by Paul Horgan
Texas was recovering from the 1846 war which had destroyed the local commerce until the population had begun to increase through the arrival of colonists from the East. Odin had built eighteen little churches or chapels since his arrival at Galveston in 1840, but for the forty thousand scattered faithful of the following decade they hardly sufficed. When overland gold-seekers began to hurry westward across Texas after 1849, the state’s population grew again, until in 1851 a hundred and twenty thousand new settlers arrived each year. The new communities and Army posts lacked spiritual administration, and Machebeuf, like Lamy before him, took up some of the waiting time at San Antonio by going out in April and early May to remote little stations along the Rio Grande.
By May, Lamy was recovered well enough to complete his plans to join the Army caravan which was to leave for El Paso and the upper Rio Grande at the middle of the month. General Harney figured large in his arrangements, for the department commander granted the bishop and all his party the assimilated rank of officers, which carried with it the issue of rations. Since his shipwreck Lamy was travelling light, but Machebeuf had come with all his possessions intact. These included three great chests in addition to smaller pieces of luggage. He had arranged for the transport of all of them, but at the last minute, the quartermaster captain refused to take along the three large chests in government waggons. (Lamy’s own waggon was full as it was, and he and Machebeuf went by horse when the time came.) Machebeuf could only hope that his important pieces would follow him by the next waggon train.
On 13 May, Odin wrote to Blanc, “I don’t know whether Mon-seigneur Lamy has left San Antonio. He was still there some days ago. I believe that the caravan is almost ready, and that he won’t hesitate to take to the road …” It was a report which the bishop of Galveston made “despite great reluctance.”
In fact, it was only a matter of a few days until the long train of two hundred waggons, each pulled by six mules, accompanied by twenty-five other non-military waggons, including Lamy’s, equipped with provisions of all sorts to last six or eight weeks, and escorted by a company of dragoons, set out from the dusty streets of San Antonio for the plains west. The soldiers wore newly prescribed uniforms: single-breasted frock coats; tall hats with chin-strap, orange pompoms, and level black leather visors; trousers of sky-blue kersey, “made loose and to spread well over the boots.” The troopers were forbidden “under any pretense whatever” to wear mustaches. The pace of the train was set by that of the slowest animals in the traces. They had six hundred miles to go through Comanche territory before reaching El Paso. The journey was the first lesson for Lamy and Machebeuf in the character of the country of the rest of their lives.
vi.
To the Rio Grande
THEY LEFT THE VERDANT, stream-sweetened country of San Antonio to go along the arid military trail which led due westward for the first two hundred miles. The black earth supported mesquite and low trees with mistletoe. On a middle-distance ridge, small clumps in silhouette might either be trees or something else; and if they moved suddenly, and vanished in the low rolls coming toward the train, it was a signal to go on guard, for they might be Indians, however unlikely an attack against such a great caravan. The waggons crossed many dry creeks with white pebble bottoms, and the black earth gave way to plains the color of dried animal dung. The scrub trees showed black winter twigs. Only distance forgave the harshness of the land. Strong winds arose at times, carrying the plains dust, and dried the skin, the inside of the mouth, pressed against the vision, made time seem endless.
The trail presently turned northwest to a great speckled land of rolling flat plains. Every waggon carried a water barrel; a stream bed with flowing water was a rarity. But there were some, and at such places, they caught fish, often with their bare hands, a sporting delight, to be followed by a feast. Where there was great scarcity of water, wrote Lamy, “we generally travelled at night.” The weather for the most part was fine, with “some days rather too warm, but the nights were delightful.” And then they would sleep in the open air, using their saddles for pillows, under the stars—”sous la belle étoile” in the phrase which Lamy and Machebeuf used often, then and for years after. At first Lamy felt stiff from sleeping on a blanket over the rough ground, but when he got used to it, he said, “I never enjoyed my rest better.” He was briefly ill with a mild cholera, like many others of the party who had drunk impure water along the way; but Machebeuf “never had the least indisposition.” In any case, one or the other said Mass every day in the tent which General Harney had provided for them, and which they rarely used for any other purpose. They were under “many obligations to the officers,” who were “invariably kind.” They enjoyed the officers’ mess, where they had fresh beef three times a week, and milk every day, and their own waggoner was at times able to offer them venison, rabbit, duck, and partridge. The country, as a scientific observer saw in 1849, was “exceedingly rich in reptiles.” The most famous of these was the great diamond-back rattlesnake (genus Crotalus terrificus terrificus). Another creature less dangerous, but one which the Mexican muleteers seemed to dread particularly was the vinagrón (Telephonis giganteus), a large black scorpion which when squashed gave off the penetrating odor of acetic acid.
