Then, too, the chamber in which the water-well revolved was so low that the powerful head of water striking the horizontal wheel splashed all over the walls and worked up through the shaft holes to the mill stones and thus wet the flour.

This necessitated the constant presence of Indian women to carry away the meal to dry storerooms at the Mission where it was bolted by a hand process of their own devising.

On this account the mill was abandoned, and for several years the whole of the meal for the Mission was ground on the old-style metates.
The region adjacent to the mill was once largely inhabited by Indians, for the foreman of the mill ranch declares that he has hauled from the adjacent bluff as many stone pestles and mortars, metates and grinders as would load a four-horse wagon.
It should not be forgotten that originally the mill was roofed with red tiles made by the Indians at the Mission; but these have entirely disappeared.
It was the habit of Padre Zalvidea to send certain of his most trusted neophytes over to the islands of San Clemente and Catalina with a "bolt" or two of woven serge, made at the Mission San Gabriel, to exchange with the island Indians for their soapstone cooking vessels,--mortars, etc.
These traders embarked from a point where Redondo now is, and started always at midnight.
In 1819 the Indians of the Guachama rancho, called San Bernardino, petitioned for the introduction of agriculture and stock raising, and this was practically the beginning of that _asistencia_, as will be recorded in the chapter on the various chapels.

A chapel was also much needed at Puente, where Zalvidea had six hundred Indians at work in 1816.
In 1822 San Gabriel was fearfully alarmed at the rumor that one hundred and fifty Indians were bearing down upon that Mission from the Colorado River region.

It transpired that it was an Opata with despatches, and that the company had no hostile intent.