Earthquakes have claimed at least 3,485 lives in California since Spanish colonial forces began keeping records. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake killed over 3,000 people when accounting for Chinese immigrants purposely excluded from the death toll. It’s a saying among the geology community: “Earthquakes don’t kill people; buildings do.” For almost 250 years, virtually each of California’s earthquake casualties occurred in and around buildings. The 1906 event might have reaped the most souls, but the state’s first earthquake victims perished nearly a century before.
On shaky ground
The evolution of personal earthquake safety parallels that of seismic soundness in architecture. In mid- to late-19th century California for instance, as adobe buildings became commonplace, so did knowledge of their seismic vulnerability. Adobe cracks and crumbles under enough pressure and agitation. The safest spot in an adobe home, the area with the most structural integrity, was a wooden doorframe. Building codes and materials have evolved, yet the doorway tradition, now outdated, persists.
Adobe and brick rank among the worst materials one could choose when building in Earthquake Country. Stone is also a terrible choice, as its rigidity generally works against structural stability. Spread throughout California’s 21 Spanish missions are 68 church buildings; 44 of adobe and 21 of the “wattle-and-daub” variety. Only three churches were built with stone.
Three stone churches, all in Southern California, were located at Missions San Gabriel, Santa Barbara, and San Juan Capistrano. California, specifically the land on which its boundaries were crudely drawn, has always been seismically active. The 1769 Portolà expedition, a Franciscan colonial probe, felt “a severe shock of earthquake” near the Santa Ana River. Padre Crespi named it “El Río de los Temblores”—river of the earthquakes—a still-accepted alternate moniker.
An earthquake in 1800 was bad enough to crack walls at San Gabriel and San Juan Capistrano. No injuries were associated with this quake, but it surely proved these tremors were capable of more than jump scares. The 1800 shaker delayed completion of the Great Stone Church at San Juan Capistrano, begun three years earlier, to 1806. California mission buildings were originally constructed through Indigenous slave labor, and none were earthquake-resistant.
The 1812 San Juan Capistrano Earthquake
Tuesday, December 8, 1812. At Mission San Juan Capistrano, Alta California, morning mass had just begun. Then at approximately 7 AM, a thunderous roar emanated from the ground, followed by jarring, whiplash movements of the earth. The intricate, unreinforced stonework of the Great Church crumbled, bringing metric tons of stone down on people’s heads. When the dust settled, forty Native Californians lay dead beneath the devastated icon of Spanish imperialism.
“39 Indians…were buried in the two days after the earthquake (another body of a married woman was found two months later in the rubble). The victims were predominantly women: 25 married, four widows, two single. The male dead included four married, three single, and one child. Because there were many of them and ‘boards were scarce,’ they were not buried in wooden coffins but wrapped instead in blankets or mats. Those ‘who had lost their life on that sad occasion,’ including the corpse discovered later in February, were interred together in the graveyard next to the ruined church.”
The earthquake, estimated M7.5, felled the Great Stone Church and brought damage to Missions San Gabriel Arcángel and San Fernando. None of the clergy perished. As is true in any earthquake, there was no fair warning. It’s possible a series of quakes said to have struck in early 1812 were foreshocks to this event. This next quote is attributed to May of that year. “Southern California was subject to nearly continuous earthquake shocks for four and one-half months. Four days seldom elapsed without at least one shock…inhabitants abandoned their homes and lived out of doors.” (City Museum of San Francisco)
Who California’s first earthquake victims were
“Inequity exists and merits attention in the case of Capistrano: more Indians died, more women died, and the casualties extended far beyond the bodies in the Great Stone Church. What accounted for these disparities in mortality? The standard physical layout of the Catholic church and conventional, hierarchical performance of mass skewed the situation. The mission staff officiating at the service stood at the front of the church and had access to different doorways. Father-President Señan reported, ‘The celebrant who happened to be at the Offertory of the Mass, saved himself through the door of the vestry.’ Back in the nave of the church, the Indian parishioners ran to the closest door to them, on the left side of the church; this is where the majority of the bodies were found. The large door was apparently damaged in the first shock and they were unable to get it open. A priest at the altar reportedly called to them to come up and exit through the sacristy door, but the second shock brought the vaulted roof down on them before they could do so.”
California’s first earthquake victims were already victims of another unstoppable force, Spanish colonialism. Missionaries made Indigenous converts observe a strict schedule involving manual labor, agriculture, and manufacturing, sunup-to-sundown with church services in between. Forty Acjachemen people gathered for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception that morning and did not leave alive. They died in the rubble of a church they were forced to construct, worshipping a God that was not theirs. A conservative estimate puts the total number of Indigenous bodies interred at Mission San Juan Capistrano at roughly 3,400.
San Juan Capistrano, like the 20 other California missions, is a mass gravesite-turned-museum. The dead belong to the Acjachemen, Payómkawichum, and Tongva tribes, but each these tribes has a real and active presence today. Of those local tribes, only the Payómkawichum (Spanish: Luiseño) are federally recognized, or considered legitimate by the United States government. The Tongva (Gabrieleño) and Acjachemen (Juaneño) are no less legitimate for lack of federal recognition. At the very least, the federal recognition process is a flaccid continuation of a failed extermination. Never rely on recognition status to discern the authenticity of an Indigenous tribe, as sovereignty is not a US-government blessing.
In another timeline, the Spanish invasion of the Americas never happened, leaving Native people to their rightful peace. The planet, living organism that it is, continues to give as it takes. Once in a while a flood strikes, wildfires burn, the ground shakes. The gently-sloping tule reed huts of the Payómkawichum and Acjachemen bristle at the tremors but otherwise respond uneventfully. If a fire or flood threatens the village, smoke or storm would warn people to flee. A new home (kíicha) required only a few days’ construction. It would not be disingenuous to say that California’s first earthquake victims, its Indigenous inhabitants, were murdered by colonialism’s crushing weight.