After more than a month’s slow travel to the northwest, the cara-vaners saw far off a great range of mountains. Clearly at last they saw fifty miles to the north the Guadalupe Range with its highest point, Signal Peak, at its eastern end. It was on the crest of this peak that the Comanches built their signal fires on their autumnal strikes across the Rio Grande to steal Mexican horses, and it was that range which Indians used as sanctuary from which to raid passing caravans. The Guadalupes made a long rocky barrier lying north and south. They were the first considerable mountains which Lamy saw on the boundary of his own domain.
The military road—now abandoned—turned westward at the base of the Guadalupe foothills a hundred miles from El Paso del Norte in Mexico, which was sometimes referred to under its parish name of Santa Maria de Guadalupe. Presently the train went along near the Rio Grande toward the North Pass, with its cluster of villages downstream, and its road north which led upstream to the heart of New Mexico—and Santa Fe.
As they drew on toward El Paso, Lamy and Machebeuf could reflect that in their six hundred miles of overland travel they had seen hardly a single sign of habitation. Soon they began to see the mountains of northern Mexico which continued across the Rio Grande in the distance.
During the last week of June 1851, Lamy’s company arrived at the river towns of San Elizario, Socorro, and Isleta. The latter two had been founded in 1680 by refugees from towns of the same name in New Mexico during the great Pueblo revolt, and it was these three villages which had been confided to Lamy’s charge by Odin of Galveston in whose diocese they belonged by treaty.
Word of Lamy’s approach had reached the settlements. People came out on the road for several miles to meet him. He passed through San Elizario, the first village, and on reaching Socorro, “a fine town,” he wrote later to Purcell, “they gave me a grand reception.” As he came to the first houses, he saw a newly erected “triumphal arch under which I had to pass.” The village mayor, the local pastor (a Mexican), a band of music, and the national guard came to meet him. The land was restful after the desert passage. “This little spot,” wrote Lamy, “and the vicinity for a few miles on the Rio Grande, is truly beautiful; particularly so to me, arriving from a journey of six weeks over barren plains, and mountains without a tree to conceal their rocky precipices.” He was “delighted to find a country covered with verdure, the fields waving with grain, and the trees loaded with fruit.”
But these three towns in Texas, under the instructions from the Vatican which Bishop Zubiría of Durango had received in 1849, had been given by him into the charge of the local Mexican pastor, all unaware of Odin’s disposition of them. “The padre,” noted Lamy, was not “overwell liked by the people”—though he treated Lamy and his party with g
reat kindness. And there, in those border settlements, Lamy saw the actual places which for years, in jurisdictional confusions established in good faith among Rome, Galveston, and Durango, would constitute an exasperating problem among the many others which awaited him.
In Socorro on 24 June—the Feast of St John the Baptist, his own name day—the bishop said Mass for a great crowd in the village church. At the proper moment, he asked the Mexican pastor to speak for him in thanking the people for the great respect which they had shown for the episcopal office, refusing to take to himself the honors they had shown him. The padre complied—but went so far with personal compliments that Lamy felt obliged to interrupt him. “I then,” said Lamy, “made my first public essay in the ‘Lengua de Dios,’ ” preaching in Spanish.
