The beginning of the real incursion into the Coast Miwok culture, which finally led to its complete demise, came dressed in woolen robes, toting crucifixes and bibles, and motivated by lofty intentions.  These were the mission-building Spanish padres who were accompanied by Spanish soldiers.  On September 17, 1775 the Yerba Buena Presidio and Mission Dolores were established in what is now called San Francisco.  Timber from the great redwood forests of Mt. Tamalpais was used for the construction.  The Spanish military took possession of that part of Marin now known as Corte Madera, which means cut wood, for its timber supplies.
    At about the same time as the establishment of the mission and presidio in San Francisco, a group of Spaniards traveled north to Marin on an expedition of discovery and to survey and chart the San Francisco Bay harbor.  Led by Lt. Bodega, they came upon a Coast Miwok village called Olompali, located in what is now northern Novato.  The natives were said to have treated them kindly and in return for their hospitality, the Spaniards showed them how to make adobe bricks and build an adobe house.  The Olompali hoipu or headman, Camilo Ynitia’s father, was said to have constructed, with the assistance of these new Spanish friends, an adobe building, (California Historical Landmarks p.41) 16’ by 20’  with walls eight feet high and three feet thick.  The thatched roof was made of tule reeds from the nearby salt marsh.  This one room structure, with a hole in the roof for a chimney, was the first European building north of the San Francisco Bay.  The year was 1776.  “This pioneer dwelling is remembered by many of the older American travelers on the Petaluma road, and abutted a more recent, though yet ancient, adobe erection, occupied by Dr. Burdell.” (Marin County Journal, 1887, Illus. Ed., p. III)

    The Mission San Rafael the Archangel buildings were the second structures erected by the invading Europeans in Marin County.  The year was 1817 and Mission San Rafael was 20th in the procession of 21 Spanish missions begun by Father Junipero Serra almost half a century before.  The mission at San Rafael was planned as a hospital, asistencia, for the sick Indians from Mission Dolores in San Francisco.  Skilled Indians were brought in from other missions in 1818 to help construct the new asistencia.  They built an L-shaped configuration of monastery, storehouse, and hospital of adobe brick manufactured on the spot and a tile roof. 
    By the end of 1818, the Indians in residence at the mission numbered 386.   Father Gil and his neophytes (as the Indians converts were called) planted much of what is now downtown San Rafael in fruit trees, beans, corn, and grapes.  Spanish longhorn cattle, horses, sheep and hogs roamed the surrounding hillsides.  In 1819 Father Gil was succeeded by the energetic Father Amoros who turned the asistencia into a thriving community.  The mission reached its most prosperous era in 1828 when neophytes in residence numbered 1,140.
    Maria Copa’s maternal grandmother, Maria Nicolasa was among these 1,140 Indians at Mission San Rafael in 1828.  Maria Nicolasa’s mother had come from the etcha-tamal village in Nicasio.  She was born there approximately in 1775.  At some point she and her husband were taken to Mission Dolores in Yerba Buena (San Francisco) where they were baptized, married, and renamed Otilio and Otilia.  Their daughter, Maria Nicolasa, was born at Mission Dolores approximately in 1805.  Maria Copa said her grandmother spoke both the San Rafael Miwok dialect and Costanoan, which was the language spoken by the tribe given that name (they called themselves Ohlone), living in the geographic area that is now San Leandro, San Francisco and San Jose. 
    Maria Copa’s maternal grandfather’s parents were both Coast Miwoks from the awani-wi village in the San Rafael area.  They too numbered among the 1,440 Indians at the San Rafael Mission in 1828.  They were baptized, married, and renamed Isidro and Isidra at the mission.  Maria Nicolasa married their son who was born, raised and worked at the mission.  He washed and ironed the priest’s clothes, was “lantern man” and played violin at mass.  His brother, Maria Copa’s great uncle, was a vaquero.    
    Maria Copa’s father, Pedro Copa, was born and raised at Mission Solano in Sonoma.  His mother was a Solano Indian and his father was Mexican, one of General Mariano Vallejo’s captains.  Pedro’s sister worked for Mrs. Vallejo in the Vallejo home.
