The organization was threefold, including (1) the garrison town, (2) the Spanish settlement, and (3) the mission, at which the Indian neophytes were gathered under the tutelage and strict government of the convent of Franciscan friars.
The whole system was sustained by the authority and the lavish subventions of the Spanish government, and herein lay its strength and, as the event speedily proved, its fatal weakness.

The inert and feeble character of the Indians of that region offered little excuse for the atrocious cruelties that had elsewhere marked the Spanish occupation; but the paternal kindness of the stronger race was hardly less hurtful.
The natives were easily persuaded to become by thousands the dependents and servants of the missions.

Conversion went on apace.

At the end of sixty-five years from the founding of the missions their twenty-one stations numbered a Christian native population of more than thirty thousand, and were possessed of magnificent wealth, agricultural and commercial.

In that very year (1834) the long-intended purpose of the government to release the Indians from their almost slavery under the missions, and to distribute the vast property in severalty, was put in force.