THE DISMAL SCIENCE DEPT./
THE THEATRE OF CONVERSION

EVERY FRENCHMAN HAS ONE

Before 1786 there were no grain mills in California. But in that year a probably excellent (French?) hand-mill was offered as a gift to the Indian women at Mission San Carlos in Carmel. The donor was a (French!) naval commander and philosophe, Fleuriot Vicomte de Langle, captain of L’Astrolabe, second ship of the La Perouse Expedition. The explorers had paid an unexpected anchor-call in Monterey Bay, on the voyage royale of Pacific exploration. Anyway, de Langle just happened to have a hand-mill on hand (French!).

Fr. Fermin Lasuen, the second Father President of the Missions invited the French officer party to tour Mission San Carlos of Carmel, and received them formally, like a prelate-grandee. The French were impressed that Spain had done anything in California at all; but La Perouse and his crew were dismayed by the sullen, demoralized Indians; and by the fires-of-hell theology there were being indoctrinated with, and also the unproductive authoritarian agriculture of the place.

Capt. de Langle was especially galled that the Indian girl neophytes were working all day rolling grain — probably wheat and barley — with metates, Mexico-style, to make flour. Franciscans at the different Missions, of course, had different attitudes to labor saving devices; but Carmel was Fr. Serra’s and Fr. Lasuen’s own HQ, so the regime — work is holy — was spartan here. The French saw it as backwards. In Europe, America, Chile, even in Mexico, farmers and landlords were experimenting with scientific agriculture and terraforming for maximum yields and breeding new varieties and draining and enclosing lands, etc. The whole world had been boosting outputs and specializing and going over to cash-cropping for over a century. As the French noticed, this Georgic spirit was thin in Franciscan California, much to the frustration of the civil authorities at Monterey. Developing modern agriculture was just not a Franciscan goal — yet. Anyway the Indians had little incentive to work efficiently at their goal of becoming peasants, with their only reward, it seemed, ever more of the curse of Adam’s toil:

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Besides the socially-ritualized and religious call to the hunt, Indians longed for the fantastic variety of carb and protein sources in costal sage scrub, which evolved right along with the Indians. Beautiful buckwheat, sage seeds by the basketful — delicious, nutritious foods. Here’s some Indian staples I found just on a random half-hour hike recently around the Rio Hondo near the old San Gabriel Mission site. I wasn’t even looking for food, but, on reView, practically every plant I found beautiful, was also edible:

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But the scrub, and the scrub’s ability to nurture non-Mission Indians, soon collapsed under the weight of millions of hooves, ox-tillage, soil-depleting crops, and the lightning-fast spread of the odious Spanish Pasture Mix of invasive fodder weeds.
In just a few generations, Indians outside the Missions were facing long odds to keep independent and to keep their food-ways alive in a transforming landscape. And inside the Missions, they faced disease and the sullen demoralization of a work regime set to the clang of bells.

Capt. de Langle’s mill may have been just cluttering up the Astrolabe’s hold, but for California, it was a gentle push into the future. The Indians and Franciscans alike expressed wonder to see it work, as it clearly dawned upon them that with this mill, their community suddenly could — and did, henceforth — multiply their flour output many times over. It freed the girls for a whole new roster of back-breaking jobs! It may also have been at that moment, that the noted California preference for wheat over maize tortillas was determined.

capital – wealth from the past that has been stored up and carefully maintained in its value, specifically for the purpose of seeding it to create more wealth in the future.

— The VVV Dictionary of Organic Economics

A Franciscan of the College of San Fernando, Lasuen despised the French and resisted French thinking at all levels (science, materialism, atheism, nihilism, existentialism). But the French hand-mill embarrassed, in a sense, the Father President of the Missions into planning more economic production and storing food surpluses and promoting specialization of labor. The Missions simply had to find ways to put more tortillas on more mesas all across California.

EPILOGUE: It is sad, but sensational, to report that after the La Perouse Expedition sailed on from California, the ships visited the island of Samoa in December of 1787, and poor Vicomte de Langle was killed by the hostile natives. He remains genuinely mourned and honored as a hero in France. If the Samoans played their cards right, they might’ve gotten a hand-mill off the Vicomte. Maybe a nice omelet pan.

FATHER ZALVIDEA BUILDS HIS DREAM MILL

There were exceptions to the rule of low Mission productivity. After the French diplomatically sniffed at the medieval conditions of Carmel, Gov. Fages defended California to the Viceroy in Mexico City, by singling out Mission San Gabriel for commendation:

In 1806 Fr. Jose Maria Zalvidea was appointed to San Gabriel. A Basque from old Bilbao (Bilbao…Bilbao) Fr. Zalvidea was especially entrepreneurial. He wanted results and expected growth and demanded out-of-the-box thinking and not a buncha yes men and shirkers. Reportedly he was a visionary, talented himself and quick to spot talent, but a prick and a martinet who freely used corporal punishment as a team-building exercise. Between 1810 and 1815, Zalvidea deployed resources towards an enormous capital investment — significant neophyte labor and training-by-doing, much Franciscan research and design-by-doing, fees for the master craftsmen and artisans Lasuen had been luring to settle in the province, and community-wide hydro-planning. He would build them a permanent labor-saving tool, a modern water-powered grist mill, that would magnify the Mission’s output (and God, of course).

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P.S., it worked, but it had issues. George Wharton James wrote that the mill was sited too low on the hill, making the building damp; and that Zalvidea’s unusual design somehow allowed the water from the wheel to sprinkle up into the flour. This meant a troop of girls had to tote the flour out in bowls to dry in the sun. But Indian labor was cheap and flour was dear, even if hand-batch-dried. Production increased until the inevitable unexpected California flood damaged the apparatus. Milling there was abandoned by 1818, but the idea was a success. Zalvidea was already shaping plans for a new mill, this time in the Mission yard.

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EPILOGUE: The Old Mill survived abandonment, squatters, renovations. I was expecting to find a pile of adobes overgrown with weeds; I had no idea it had been fitted out as the clubhouse of Henry Huntington’s golf course, or that later in the 20s Mrs. Brehm, a Huntington heiress, renovated it as a stylish residence, then, just rented it out for 50 years. Ordinary folks lived here into the 1970s. Families. As renters! Sigh.
FUN FACT: The millstones were discovered lying around the grounds of the Huntington Gardens by none other than George S. Patton. He apparently grew up here, and as a boy, recalled seeing stones like these used in the neighborhood as mounting blocks. Realizing what they must be, he recovered them to the mill site. So update your Rolodex to add “historic sites archaeologist” and “California vernacular architecture expert” to Gen. Patton’s already densely-packed card. Meanwhile, enjoy our Sunset Magazine treatment of El Molino Viejo:

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NEXT PART: Fr. Zalvidea finally builds his dream mill, by employing cunning Yankee know-how. But soon that cunning Yankee brings on some big-money competition to challenge the Mission’s market corner on wheat.