Life in New Spain - the Missions of San Antonio

"Imagine the feelings of the Indians who had never seen a building beyond their temporary wikiup - coming into the compound at dusk to see the church building shining in the afternoon sun," says Ranger Dava D. McGehee, Managing Park Ranger at Mission San Jose. The San Jose Mission, the “Queen of San Antonio Missions,” and the center of the Historical Park contains the most extensive displays and restored buildings that allow the visitor to enter the 18th century.

For tens of thousands of years the native Indians had been hunter-gatherers living simply in small bands, but "comfortable" according to McGahee. At just the time that the Spanish priests arrived in the area, the Indians were undergoing severe pressures. They were being devastated by a prolonged drought, news diseases, which were unwittingly included in the blankets that they had traded from the Europeans, and the increasingly brutal raids of the warlike Apache and Cheyenne, who used horses descended from those introduced by the Spaniards. The protection of the priests and the soldiers accompanying them, and their new God was very appealing to these people seeming abandoned by their traditional gods. "They couldn't keep their old life way," explains Ranger McGehee, “but they survived and are part of the population of San Antonio today.”

Each family group of Indians was given two rooms built into the surrounding wall of the mission compound with individual bake ovens in the mission courtyard. Workshops for blacksmithing, spinning, dyeing (the Indians knew that the body fluids of the cochineal bug provides a unique vermilion dye), weaving of cotton and wool, and making pottery, all filled the mission compound. Mission San Jose, the most successful of the missions in Texas, had a granary and the oldest grist mill in Texas with a horizontal wheel which is being reconstructed and is scheduled to be opened to the public in January 2001.

The Franciscans left in 1824; the missions were secularized with a local preacher and the surrounding lands were partitioned out to the Indians. Many of the stones making up the walls of the mission compound were used to make the homes of the Indians on their land.

The Mission San Jose (1739), one of four missions in the San Antonio area, is the headquarters of the National Park Services’ San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. Four Spanish frontier

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