He moved on to El Paso, on the Mexican bank of the river, and was at once established under the famous hospitality of Father Ramón Ortiz, who was well known to a generation of traders and soldiers who had passed either way across the Rio Grande between Mexico and what had so lately become United States territory. Here Lamy and his people had several days’ respite. It was a particularly rewarding place to pause, after coming out of the wilderness. Lamy thought Father Ramόn “very intelligent” as well as most cordial. The El Paso pastor—a handsome and charming man—was full of advice and information about the journey to Santa Fe which still lay ahead, and generously reprovisioned the bishop’s party for the long way still to go. After years of never seeing a bishop, Father Ramόn now entertained his second within nine months, for in the preceding autumn Monsignor Zubiría had paused at El Paso on his way home to Durango from his last tour of New Mexico. By the time of Lamy’s arrival, the Mexican bishop’s vast northern lands had already been transferred by the Holy See to an ecclesiastical jurisdiction within the United States—but he did not know it then, and the pastor of El Paso, discussing Lamy’s credentials with his new visitor, could not say if Zubiría knew it even now.
On the recommendation of Don Ramόn Ortiz, Lamy wrote of his coming and his new post to the pastor at the other Socorro, on the Rio Grande up north in New Mexico, and the letter was relayed to all parishes farther along on the road to Santa Fe. He wrote his official news also to the Very Reverend Monsignor Juan Felipe Ortiz, who was Bishop Zubiría’s vicario foráneo—rural dean—at Santa Fe, representing the Mexican episcopal authority there.
Lamy saw El Paso in Mexico as “a scattered village, of at least eight thousand souls. Though it seldom rains (for they have had scarcely a drop of rain for three years), yet, by a system of irrigation, they have managed to make their country like a garden. Their wine is excellent, also their peaches, apples, apricots, and pears.… The houses are low and remarkably clean, and well arranged for commerce, and to suit the climate.” He noted that they were built of “mud.” The churches, he saw, were large—the largest was that in the plaza at El Paso (now Juarez). It was a great block-like construction of adobes, with a flat roof over the nave and a higher rise above the sanctuary. A free-standing bell tower—later demolished—with slender arches, cornice, pilasters, and a tile dome and lantern, rose at the left front corner of the church. The sacristy and priest’s house were attached to the rear of the building, and the whole was surrounded by a low adobe wall. The plaza was enclosed by other low, flat buildings with porticoes roofed with cut branches. Mexicans in wide hats, wearing serapes across one shoulder, and with their loose white cotton trousers bound with leggings, rode small ponies on the dusty square, and women in long voluminous dresses sat by their wares in the shade of the porticoes. The sky was open and hot, and Lamy observed that “it is so warm that many go half-naked.” Flocks of blackbirds turned in their sudden accord about the bell tower. Lamy thought the churches might have been better kept. So far as he could see, the people were well disposed, and showed a strong attachment to their religion, “especially to its exterior observances.” It would take him more time to know more of “their customs and practices,” of course.
In the evening, when the air chilled, and the sun fell behind the great sierra west of the town, dust in the air made wonders of the sunset. The mountains became a mysterious violet, the skies were streaked with dusty gold under the high lingering daylight blue, and all was shadow on the streets, roads, and houses. It was then that the other character of El Paso and the lower villages came free; for the transcontinental migrations continued westward since 1849, and to the volatile temperament of the natives was added the lawlessness of the transients. Violence and vice of every description were met at any moment. Gamblers, thieves, even murderers were abroad; and the fandangos—dances held in private houses or public halls, to the rude music of scraped violins and violated guitars—were scenes of every ardor of romance among the swaying couples. Fury often broke out at the gaming tables, with sudden death as ready as a hand on a pistol or a knife. With little organized preservation of the law, posses of citizens were convened, trials were swift, and murderers were often hanged within an hour of their conviction. Was Santa Fe to be like this? “From what I have heard,” wrote Lamy to Blanc, “and the little I have seen here, no doubt I may expect to meet with serious difficulties and obstacles …”
He had over three hundred miles yet to go, and he understood that after advancing one third of the way, he would reach the pueblo lands, and would see at least half of his district before reaching Santa Fe. It was soon time to march again. The military escort from San Antonio—presumably including the troops earlier assigned from Cincinnati—was now divided into two detachments. One was to remain at the military post near El Paso (later Fort Bliss) for eventual return to San Antonio. The other was destined for upstream New Mexico. Accompanied by the new increment for Santa Fe, Lamy and his personal party set forth in early July 1851 on the Rio Grande road—that stretch of the Camino Real reaching from Mexico up to Santa Fe over which the waggon trade had been moving since the seventeenth century.
