In the Footprints of the Padres — Story, Setting & Ideas

Lyricism and Labor in the Farallone Diary

The most striking section of the excerpts is a diary from May 1855, recording an egg-hunting expedition on the Farallone Islands. Here, Stoddard’s voice becomes immediate and physical: men draw lots for bunks, build suspension bridges over chasms where waves “leap wildly into the air,” and chase rabbits with clubs. The tone is matter-of-fact about violence—“it is cruel sport, but this is our only hope of fresh meat”—and laced with wry humor. Crossing a gap they call “the Jordan,” he quips, “If the real Jordan is as hard to cross, heaven help us.” This section contradicts any expectation of a purely reverent mission history; it is a survival narrative, complete with fog, homesickness, and card games. The catalog subject “California—Description and travel” encompasses this, but the gritty detail—washing egg-stained clothes in cold water—is far from picturesque.

The Mission as Memory and Ruin

Phillips’s introduction frames the book as a lament for a lost California, symbolized by a “desolated hearth” in an adobe ruin. Stoddard’s own prose, in the excerpt titled “Life at the Mission of Dolores, 1855,” likely continues this elegiac mode. The catalog subject “San Francisco (Calif.)” points to urban landmarks, but Phillips notes that the 1906 fire obliterated many sites Stoddard described. The book thus becomes a double record: of missions as living institutions and as ruins already vanishing. Stoddard’s gift for “word-painting” (Phillips’s term) suggests he renders these spaces with sensory detail—light, foliage, crumbling adobe—rather than dry historical cataloging. Readers should expect a tension between the author’s affection for the “old California” and the awareness that he is documenting something already passing away.

Humor and the Unromantic Frontier

Phillips identifies Stoddard’s “mustang humor” as a key trait, and the Farallone diary bears this out. The egg-hunters are not heroic explorers but pragmatic laborers: they “rob” nests, complain about scarce eggs, and note that mariners give the islands “a wide berth.” Stoddard undercuts his own romanticism by wondering how Robinson Crusoe would fare on such a barren rock, then concluding “we are beginning to lose faith in the delightful romances of our youth.” This self-deprecating note appears alongside lyrical descriptions, creating a layered narrative. The catalog does not flag humor as a theme, yet it is central to the excerpts. Readers should watch for sudden shifts from poetic description to wry observation—a technique that prevents the book from becoming merely sentimental.

Structure and Voice Across the Text

The excerpts show at least two distinct modes: the polished, descriptive prose of the mission chapters and the raw, dated diary entries of the Farallone section. Stoddard does not smooth these into a uniform voice; the diary is full of abbreviations (“p.m.”), present-tense immediacy, and colloquial phrasing (“pretty well fagged”). This structural variety suggests the book is a collection of essays or sketches rather than a continuous narrative. The catalog’s single subject heading “California—Description and travel” masks this generic hybridity. Readers should approach each chapter as a self-contained piece, with its own tone and temporal frame—some retrospective, some immediate. The introduction by Phillips, written after Stoddard’s death, adds another layer of memorialization, urging us to read the book as both travelogue and eulogy.

Stoddard’s In the Footprints of the Padres rewards readers who attend to its shifts in register—from the honeyed to the blunt, the nostalgic to the comic. The catalog subjects understate the book’s range; it is as much a record of frontier labor as of mission piety. Treat each chapter as an independent sketch, and watch for the author’s ironic asides. The 1912 edition, with Phillips’s introduction, frames the work as a memorial, but the excerpts suggest Stoddard himself was already aware of the fragility of the world he described.

Reading Stoddard’s mission ruins, I kept feeling that ache of distance—the way his words paint something lovely while the work itself was dirty and real. That same ache came back with Ireland, Historic and Picturesque — A Reader’s Guide, where every green slope hides a harder story. It felt less like a guide than a quiet hand on my shoulder, nodding at what we both knew.