I am happy to have read Soldiers, Scoundrels, Poets & Priests and to recommend it to anyone even slightly interested in how California came to be what it is today.
www.missiontour.org

This is a highly readable book, well researched and written... It allows the reader a quick overview of the key players in the California mission drama.
The Carmel Pine Cone

I can't begin to say how much I enjoyed reading Soldiers, Scoundrels, Poets & Priests. This is a book that adds much... because of its unique approach... concise, informative vignettes of men and women who were the behind-the- scene players during the Spanish-Mexican-American periods... and a Time Line / Map which correlates California events to the history of the United States from 1769-1848. This book will surely be a source classic for many years to come.
Daniel Francis Toomey, Author of The Spell of California's Spanish Colonial Missions
Soldiers, Scoundrels, Poets & Priests: Stories of the Men and Women Behind the Missions of California
by David J. McLaughlin
 
This wonderful book (also available as an eBook) proves our point that peoples' lives tell the real history of an era. It is both diversified and comprehensive in its coverage of the people whose hearts, souls and bodies are the stuff of which California was made.

In addition to the breadth of material, the book also provides a depth of insight into life in the state's formative times, held together by the common thread of California's missions. An abundance of firsthand quotes fills its pages with vivid imagery of the tenor of the times. It takes us into our chroniclers' deepest thoughts...

"There are difficulties all around and I am overburdened with cares which render life wearisome. There is hardly anything of the religious in me, and I scarcely know what to do in these troubling times. I made the vows of a Friar Minor; instead, I must manage the Indians, sow grain, raise sheep, horses and cows. I must preach, baptize, bury the dead, visit the sick, direct the carts, haul stones, lime etc. These are things incompatible, thorny, bitter, hard and unbearable. They rob me of time, tranquility and my health. I desire with lively anxiety to devote myself to my sacred ministry and to serve the Lord."

Padre Felipe Arroyo de la Cuesta
In a letter to his friend Jose M. Herrera on August 10, 1826
Quoted in Chapter 11, page 90

...and shares with us the very visions that filled their eyes.

"We had passed many herds of cattle belonging to the residents of the Angel village (Los Angeles) and thousands of wild horses. The wild horses become so abundant at times as to eat the grass quite clean. My guide informed me that the inhabitants of the village, and of the vicinity, collect whenever they consider the country overstocked, and build a large and strong pen with a small entrance and two wings extending from the entrance some distance to the right and left. Then mounting their swiftest horses they scour the country and surrounding large bands they drive them into the enclosures by the hundreds.

"They will perhaps lasso a few of the handsomest and take them out of the pack. A horse selected in this manner is immediately thrown down and ... blindfolded, saddled and haltered (the Californians always commence with the halter). The horse is then allowed to get up and the man mounts it. When he is firmly fixed in his seat, and the halter in his hand, an assistant takes off the blindfold and several men on horseback with handkerchiefs to frighten and some with whips to whip, raise the yell and away they go.

"The poor horse, having been severely punished and frightened, does not think of flouncing, but dashes off at no slow rate for a trial of his speed. After running until he is exhausted, and finding he cannot get rid of his enemies, he gives up. He is then kept tied for two or three days saddled and rode occasionally, and if he proves docile, he is tied by the neck to a tame horse until he becomes attached to the company and then turned loose."

Jedediah Smith, 1826
Mountain Man
Quoted in Chapter 16, page 131

The book also remarks upon the changes brought by the passage of time.

"When I first stumbled upon the Southwest (on his trek to California, in 1884-85) it was different. The stark peaks, the bewitched valleys were as now. As now, except that the old life had not yet fled from them. Across those incredible acclivities, where distance loses itself and the eye is a liar, the pronghorn antelope still drifted, like a ghostly scud of great thistledown, 500 to a band. In the peaks, the cimarron still played ladder with the precipices, in the pineries, the grizzly shambled shuffling, and in green rincones where valley and foothill come together, and a spring issues of their union, there were lonely adobes, with a curl of friendly smoke from their potsherd chimneys -- gray, flat little homes, bald without, within warm and vocal of the old times when people sang because they felt like it.

"Today the antelopes are gone, the cimarrons have yielded up their wonderful coiled horns to adorn the walls of those who didn't kill them; the grizzlies are rugs for persons who couldn't shoot a flock of barns flying low, and the songs are almost near extinction."

Charles Fletcher Lummis, 1889
Newspaperman and Promoter of California
Quoted in Chapter 22, page 180

Truly a unique book, in addition to authentic firsthand quotes, Soldiers, Scoundrels, Poets & Priests provides:

More than sixty photos, many of them historic images never before published.
A Time Line that is an essential historic guide relating what was happening in California to U.S. and world events.
A participants'-eye-view of days gone by.
Organized by era, the book puts flesh and blood onto California's history. It is a singular treasure for those interested in California's colorful past and the people who made it what it is.