Jedediah Smith Lunch

Thinking of hosting an event where we eat the lunch Jedediah Smith has at the San Gabriel mission, California in 1826:

At 11 O Clock [am] the Father came and invited us to dinner. We accompanied him to the office adjoining the dining room and after taking a glass of Gin and some bread and cheese we seated ourselves at the table which was furnished with Mutton Beef Chickens Potatoes Beans and Peas cooked in different ways. Wine in abundance made our reverend fathers appeared to me quite merry.

Gin, bread, cheese, mutton, beef, chicken, potatoes, beans, peas, wine in abundance, at eleven in the morning. (In fairness Jed has been up since sunup).

Smith notes that he enjoyed his meals at San Gabriel because it had been a long time since he’d sat at a table (he’d come overland through the Rockies and across the Mojave Desert). His first view of the mission:

Arrived in view of a building of ancient and castle-like appearance.

(from Wikipedia)

At that time what Smith calls “the village of the angels” was a minor outlying place. Smith records that the people of the village of the angels were master horsemen, and he describes their method. Those sensitive to animal suffering may wish to skip:

My guide informed me that the inhabitants of the village and of the vicinity collect whenever they consider the country overstocked and build a large and strong pen with a small entrance and two wings extending from the entrance some distance to the right and left. Then mounting their swiftest horses they scour the country and surrounding large bands they drive them into the enclosure by hundreds. They will there perhaps Larse a few of the handsomest and take them out of the pack. A horse selected in this manner is immediately thrown down and altered blindfolded saddled and haltered (for the Californians always commenc with the halter). The horse is then allowed to get up and a man is mounted. when he is firmly fixed in his seat and the halter in his hand an assistant takes off the blind the several men on horseback with handkerchiefs to frighten and some with whips to whip raise the yell and away they go. The poor horse having been so severely punished and frightened does not think of founcing but dashes off at no slow rate for a trial of his speed. After running until he is exhausted and finding he cannot get rid of his enemies he gives up. He is then kept tied for 2 or 3 days saddled and rode occasionally and if he proves docile he is tied by the neck to a tame horse until he becomes attached to the company and then turned Loose. But if a horse from the moment he is taken from the pen proves refractory they do not trouble themselves with him long but release him from his bondage by thrusting a knife to his heart. Cruel as this fate may seem it is a mercy compared to that of the hundreds left in the pack for they are shut up to die a death most lingering and most horrible, enclosed within a narrow space without the possibility of escape and without a morsel to eat they gradually loose their strength and sink to the ground making at time vain efforts to regain their feet and when at last all powerful hunger has left them but the strength to raise their heads from the dust with which they are soon to mingle: their eyes that are becoming dim with the approach of death may catch a glimpse of green and wide spread pastures and winding streams while they are perishing from want. one by one they die and at length the last and most powerful sinks down among his companions to the plain. No man of feeling can think of such a scene without surprise indignation and pity. Pity for the noblest of animals dying from want in the midst of fertile fields. Indignation and surprise that men are so barbarous and unfeeling. A fact so disgraceful to the Californians was not credited from a single narrator but has since been corroborated.

Perhaps worth considering here that Smith was writing in a tradition of Anglo/Protestant anti-Spanishism. Still. I’m prepared to believe Los Angeles has some history of horse crime to answer for.

The real center of power at this time, where Jedediah is eventually sent to answer to the governor, is San Diego. Smith says San Diego is “much decayed.” In a footnote, editor George R. Brooks says:

Smith was not alone in his opinion that things at San Diego were somewhat rundown. “Of all the places we had visited since our coming to California, excepting San Pedro, which is entirely deserted, the presidio at San Diego was the saddest. It is built on the slope of a barren hill, and has no regular form; it is a collection of houses whose appearance is made still more gloomy by the dark color of the bricks, roughly made, of which they are built.

The fine appearance of [the mission] loses much on nearing it; because the buildings, though well arranged, are low and badly kept up. A digusting slovenliness prevails in the padres’ dwelling.” (Carter, “Duhaut-Cilly,” 218-19).

Smith’s memoir has an interesting backstory, it’s a “found in an attic a hundred years later” kinda tale. My edition was published in 1977. I wonder if Cormac McCarthy had this at hand when writing the San Diego parts of Blood Meridian. I betcha he did.