The north road took them at every five or ten leagues through New Mexican parishes for the first time. In all the towns, the reception was the same, as the bishop’s waggon and his horsemen appeared with him from the dusty road—a road as pleasant, said Machebeuf, as the other passage across Texas was tedious, except for the eighty-mile stretch which they would encounter called the Dead Man’s March. This was a desert crossing divided from the river by a range of mountains which began shortly north of Las Cruces and ended a little way below Socorro, at a point where the mountains sloped down to the plain, and the road joined the riverside again.
While Lamy was on the way, the Santa Fe rural dean Juan Felipe Ortiz, having received his letter, wrote to various pastors along the way the amazing news of the American bishop’s progress northward. The word spread rapidly among the people; and at town after town they marshalled their poor best to receive him in honor. “Everywhere I had to go,” he said, “they erected triumphal arches across the road, in village after village,” and, as he had put it concerning the same honors at San Elizario, he “had” to pass beneath them. Entire villages came out to meet him and escort him in procession to their local churches. In certain towns the women laid their shawls or wraps on the ground before the church doors to make a carpet for him, and men, women, and children came to receive his blessing and kiss his ring. It was clear, said Machebeuf, that they had not come to a non-Catholic land. They thought the people’s devotion survived from the time when the first Franciscan missioners from Spain had “watered the Mexican earth with their blood and sweat.”
But the further they advanced, Lamy and Machebeuf saw that their first impression was not wrong—the zeal and piety they saw was only on the surface. The people went to Mass, observed the feast days, kept their religious sodalities active enough, but for the most part failed to adhere to the sacraments, upon which all else depended. The reason was not far to seek: the general disarray was the fault of the clergy. For the Catholic population of seventy thousand, Lamy in the end would encounter only fifteen priests, six of whom, enfeebled by age, were in
active. As for the other nine—he soon saw that they were either lacking in zeal or were actually so scandalous in their lives that the state of affairs could not be worse. He would need prudence, zeal, and devotion if he was to administer such a vicariate. The people were sweet as children in their response to the priest, and if the Mexican clergy who were still active could be moved by good intentions, it would be the easiest thing in the world to lead their people back to the full practice of their religion. “But alas,” exclaimed Machebeuf, “the great obstacle to the good which Monseigneur wants to do comes not from the people but from the Mexican clergy who dread any reform in their ways.… One of the worst of their neglects of their duty to their parishioners was that they almost never preached the Gospel … and,” he demanded, “how could such priests dare to preach?”
As they progressed northward, the bishop and his vicar general did what they could to begin meeting needs long neglected. Lamy whenever he could offered the Mexicans “edifying words in poor Spanish,” and Machebeuf, when they came to any of the United States Army forts along the river, brought his spiritual offices to the soldiers who asked for them. On they went (“Goodbye to railroads, steamships, passenger coaches, and so on,” exclaimed Machebeuf, “in New Mexico there’s no way to travel but in your own wagon, if you were lucky enough to have one, or on muleback”) through the villages of Socorro, Lemitar, Belen, Tomé (where they saw the parish records which Bishop Zubiría had signed on his last visit on 30 May 1849), and the Pueblo of Isleta, and the Rio Grande town of Albuquerque under its great dome of cottonwoods, and again on to Bernalillo (Coronado had wintered across the Rio Grande there in 1540–41), and to the pueblos of San Felipe and Santo Domingo, where they left the river and began to climb toward the escarpment of La Bajada. There the narrow road led in precarious double curves up to a great plain, and they came in sight of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains twenty miles away, in whose foothills lay the ancient and famous city of Santa Fe and the end of the journey.