries and Mission records kept by the Franciscans themselves. In addition to Life in a California Mission, Monterey in 1786, the journals of Jean François de la Péruse (mentioned in my first post), I highly recommend Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians by Robert H. Jackson. Published in 1996, this book is packed with facts and figures about everything from birth and death...
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