The first Catholic mission of California was begun in 1601 by a band of Franciscan monks; but the real found- er of tiie Church in that state was father Juniper Serra. an Italian Franciscan, who in 1769 established the first mission in San Diego, and in 1776, a few days before the declaration of the independence of the United States (June 27), founded the city of San Francisco. In 1570, father Segura and eight other Jesuit fathers landed in Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, with the son of an Indian chief whom Spanish navigators had brought away with them from that region, and who had re- ceived a good education in Spain. All of them were treacherously murdered at the instigation of this Indian youth. Sixty-four years later, in 1634, two English Jesuits, fathers Andrew White and John Altham, who accompanied Lord Baltimore, resumed the missionary labors among the Maryland Indians, and in 1639 they reported that many tribes had been visited, numerous converts made, and four permanent stations established.
The first Catholic chapel in New England was reared by French missionaries on Neutral Island, in Schoodic Kiver, Maine, in 1609, eleven years before the founda- tion of Plymouth. In 1612. a new mission was estab- lished on Mount Desert Island, but it was soon after destroyed by the English. In 1646, father Drnillcttes, a Jesuit, who has been called by t'atholic historians the apostle of INIaine, established a mission on the Upper Kennebec, which gradually succeeded in converting the entire tribe of the Abnakis. The cession of Canada by the French to the English in 1763 interrupted for some time the Catholic mission among the Abnakis; but after the Ifevolutionary War it was reorganized, and has since then continued to exist until the present day.
The first Catholic missionary among tlie Indians in the State of New York was father Jogues, a Canadian Jes- uit. He attempted in 1646 to found a mission among the Mohawks, and was massacred in the village of Caughnawaga (now Schenectady). The first Catholic church was established in November, 1655, among the Onondagas, on the site of the present city of Syracuse ; but three years later the missionaries barely escaped with their lives from a ])lot to destroy thein. The close of a bloody war l)etween France and the Five Nations ill 16t)6 led to the re-establishinent of the old missions, and to the foundation of new ones among the Ononda- gas, Senecas, Cayugas, Oneidas, and Jlohawks. In 1668
the cross, as a Catholic historian says, " towered over every village from the Hudson to Lake Erie," and the Mohawks especially "became firmly attached to the Church;" but the recognition by France of the English claims to the State of New York, in the treaty of Utrecht, 1713, was the death-knell of the Catholic mis- sions among the Indians of New York. Among the In- dians of Vermont mass was said for the first time in 1615.
The regions along the Great Lakes, in the present states of Michigan and Wisconsin, were first visited by Canadian Jesuits in 1641. The field proved ungrate- ful, and the missions terminated when the FVench gov- ernment suppressed the houses of Jesuits and confis- cated their property. All along the banks of the Mis- sissippi, the shores of which were discovered by INIar- qnette in 1673, the Jesuits preached and established missions. Among the Indians converted by them was Chicago, the chief of the Illinois. With the suppres- sion of the Order of the Jesuits and the increase of English power, the Catholic missions among the Indians generally disappeared from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gtdf of Mexico. After the establishment of the in- dependence of the United States, some of the Indian missions were gradually re-established, but their prog- ress was slow. In 1833 the bishops of the United States assembled at the Council of Baltimore confided the Indian missions in the United States to the Jesuits. Catholic historians complain (Murray, Popular Hist. etc., p. 343) that "the Catholics of tlie United States have shown little interest in the Indian missions, and done little to cheer and support the missionaries." The latter had to look to Europe for the necessary means. Tlie most famous among the Jesuit missionaries of the 19th century was father De Smet, a Belgian, who is com- pared by the historians of his Church to F'rancis Xavier, and is said " to have opened heaven to over 100,000 In- dians."
2. The proper history of the Catholic Church in the English colonies begins with the immigration of Leon- ard Calvert, second son of Lord Baltimore, and about 200 English and Irish Catholics, into Maryland. Lord Baltimore, who had left the Anglican communion for the Church of IJome, had received (June 20, 1632) from king Charles I the grant of a large tract of land lying north of the Potomac, for founding a Catholic colony in the New World as a refuge from persecution. The charter drawn up by him guaranteed liberty of worship to all Christians, and secured a voice to all freemen in making the laws. He died soon after the charter had received the royal sanction, and his eldest son, Cecil Calvert, second Lord Baltimore, commissioned his broth- er Leonard Calvert to carry out their father's design, and apjiointed him governor of the new colony. Leonard Calvert, with his colonists, landed in 1634, and in the same year the city of St. Mary was founded. The colonists were accompanied by two Jesuits, who were soon followed by several more Jesuits and Capuchins. A civil contest between the new colonists, on the one hand, and Captain William Clayborne, who with a party of men from Virginia had settled, in 1631, on Kent Island, Chesapeake Bay, and a company of Puritans who had settled in JNIaryland in 1642. on the other hand, resulted in favor of Clayborne and the Puritans, who made themselves complete masters of the province. There- upon the Catholics were in 1644 deprived of equal rights, but these were restored in 1646. In 1649 the General Assembly of Maryland, composed of eleven Catholics and three Protestants, passed the Toleration Act, which enacted that no person believing in Jesus Christ should be molested in the free exercise of his re- ligion. 'J'ho Toleration Act was repealed in 1654 by an assembly in which the Puritans had a majority, and which denied the protection of the law to the Catho- lics; but in 1660 the new king, Charles II, restored Lord Baltimore to his rights as proprietor, and thus the Cath- olics received back their rights. In 1692, after the ex- pidsion of James II, an Anglican governor was sent to