The church-tower fell in 1840 as the result of an earthquake and ten years later a second shock demolished the walls of the building. Being within the limits of the town, the debris was not allowed to remain, as in lonely Soledad or La Purisima, and the site was cleared for other purposes. And this reminds us that we owe the existence of many of the mission ruins to their isolation; wherever they stood within the limits of a town of any size they either have been restored or have disappeared. Of the former we may cite Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo and of the latter, Santa Cruz and San Rafael.
The mission at Santa Cruz was another of Padre Lasuen's projects—founded under his direction in 1790. It never prospered greatly, its highest population being five hundred and twenty-three in 1796. From that time it declined rapidly and at the secularization in 1835 the Indians had almost disappeared. The property at that time was valued at less than fifty thousand dollars and, as we have seen, the church was destroyed five years later. Santa Cruz would doubtless rejoice to have her historic mission among her widely heralded attractions to-day, but it is gone past any rehabilitation.
As a seaside resort, Santa Cruz is one of the most popular in California; during the season no fewer than thirty thousand visitors flock to its hotels and beaches. It is the nearest considerable resort to San Francisco and a large proportion of its guests come from that city. The climate, according to the literature issued by the Board of Trade, compares favorably the year round with Santa Barbara or Long Beach. It claims a great variety of "amusement features, including a palatial casino and a three-hundred-room, fire-proof hotel." It seems a pleasant place, more substantial and homelike than the average resort town.
Retracing our way for four or five miles over the road by which we entered the town, we left it at the little wayside village of Soquel, taking an abrupt turn northward and following a wooded canyon. The road ascends the western slope of the Santa Cruz Mountains, winding through a forest of stately redwoods intermingled with many other varieties of trees. These crowd up to the road, overarching it in places—as beautiful a scene of virgin wildwood as we had yet come upon; through occasional openings we had far-reaching views down wooded canyons already haunted by the thin blue shadows of the declining day. The grade is moderately stiff, ranging up to twelve per cent, and the road was deep with dust, making an exceedingly heavy pull, and more than once we paused to cool the steaming motor. An almost continuous climb of a dozen miles brought us to the summit of the range, and coming to a break in the forest a glorious view greeted our vision—a vista of green hills sloping away to the sunset waters of Monterey Bay, with dim outlines of mountain ranges beyond. A faint blue haze hung over the nearer hills, changing to lucent amethyst above the bay and deepening to violet upon the distant mountains. An occasional fruit farm or ranch-house reminded us that we were within the bounds of civilization; and the Summit School, near by, that there must be youngsters to educate, even in this wild region, though there was little to indicate where they came from.