A History of California Jacob Erwin

Our final mission-focused episode, including the environmental effects of unleashing European pack animals onto the environment, the demographic effects of unleashing disease epidemics on native cultures, and how the consequent specter of death also threatened to kill the colonial economy in Alta California. 

In the first appendix episode, we detail Lorenzo Asisara's narrative of the death of Andres Quintana at Mission Santa Cruz, question its accuracy, and then wonder whether that accuracy matters at all. Also: death by castration. 

What to do when a foreign power sets up colony-outposts in your land with the intent of converting your people to their new God? This episode we look at how various indigenous peoples up and down the California coast answered that question. 

This episode we track the early growth of the Franciscan missions under Junípero Serra until his 1784 death, what daily life was like inside for the indigenous people who lived there, and attempt to keep track of all the military governors Serra got into feuds with. 

On this episode, we watch the Spaniards get paranoid over the Russians and order the Sacred Expedition to occupy Monterey, which it finally does two years later after finding about half a dozen different ways to almost completely fail. And thus the missions at San Diego and Monterey are born. 

On this episode, we discuss the potential ramifications of Spanish contact with indigenous Californians, focusing on exchange on the short-term, ecological shift and the possibilities of disease spread in the mid-term, and the slow creep of Catholic missions northward in the long-term.