According to The Golden Book of California: From the Days of the Spanish Explorers to the Present, by Irwin Shapiro, Golden Press, New York, 1961, Father Serra was partially lame, ill, and "not a young man" when he was sent in 1769 to establish missions in Upper California. By 1773, he had established five missions. By the time he died in 1784, there were nine missions along El Camino Real, or the The King's Highway. Until shortly before his death, he had traveled from one to another, limping, leaning on a staff or riding a mule, his health getting worse and worse, but refusing to give up his travels until just weeks before his death. By then he had overseen a mission field in which more than 6,000 Indians had been baptised, and over 5,000 confirmed. He spent the last weeks of his life at the San Carlos Borromeo Mission at Monterey.
Here is Bret Harte's version of one of the Father Serra legends.
THIS IS the tale that the Chronicle
Tells of the wonderful miracle
Wrought by the pious Padre Serro,
The very reverend Junipero.
The heathen stood on his ancient mound,
Looking over the desert bound
Into the distant, hazy South,
Over the dusty and broad champaign,
Where, with many a gaping mouth
And fissure, cracked by the fervid drouth,
For seven months had the wasted plain
Known no moisture of dew or rain.
The wells were empty and choked with sand;
The rivers had perished from the land;
Only the sea-fogs to and fro
Slipped like ghosts of the streams below.
Deep in its bed lay the river’s bones,
Bleaching in pebbles and milk-white stones,
And tracked o’er the desert faint and far,
Its ribs shone bright on each sandy bar.
Thus they stood as the sun went down
Over the foot-hills bare and brown;
Thus they looked to the South, wherefrom
The pale-face medicine-man should come,
Not in anger or in strife,
But to bring—so ran the tale—
The welcome springs of eternal life,
The living waters that should not fail.
Said one, “He will come like Manitou,
Unseen, unheard, in the falling dew.”
Said another, “He will come full soon
Out of the round-faced watery moon.”
And another said, “He is here!” and lo,
Faltering, staggering, feeble and slow,
Out from the desert’s blinding heat
The Padre dropped at the heathen’s feet.
They stood and gazed for a little space
Down on his pallid and careworn face,
And a smile of scorn went round the band
As they touched alternate with foot and hand
This mortal waif, that the outer space
Of dim mysterious sky and sand
Flung with so little of Christian grace
Down on their barren, sterile strand.
Said one to him: “It seems thy God
Is a very pitiful kind of God:
He could not shield thine aching eyes
From the blowing desert sands that rise,
Nor turn aside from thy old gray head
The glittering blade that is brandishèd
By the sun He set in the heavens high;
He could not moisten thy lips when dry;
The desert fire is in thy brain;
Thy limbs are racked with the fever-pain.
If this be the grace He showeth thee
Who art His servant, what may we,
Strange to His ways and His commands,
Seek at His unforgiving hands?”
“Drink but this cup,” said the Padre, straight,
“And thou shalt know whose mercy bore
These aching limbs to your heathen door,
And purged my soul of its gross estate.
Drink in His name, and thou shalt see
The hidden depths of this mystery.
Drink!” and he held the cup. One blow
From the heathen dashed to the ground below
The sacred cup that the Padre bore,
And the thirsty soil drank the precious store
Of sacramental and holy wine,
That emblem and consecrated sign
And blessed symbol of blood divine.
Then, says the legend (and they who doubt
The same as heretics be accurst),
From the dry and feverish soil leaped out
A living fountain; a well-spring burst
Over the dusty and broad champaign,
Over the sandy and sterile plain,
Till the granite ribs and the milk-white stones
That lay in the valley—the scattered bones—
Moved in the river and lived again!
Such was the wonderful miracle
Wrought by the cup of wine that fell
From the hands of the pious Padre Serro,
The very reverend Junipero.
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