1769: Portolá Expedition

Bartólome (no surname) was a Cochimí neophyte born in what is now Ensenada Municipality in Baja California about 1750. He was baptized at Mission Santa María de los Ángeles* about 1767 and accompanied Fr. Junípero Serra to Alta California in 1769. Bartólome died at Mission San Diego de Alcalá in February 1770 and was buried there by Fr. Serra.

*Established by Jesuit missionary Fr. Victoriano Arnés in May 1767 at a spring called Cabujakaamung by the Cochimí (29°43′54″N, 114°32′50″W). The Jesuits had been at Mission Santa María for only 7 months before the king of Spain expelled them from New Spain and sent them all back to Europe. In April 1768 the Franciscans arrived on the California peninsula to assume control of the mission system started 71 years earlier by the Jesuits. Mission Santa María was abandoned in 1774 and its neophytes moved to Mission San Fernando de Velicatá, established by the Franciscans in 1769 as part of Spain's expansion into Alta California.

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Translation of Serra's burial entry:

"In the month of February 1770, I buried, according to the rites of the Church, Juan Evangelista Benno, an Indian youth about eighteen years of age. He was the son of Carlos Tapia [no surname] of the Mission of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Lower California, whence, with the blessing of his parents, he set out with me as my servant. He died after receiving the Sacraments of Penance, Holy Eucharist, and Extreme Unction. I buried him clothed in our habit. The corpse was present at the Requiem High Mass which was celebrated with as much solemnity as possible.

"At the same time, a few days intervening, two Indian neophytes departed this life. They were recent converts of the newly founded mission in Low California, that is to say of Mission Santa Maria. One of them, single and about twenty years of age, was called Bartolome; the other, apparently his cousin and Mateo by name, was somewhat older and married. I heard their confessions as well as I could; it was attended with some difficulty, however, owing to their meagre knowledge and to the lack of interpreters. It seems to me that Extreme Unction was administered to them. That all this may be in evidence and that this book be continued, beginning anew from the first neophytes that died and received burial, I so certify and subscribe, on October 25, 1776. Fr. Junipero Serra."

(Fr. Zephyrin Engelhardt, O.F.M. San Diego Mission. Published at San Francisco by The James H. Barry Company, 1920; pg. 88)