4.5—The French Colonies & the Missions (6 min video)

Transcript

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Well, for this last lesson of this week, we’re going to take a look today at some of the bright lights in these first types of colonies before we look at the settlement colonies next week.

And the bright lights really were the missions of the French and the missions of the Spanish. It’s important to understand this. We often think of the first Thanksgiving being the Thanksgiving of the pilgrims, and there’s a certain reason why we of course look to that one as the chief Thanksgiving, but there were actually numerous thanksgivings done by the French and by the Spanish under their Christian influences centuries prior to the pilgrims.

And so it’s curious to keep that in mind because you have to look at their faith, albeit sometimes sporadically actually applied to how they lived over here, but that explains to us some of the differences with them.

Now, with the French, the first character I’ll introduce to you, a character you might be familiar with, is Father Marquette. And Father Marquette founded missions at places like Sault Ste. Marie, which is up there, actually straddles Canada and Michigan. And he also, along with his fellow traveler, Juliet, was able to travel and set up a trading post, or essentially a mission post, at places like Chicago.

But the French missionaries who traveled deep in the wilderness and set up the foundations of churches actually established what would become some of the oldest buildings in the middle of our country.

But the French did these incredible missions. They weren’t the only ones. The Spanish also. The Spanish found missions all up and down the West Coast at places like San Francisco, San Diego, San Jose, all the way down to Chile and to Argentina, down in South America.

And these various coastal missions, or missions that sometimes went a little bit inland, always had a certain model. They always had essentially a quadrangle, which was kind of like a square type structure that was made up of buildings all the way around, usually a central garden.

And those buildings, they might have a place for soldiers to stay, to just protect the mission. But primarily, those were places for the monks who ran those missions to stay. They were places for the poor in the area to come in and stay. They were places for libraries, places to teach music, and things of that nature. In fact, there’s a great old movie called “The Mission” which shows how the Spanish missionaries often taught classical music to the natives so they could actually sing various forms of worship. And so this kind of vision didn’t just come out of nowhere. It took an incredible amount of guts, an incredible amount of stamina on the part of these French and Spanish missionaries to do in the first place.

What’s incredible too is that the Spanish missionaries were the first ones to bring in the printing press. They were the first ones to actually bring in something that could reproduce things like Bibles, reproduce things like hymnals in the New World, and they actually taught the natives how to read.

It’s interesting too. Not only did they plant gardens and establish these libraries and establish this printing press, they also established farms and orchards and they taught the natives how to farm and how to manage these orchards.

In fact, the Spanish vineyards that were founded by these missions of their grapes all up and down Chile are some of the oldest vineyards we have in the world.

And it’s interesting, what happened years ago was several of the grapes throughout Europe’s old vineyards were affected by a disease. And so they needed some new root that hadn’t been affected by these, and so they had to turn to Chile and these old Spanish mission vineyards to actually get those grapes or get those roots so they could somehow repair their vineyards, which they did.

But those Spanish wines that came out of those vineyards in Chile, those are some of the oldest in the entire world. Now there’s a few more points we need to actually make about the missions. And that is the fact that the missions ultimately didn’t last. And what’s curious about that is we have to ask the question, okay, why is it that the missions finally did not last? They had these thanksgivings, they had the printing press, they had these brilliant orchards and vineyards and gardens and so forth. And the answer is fairly simple. The answer is that these missions did not actually have a vision of family. They failed because they didn’t really have a way to reproduce themselves. They weren’t ultimately successful with evangelism, and they weren’t ultimately successful with reproducing through the whole notion of the family or of having children, being fruitful and multiplying. So as a result, even though the Spanish missions have left their mark and are still a brilliant thing to see, you should actually go see the Spanish missions if you ever travel out to California, or you can see the Alamo, for example, down in San Antonio.

But even though they were a brilliant light, they ultimately were not the places that left their mark on American history. The types of colonies that left their mark on American history were not these. They weren’t exploitation colonies. They weren’t trading posts and they weren’t strategic colonies. They were those parish settlements which we talked about at the beginning of this week. They were those places that were founded based upon ideas of religion, based upon ideas of freedom of press, freedom of worship, freedom of thought, freedom of speech.

They were those places based upon the whole idea of home and family. They were those places that had a vision for decades or centuries beyond themselves. We’ll take a look at those colonies next week.