Andrés Quintana
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Andrés Quintana, O.F.M. (1777-1812) was a Spanish missionary who labored in the Mission Santa Cruz, in California during the early part of the 18th century.
Born November 27, 1777 in Antonossa, in the Province of Alva in Spain, Quintana joined the order friars minor, O.F.M. in 1794, when he was 17 years of age. 9 years later he had completed his formation and achieved the priesthood, which he did in the province of Cantabria, in northern Spain from where a great deal of Spanish missionaries eminated. In 1804 he sailed to the New World, to join the Franciscan College of San Fernando, a springboard for all missionaries doing work in Alta California. There he received further instruction and preparation for his assignment to the Mission Santa Cruz, one of the most unsuccessful of the Spanish missions in California.
Arriving in Monterrey from the Mexican port of San Blás in the year 1805, he became one of two missionary fathers stationed at Santa Cruz until 1812, where he died at the age of 35 at the hands of the Indians under his command. According to one of the only surviving Indian narratives of the Mission period in California, Quintana was murdered because of his plans to use a metal-tipped whip against his Indian converts.
During his tenure at the Mission, the vast majority of the native Ohlone population who lived at or near the Mission died because of the conditions, labor, and endemic diseases. The demograhic collapse was so severe, that by 1810, Quintana and others had to hunt for converts from the Yokut populations of the Central Valley, hundreds of miles away, to replenish the vanishing labor force.
He died October 12, 1812 in Santa Cruz, California.
