Charles Warren Stoddard, one of California’s sweetest poets, realized to the full the mercenary treatment the Missions and the Indians had received, and one of the latest and also most powerful poems he ever wrote, “The Bells of San Gabriel,” deals with this spoliation as a theme.  The poem first appeared in Sunset Magazine, the Pacific Monthly, and with the kind consent of the editor I give the last stanza.

     “Where are they now, O tower! 
       The locusts and wild honey? 
     Where is the sacred dower
       That the Bride of Christ was given? 
     Gone to the wielders of power,
       The misers and minters of money;
     Gone for the greed that is their creed—­
       And these in the land have thriven. 
     What then wert thou, and what art now,
       And wherefore hast thou striven?

     REFRAIN

     And every note of every bell
       Sang Gabriel! rang Gabriel! 
     In the tower that is left the tale to tell
       Of Gabriel, the Archangel.”

To-day, the total Indian population of Southern California is reported as between two and three thousand.  It is not increasing, and it is good for the race that it is not.  Until the incumbency by W.A.  Jones of the Indian Commissionership in Washington, there seems to have been little or no attempt at effective protection of the Indians against the land and other thefts of the whites.  The facts are succinctly and powerfully stated by Helen Hunt Jackson in her report to the government, and in her Glimpses of California and the Missions.  The indictment of churches, citizens, and the general government, for their crime of supineness in allowing our acknowledged wards to be seduced, cheated, and corrupted, should be read by every honest American; even though it make his blood seethe with indignation and his nerves quiver with shame.

In my larger work on this subject I published a table from the report of the agent for the “Mission-Tule” Consolidated Agency, which is dated September 25, 1903.

This is the official report of an agent whom not even his best friends acknowledge as being over fond of his Indian charges, or likely to be sentimental in his dealings with them.  What does this report state?  Of twenty-eight “reservations”—­and some of these include several Indian villages—­it announces that the lands of eight are yet “not patented.”  In other words, that the Indians are living upon them “on sufferance.”  Therefore, if any citizen of the United States, possessed of sufficient political power, so desired, the lands could be restored to the public domain.  Then, not even the United States Supreme Court could hold them for the future use and benefit of the Indians.

On five of these reservations the land is “desert,” and in two cases, “subject to intense heat” (it might be said, to 150 degrees, and even higher in the middle of summer); in one case there is “little water for irrigation.”