by Paul Horgan
iv.
The Durango Journey
WHAT HAD HE WRITTEN in Ohio four years before to Purcell? “Providence seems to have fitted me for a barbarious [sic] and extensive mission,” Perhaps these words crossed his mind now, as he rode forth across Santa Fe plain with his attendant, who must surely have been a man who could serve as guide with knowledge of the long road to Durango. By necessity they travelled light. The bishop’s travelling bag was probably much like that which he used on later overland journeys. It was fashioned of black leather, about fourteen inches long, with a fastener and lock at the top, and a shoulder strap. It was wide enough to contain the simplest of Mass vessels and a set of thin vestments, among other objects.
Leaving the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and Santa Fe behind, the riders passed by La Cienega, with its farms and low red bluffs and scrub piñon, and passed down the escarpment of La Bajada on the Albuquerque road. Sixty miles to the south rose the Sandia range. Lamy was never to be out of the sight of mountains on the entire passage. He was fortunate in the season of his journey. New Mexico in autumn was a time of special comfort for the senses. Lamy, if he had any capacity to express exalted feeling, left no record of it; but even the most stolid of travellers there had been known to respond to the particular beauties of that landscape; and it would be strange if a man such as he who so much loved the open country—one who “could not bear the idea … to be confined”—did not respond to the wonderful vistas, by day and night, of his new land. His present journey would reveal to him every aspect but that of extreme summer, which he already knew, with its great dome of white light and parching heat; and now of the autumnal desert, river course, and mountain wilderness, where scattered so widely lived the human creatures he had been sent to serve.
Riding down to Albuquerque, he passed black-crested mesas rising above pink earth, and came into river groves along the Rio Grande at Algodones and later at Bernalillo and Albuquerque itself where the cottonwoods and willows made islands of cool shadow, and the fields by the shallow river gave off a damp rich air; and always at the end of vision were the blue mountains, and the rolling silver clouds which they brought into being through the interaction of earth and sky. Storm often rode over valley and plain from such heights, and then every fantasy of light and distance, obscurity and brilliance, changed the vast vision of what was to be seen, and, in private thought, what was to be felt. Riding his horse at a sustained walk, alone but for his guide, it might be that Lamy, halting to say Mass in the desert, felt how the exaltation of the Gloria would be made manifest by the splendor of the earth and sky in their immense changing aspects. The liturgy would speak to him in French as well as Latin:
Les cieux et la terre sont remplis de Votre gloire:
Hosanna au plus haut des cieux,
and before the blessing at the end of Mass,
… Si Vous êtes un abime de majesté,
soyez aussi un abime de miséricorde.…
Always plain spoken, and in writing simple and direct, Lamy might not express himself so grandly; his eloquence was that of act, not word.
His first one hundred thirty miles took him down the old Royal Highway along the east side of the Rio Grande—the same which had brought him north six weeks before. In central New Mexico there were villages—Placeres, Peralta, Valencia, Tomé, and a few more, some scarcely more than ranches of one or two families—-where he might find hospitality for the night and a tortilla and a mug of hot chocolate the next morning. But such places were not spaced out for the convenience of travellers, and more often than not, all the way to Durango, he would spend the night in a blanket, on the ground, under “la belle étoile” like any plainsman. There might be occasional trains of traders, or a mail rider—though the latter was a rarity, for there was no regular system of mails, and the carrier was willing, for “a slight douceur” to open his bag to let his tipper examine the letters within, and do with them as he liked. The road in New Mexico was merely a trail, so limited was the travel on it. Yet it had its attraction for raiding Indians, who watched for the waggons of traders or the drives of cattlemen. More than one person at Santa Fe thought the bishop “heroic” for setting out with only a single companion through country which had been terrorized for generations—even before the arrival of the American invaders—by Apaches who preyed not only on travellers but on Indians of the pueblos.
But by his acts, he seemed to say that every journey could only add to his immediate knowledge of his desert diocese, as he went on his way. His road on the east bank crossed to Socorro on the west, and then back again, on high ground above the Rio Grande. He passed Fort Conrad, which was a United States Army post established only a fortnight before on the opposite bank of the river, and soon came parallel to the mountain called Fray Cristobal, which was named after an early Franciscan who had died near the place; for the mountain’s outline curiously seemed to show in rock the profile of a man’s face, which his companions thought looked like Fray Cristobal himself. This was the northernmost end of the mountain system which, rising close upon the east bank of the Rio Grande, made travel by road impossible along the river; so that travellers had to turn eastward at that point, and for the next seventy miles, follow a course separated from the river by the mountain range. Lamy had come north by that path—it was the Jornada del Muerto, or Dead Man’s March, and it was the dread of all who passed that way from the time of Juan de Oñate, the colonizer of New Mexico in 1598, to the bishop’s time. The character of such country was expressed in the names put upon it in various places—Dead Man’s Lake, Dead Man’s Spring. Water was so scarce that parties often had to leave their direct route north or south and go west to the mountains which separated them from the river to find a spring or a little natural reservoir. Finally, the mountain chain dwindled southward, and at the southern tip, allowed Lamy to come to the river again at a place variously called San Diego or Robledo, approximately sixty miles north of El Paso in Mexico.