    In these early mission days the Mission San Rafael padres were said to hunt elk in the Point Reyes coastal range with their attendant vaqueros and Indian hunters.  They lassoed and shot the tule elk, skinned and butchered them and then salted down the meat for their winter food supply.  “Hundreds of elk have been captured and destroyed in a few days.  The bones and antlers of these splendid animals, still can be gathered in quantities on the spot where they were killed, lying beaten and bleaching with sunshine and storm weather.”     (Marin County Journal, 1887, Illus. Ed., p. VII)
    Not all the Coast Miwok Indians were friendly to the San Rafael Mission.  Many preferred to continue living in the beautiful Ross Valley where nature amply provided them with fish, game, and a variety of plant foods.  In addition, although the Coast Miwoks at Mission San Rafael were said by Richardson to be well off, others who reported whippings and imprisonment disagreed.  In reality, few Indians came to the missions voluntarily.  They were brought in by the soldiers, an unruly lot to put it mildly, who also dragged back runaways at the end of their riatas (lassos of braided rawhide).  Mission Indians had to remain at the mission, work hard, pray hard, and obey absolutely or they were punished, often severely.  “One time my grandfather ran away from the mission.  He was afraid to go back but every time he tried to take a drink of water he heard something hissing.  It frightened him so that he went back to the mission.” (Kelly, 1996, p. 26)
           Prior to 1824 the Marin Indians had already once surprised Mission San Rafael with an attack in which the buildings had been burned.  In 1824, a band of one thousand Coast Miwok, incensed by the death of an Indian at the hands of a soldier, attacked the mission.  Corporal Rafael Garcia stood off the attack and was later rewarded for it with a grant of two leagues of land north of Bolinas.  Sadly, at this point there was even aggression between Indian tribes.  The Alta, an early San Francisco newspaper, reports that in 1827 Sonoma and Nicasio tribes under Chiefs Sonoma and Marin destroyed their enemies of the Caymus tribe near Napa. 
    Back at Mission San Rafael things only got worse for the Indians when the kind hearted Father Amoros was replaced as mission padre in 1832 by Father Mercado, who had little love for his Coast Miwok charges.  A battle soon ensued in which twenty-one of the raiding Indians were killed and a score captured.  At this point California Governor Figuerroa stepped in to restore peace.  He suspended Mercado and granted the Indians amnesty.  Six months later Mercado got his mission back.
    In spite of their sporadic raids and strong resistance to conversion and mission life, Chief Marin and many of his followers were eventually converted and one account claims that he was buried at Mission San Rafael.  
    The demise of the missions, however, did not come from the bellicose attitude of the indigenous people, but rather from the plan inherent in their creation.  The California missions were not merely religious institutions but also complete economic and social units.  Their purpose from the Spanish government officials’ point of view was to render California a Spanish province by civilizing the natives.  Once civilized, the missions were to be secularized, that is the natives were to be given the mission wealth and lands, and the mission church was to be turned over to ordinary parish priests.  The natives would become full-fledged, tax-paying citizens of the Spanish empire and the Franciscan friars would be sent to another frontier to save the souls of the heathens there.  This was the intent.
    Mexico won her independence from Spain in 1822, and in 1834 the 21 California missions were secularized by order of the Mexican government.  Needless to say, secularization did not turn out as originally intended.  In reality it amounted to confiscation of the missions’ wealth and land.  In Marin when the Indians, without the strong leadership of the padres, drifted away from the mission complaining of mistreatment, the government administrators pillaged the mission’s holdings.  The mission land in San Rafael, although originally granted to the Indians in the secularization decree, was eventually officially confiscated by governor Pio Pico and sold in 1846 for $8,000 to his brother Antonio Pico and Antonio Sunol.     
    With the closing of the mission at San Rafael in 1834, General Mariano Vallejo was appointed mission administrator.  Governor Figueroa ordered Vallejo to compel the San Rafael Indians to take their choice of lands belonging to the mission.  They chose Nicasio, and Vallejo set aside 80,000 acres to be their home and hunting grounds and supplied them with some of the cattle, sheep, horses, and implements from the mission stores.  Most of the San Rafael mission’s livestock, root stock and implements was acquired by californio rancheros.
    The Indians were soon placed under the care of Don Timoteo Murphy who took them to Nicasio.

    Yankees and European Adventurers 

After Mexico’s War of Independence in 1822, Spain permanently lost control of Alta California.  The new Mexican government’s Acts of Secularization in 1828 forced all the California missions to relinquish their vast tracts of land and all resources.  Territorial governors, having been given the authority to award extensive land grants, now began granting them to loyal Mexican citizens and generals to repay their services to the Mexican government.  The purpose of these grants was to encourage settlement which would strengthen Mexico’s control of Alta California and protect her strategic interests from incursions by other powers like the Russians and the Yankees.   Due to a climate of political unrest and civil insurrection in Mexico, few settlers from the south were attracted to this remote region.      
