Our C aeholic Heritage in Texas
2
the previous volume of this history. Before taking up the interrupted thread of our narrative, it will be well to survey conditions in Texas in 1762. With this as a background the new policies of the viceregal aovernment and the activities of the zealous missionaries during the 0 closing quarter of the eighteenth century will be better understood. The mission system had been founded under numerous handicaps and at the cost of great sacrifices in the early part of the century. It had heroically stood the trials and tribulations of the early years in an untrodden and unconquered wilderness and in the face of unmerited opposition of unsympathetic and selfish officials. In the years that followed, it had grown and developed inspired by human sacrifice and the blood of innocent martyrs, who toiled with undying faith to plant deep the roots of civilization and bring the comforts of religion to the untutored hordes that roamed the vast wilderness. But like other frontier institutions, the mis·sions were to continue until their work was done. Not till then were they to pass on even as the frontier itself. It is this last phase that will form the major portion of the present volume. It would be misleading, as Bolton, the great pioneer historian of Spanish Texas, has so aptly said "to leave the impression that all the Texas missions in this period had the same disastrous career as those on the San Xavier, the Trinity, the San Saba and the Nueces Rivers." 1 Fortunately the industrious and painstaking friars have left us a detailed and illuminating report of the progress, both spiritual and temporal, made by the missions up to the year 1762. An impartial examination of the record of material and spiritual progress attained by the missions offers a striking contrast to the wretched and precarious existence of the civil settlers in Texas. But the success of the missions had not been at the expense of the civil settlements. It was the result of the intelligent and disinterested direction of the mis- sionaries, the paternal care, the burning zeal, and the unselfish labors of that remarkable group of men who took the uncivilized denizen of the wilds, and in order to bring to him the comforts of religion, initiated him into the industrious habits of civilized men, leading the neophytes gently but firmly in their daily tasks and inclining them by slow degrees to sustained and persistent effort. This was, truly, a labor of love and genuine civilization. The realization that the civil settlement of Texas and the establishment of Spain's claim to this vast province were due to the ~ of the missionaries more than to Spanish arms, dawns with 1 Bolton, T,ras in Ike Afiddle Ei;:ltteenilt Cenlur,y, 95.
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