Religion as set forth by an exotic clergy became an object of indifference when it was not an object of hatred.

In 1845 the Bishop of Durango, visiting the province, found an Indian population of twenty thousand in a total of eighty thousand.

The clergy numbered only seventeen priests.

Three years later the province became part of the United States.
To complete the story of the planting of Spanish Christianity within the present boundaries of the United States, it is necessary to depart from the merely chronological order of American church history; for, although the immense adventurousness of Spanish explorers by sea and land had, early in the sixteenth century, made known to Christendom the coasts and harbors of the Californias, the beginnings of settlement and missions on that Pacific coast date from so late as 1769.

At this period the method of such work had become settled into a system.