    During the 1820’s,’30’s and 40’s several adventurous European and a few Yankee expatriates arrived in Marin and Sonoma counties.  The first Mexican land grant north of San Francisco Bay was awarded to a young Irishman from Dublin, John Thomas Reed, known as Don Juan Reed after becoming a Mexican citizen, in 1834.  In fact he was the first Anglo to settle in Marin.  He had arrived in San Francisco in 1826 from Mexico where he had lived for five years.  He had immediately built himself a cabin just north of the Golden Gate where he ran a ferry service that brought water, firewood and eventually lumber (after constructing northern California’s first saw mill) to the Mexican families in the Presidio.  He acquired 400 head of Mexican cattle and 60 horses from the San Rafael mission for his Rancho de Corte Madera del Presidio.       
    Timothy Murphy arrived in Monterey, California, in 1828 from Wexford County, Ireland via Lima, Peru.  He was a man of large stature, six feet two inches tall, weighing some 300 pounds, and said to be straight as an arrow and muscular as an ox.  After working in the meat packing industry in London, Peru and Monterey, he made a fortune trapping otter along the Monterey coast before coming to the San Francisco Bay area.  In 1837 he was made administrator of Mission San Rafael and agent for some 14,000 Marin Indians.  He truly cared for the Indians who respected his physique, sense of fair play and sense of humor.  Murphy is also said to have spoken the Miwok language, albeit with an Irish brogue.  
    Murphy assisted the mission Indians in their relocation to Nicasio, probably supervising the construction of the Casa de los Indios mentioned later in the land grant of 1844.  He encouraged the Indians to practice the agricultural skills they had learned at the mission and helped them sell their surplus wares, made on their Nicasio Rancheria, to customers in San Rafael, Sausalito, and Yerba Buena (San Francisco).  Under his care the Indians had plenty to eat, plus American blankets, clothes, tools, and of course their agricultural skills.  He was convinced that the Indians could achieve a fair standard of living, however, the corruption of the Mexican officials, the greed spawned by the gold rush, and the diseases for which they had no immunity, resulted in Marin’s Coast Miwok’s ultimate demise. 
    In 1844, Timoteo Murphy, having become a Mexican citizen and Roman Catholic, a requirement for receiving land grants in California, was granted 22,000 acres of land at San Rafael, the ranchos of Las Gallinas, San Pedro, and Santa Margarita.  He later acquired an extensive tract of land in Nicasio in 1849 or 1850. 
    After having been refused as suitor to one of General Vallejo’s sisters, Murphy never married.  In 1849 he brought his brother Matthew and nephew John Lucas over from England.  Sadly,  in 1852 Matthew was shot while riding on a favorite trail near San Quentin by a prison guard standing watch at the prison wall.  Matthew Murphy died of this wound two years later.  Tim Murphy died of a burst appendix in 1853.  Upon his death, his nephew, John Lucas, inherited Lucas Valley and Terra Linda and his dying brother Matthew, McNear, Peacock Gap, and China Camp.
    Murphy was best remembered for his rodeos and fiestas.  The rodeos which became an annual holiday in San Rafael on October 22, St. Rafael’s Day, included feats of horsemanship, cattle branding, bull roping and a sideshow of gambling and booze.  Coast Miwok Tom Wood of Tomales, known as Vaquero Tom, is described in the forefront of these rodeos, snagging a bull (all cattle was basically wild) with his riata and dragging him behind his horse, as the crowd whooped and cheered.  Murphy’s fiestas lasted for days and the generous assortment of barbecued meats and other foods was succulent and sumptuous. 
    An often-retold story is of Murphy wrestling a cinnamon bear after his shying horse threw him directly into the bear’s path.  His riding companion, Tomaso Sais whipped the bear across the eyes with his riata in an attempt to help Murphy, who rolled over and over struggling with the bear in the dust.  When the bear finally broke loose from Murphy’s embrace and confusedly ambled away, Murphy advised Sais to stay out of an Irishman’s fight.  
    In spite of Murphy’s concern for and protection of the Indians and a valiant effort to save their Tinicasio (the Anglo name for the Indians’ rancheria and land in Nicasio) land grant in the courts, it was granted to others in 1844.  Murphy resigned as Indian agent in 1851 demoralized that he could save his Indian friends from neither the Mexican officials’ corruption nor the greed of the newcomers seeking gold.
