Title: How Did the California Missions End? | The California Frontier Project
Headings: 

Content: In the view of the missionaries, though, 10 years was not enough time for this to be accomplished. They believed that Native Americans in California needed more time be educated and adapt to the new lifestyle. So, when the Spanish government pressed to have the missions converted into towns, the missionaries resisted, saying that the Indians in their communities were not ready for the change. Who started secularization? When Mexico became independent from Spain in the 1820s, the newly formed Mexican government decided that it was time to secularize the missions. They passed laws ordering California officials to turn them over to the Indians to be converted into towns. Soon the California territorial government decided that the missions would be overseen by an administrator, who would be in charge of distributing the land and property to the Indians. First the administrator would do an inventory of the property of the mission together with the priest and decide on the value of the property. He would then decide how much property both land and goods would be distributed to the Indians, and how much was to be considered surplus. Often much of the land and property wound up in the hands of the administrators themselves.