Spirit of the Ground Out of the South they came, from the missions of Baja these Cochimí came. Some suppose it was because that was where the padres led. The church, long on desire but short of ways, and so to a handful of mission Indian owed their passage from San Borja and Loreto— the short end of the Baja road— through unknown wilderness and to any reason they stayed alive. Why, to consider the means, should we remark that anything less flowed through Cochimí veins than the passion and vision of a Cabrillo or De Anza or Lewis & Clark? Why else would they agree to take a single step into those uncertain deserts better left alone? To string some fragile strand of mission beads? —We do not believe the Orders of Assisi held much sway beyond the padres, and they? Well, they drank their own wine deeply.— More we best leave for believers to explain. Whatever the case, it was a fragile human rosary to be sure. Two out of three never made it over the miles of devil rock and bare desert boil. A handful, twenty-eight, would arrive to consecrate that empty land — the first bead in the Junipero Serra strand. To Mission San Diego Alacala they came, these Baja field hands, these combo sappers, wagoneers, healers, hunters, mappers and pallbearers all-in-one, these explorers and teachers we'll call the first braceros, the Baja field hands who broke the earth to clod and clod to soil, who baked in the sun and toiled to death. But why? &what kind of home was to be the home of a mission breed who neither sat at the padres' table nor would ever return to his own lodge over stones long uprooted from clay soils older than the church? What home did they desert, what unguessed lands had they imagined? Strung out on the practice of misery they came to that unturned soil. Starving and exhausted men they came. Scant skeletons ravaged with disease, sunburnt and raw they came to labor and die, break trail, build churches, leave bones, plant crops, tame land, and then pass into oblivion. Die unknown they did, unnamed they came, these first explorers to cross that long cruel sand— the first of the Baja field hands, these Cochimí Indian. And does anyone know or ask why? &what carried them so far from home? What document, save death, might serve to carry them back again? When all too swiftly their terrible job was done, the tribes they taught displaced them, in turn to displace and then succumb as disease and cruelty would take their toll, thus learned the modern ways of misery until they self-inflicted with amazing skill. What that didn't get the soldiers would kill, if not with guns, then syphilis. Between the Spaniards and the Yankees it took less than a century to reduce twelve-thousand years and a hundred and thirty-thousand people to a handful of tears and a little dust. Oh, by then they were given their ration of the grape, paid in aguardiente at the end of the week. Drank and fought till Sunday, arrested, corralled and auctioned Monday morning.—cheap labor... dirt cheap the Angelino growers would say, and kept it up until the checkerboard was just about complete and, yes, how the money flowed. As eloquent as he was, John Muir said nothing that ought endure as much as, in that very year, Stephen Powers said in his government report: "Never before in history has a people been swept away with such terrible swiftness." Martin Luther King didn't say that. J.F.K didn't say that. Neither did Abraham Lincoln. That was 1877, the same year John Muir entered the valley of San Gabriel where Dr. Conger said to Muir, "Milk and honey and plenty of money."