    An undated, handwritten “List of the Indians Residing in Tirnacasio,” a photocopy of which is located in the Marin Civic Center Public Library’s California Room, appears to show, either by name or number, 15 Miwok children living there.  It also lists by name each man (total: 27) and woman (total: 11).  After the closing of the San Rafael Mission, only Tinicasio, the Nicasio Rancheria, and Olompali, the Novato Rancheria, which was owned and run by local chief Camilio Ynitia, remained of the dozens of Coast Miwok settlements and villages. 
    Regarding this Tinicasio Rancheria Maria Copa had said, “Four times there was a big rancheria at Nicasio, and we were the only ones who were left.  All the others were killed, but mostly poisoned.”     
    According to Cook’s review of total Coast Miwok population estimates made by A. Kroeber (Interviews, p. 61), the Coast Miwok population was:
    Aboriginal or pre contact: 2000
                            1851-52:   250
                                 1880:     60 
    According to Meret, the Nicasio tribelet dwindled to fewer than two dozen living in eight kotchas (redwood bark teepees with a diameter of approximately eight feet) in 1880, two remained in 1884, and “a few” in 1887 (Meret - August 13, 1880 quoted in St. Mary’s Church, 1979). 
    Based on: 1. the number of Indians shown in the “List of the Indians Residing in Tirnacasio,” 2.  the School Census numbers for Marin Indian children (six in 1870 and 19 in 1871), and 3. the various reports of the number of Tinicasio Indians still residing at the Nicasio Rancheria, this list appears to have been written between 1865 and 1875.  It may very well be from the year 1871 because it is likely that 15 of the county’s 19 Native Americans children counted that year were living in the only remaining rancheria in the county, Camilo Initzia having sold Olompali to Black in 1852 or 53.  However, this list neither names Maria Copa nor her parents.
    Captain Sebastian, a Nicasio Indian chief, reportedly died in 1880 at nearly 100 years of age.  “ ‘As late as 1853 he was a conspicuous character as he ruled over 300 men who owned at least a territory of 100,000 acres.’ (Meret - August 13, 1880)” (St. Mary’s Church, 1979)
    The last of the Nicasio Indians managed to briefly hold on to 30 acres of the original 80,000-acre grant.  According to Marin historian Jack Mason, this 30-acre parcel along Halleck Creek was conveyed to them by Henry Halleck.  (Mason, 1971,  p. 69)  The History of Marin of 1880 claims Calistro bought it from William Miller (p. 289).  The Marin Journal Illustrated Edition (1887, p. IX) reports, 

    Chief John Calistro finally gathered up all the remnants of Indian properties and with the proceeds purchased some thirty acres… , thereafter making an attempt to uplift his people in a final struggle against the insidious voices of the white man.  But this little band was surrounded by every kind of demoralizing influence and the settlers were too busy to banish the vagabonds preying upon them.  It was soon necessary for the county to support these disheartened remnants of a once great race...

    The county appropriated $40 per month toward their support, which, together with the wages they earned on the ranches and the game they hunted, afforded them a meager subsistence.  Their numbers rapidly diminished due to.  By 1880 the once populous village was said to contain only eight redwood bark kotchas.  The population could not have numbered more than two dozen of which five were said to be very aged and helpless. (History of Marin, 1880, p. 288-289)  
    In 1884 it was reported that “ ‘Old Nicasio Rancheria once a populous Indian village has dwindled until only two natives are left, the mother and sister of Antone who was drowned recently.’ (March 1884)” (St. Mary’s Church, 1979).  As of 1887, it was reported that a few Indians still lived on and owned this small rancheria.  (Marin County Journal, October 1887, Illustrated Edition, p. X)  The rancheria property was later conveyed to a Matt Powers who sold this 30-acre hay field to Tillmon Farley.
    Bob Wells, who interviewed William Irving for his article in the Press Democrat of 12/17/67, states that a painted portrait of Chief Calistro from around 1870 was hanging “in the present Rancho Nicasio dining room.”  The article ran a reproduction of this portrait.  This portrait is said by William’s son, Ken Irving, to have actually been a portion of a mural on the dining room wall now situated behind the booths in the main dining room, and that it depicted Calistro seated on horseback surrounded by his countryside.  Calistro’s cabin remained standing in Halleck Valley well into the twentieth century on Farley property.  The young sons of Bob Farley were furious when a neighbor named Mr. Hind allegedly knocked it down with his tractor, motives unknown.