Missions played a critical role in the early history of California. They served as vehicles for introducing Christianity to the Indians in the region. This research focuses on one of the missions. San Buenaventura Mission is cited as the Mother Church of Christianity in Ventura County.
The region where the mission is found was described by Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo in 1542 as "a beautiful valley in which there is much maize and food, with high sierras and rugged land surrounding the valley" (Weber xi). The Mission and its environs were given county status in 1872 as an autonomous district of 1,878 square miles (Weber xi). The Mission is one of the numerous missions making up an important religious system in the California region during the eighteenth century and beyond as the area came under Spanish conquest, Spanish rule, and eventually liberation from Spain:
The entire history of human affairs relates no adventure of greater ambition and deals with no task more utterly hopeless than the noble effort of the Franciscan padres of California to raise a pagan Indian race to the white man's standard of living. To add to its unique distinction, the whole grandiose undertaking from beginning to end spanned merely the period of one normal lifetime (Berger 3).
The period of Spanish rule covered 53 years beginning with settlement and extending to Mexican independence in 1822:
The short Spanish era of fifty-three years bequeathed to modern Californians an abundant heritage out of all proportion to its brevity. For California today is still Spanish (Berger 3).
The Franciscan missions of California are part of that heritage.
Inspector-General Don Joseph de Galvez wrote to Father Junipero Serra on September 15, 1768 that the intermediate mission between San Diego and San Carlos would be called San Buenaventura. Galvez was then planning the conquest of Upper California and invariably spoke of San Buenaventura as his m...