Here near Robledo ran, east and west, the old boundary between New Mexico and the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Within a few miles of each other, the villages of Doñana and the ranchos of Mesilla and Las Cruces bordered on the river. Sparsely occupied, these adobe settlements would finally assume, for Lamy, a grave importance for many years to come, when additional problems of his jurisdiction in territory led to wrangles and intrigues reaching from Santa Fe to Rome, Rome to Durango, Durango to Sonora, and Sonora to Santa Fe.
But as he rode past these settlements Lamy had as yet no reason to consider their site as significant. He saw that it was a barren land with two small villages removed from the world. Durango, which had long held them ecclesiastically, was still more than a thousand miles away to the south; Santa Fe, to which they belonged by political treaty, was over three hundred miles away to the north. Both villages lay in a vast district also referred to as Doñana, like the hamlet of the same name, and out of this confusion of names, a persistent problem would result—especially after the third village, La Mesilla, would be established two years later, whose name would also be popularly and even officially used to designate the district, or Condado, or county, of Doñana. But for the moment, Lamy could only wonder how such little clusters in such remote territory could ever be given the comforts of church and pastor.
The United States Army, though, viewed the area as strategically important: Lamy could see across the Rio Grande, as he went by, the construction of Fort Fillmore in its early stages. The ford at Mesilla was logically the place to extend the road from California and the West across the Rio Grande at that point. One day, California—a third of a continent away—would be joined by commerce to Arizona and New Mexico. The whole immense Southwest must come into Lamy’s vision.
Entering the state of Chihuahua as he went south from Robledo, the bishop saw abandoned and ruined villages in the desert between the Rio Grande and the Organ Mountains to the east. They had been destroyed by Apache raiders who had swept down from their heights and canyons in the Sierra Bla
nca and who still must be watched for by anyone travelling that way—especially anyone almost alone. He crossed the river, taking the ford six miles above El Paso, and came again into that pastoral valley where he had been so well received before. Now he came without a powerful escort and he knew nothing of the country from there to the south. Here, for the moment, was refreshment in shade, with his journey to Durango almost one third done. El Paso del Norte was the source of the famous “Pass wine” and “Pass brandy,” which went up the trail to Santa Fe and Taos in the trading waggons. Lamy, always an agriculturist, may well have thought of cuttings from the vines for his use when there was time for such pleasant refinements.
At the nodding pace of his horse’s walk, he took the Chihuahua road and after a day or two came to the formidable passage of sand hills called Los Medános which reached as far as the eye could see. The sand so fine, the dunes so endlessly wave-like, were entirely without, vegetation. A trail wound through the shifting valleys of the dunes. It was the sort of country which led a traveller to wonder if it would ever end; but when it did, he found a road which a trader described as “firm and beautiful.” Yet it was the sort of land which was either parched or flooded by the desert sky. Sudden cloudbursts would send the arroyos running, and would mire the road for miles. It was said of the state of Chihuahua that in its hundred thousand square miles there were no more than two inhabitants for each square mile, and fewer than twenty square miles were under cultivation.
Comanches knew the road well and, working out of their retreat in the Bolsón de Mapimí to the east (a great purse-shaped desert valley roughly 150 miles long and 100 wide), had their way with passengers who had no refuge. Where there was an occasional ranch, it was centered on a hacienda built like a square fort, with sentries on the flat roof, and marksmen’s portholes, and a great timbered double doorway bolted and barred every night. Once accepted within, travellers were treated to good food, ingenious song and dance accompanied by guitars, and even folk plays in pantomime. By day men worked in the close-lying fields, while women cooked or sewed; but an Englishman passing by such a wilderness lodgement remarked that “severe labor is unknown to either men or women.” The United States citizens who had taken Mexican territory north of Chihuahua were known locally as “the barbarians of the North.”
Lamy met a continuing sequence of land forms as he went. In effect, all of that Mexico which he travelled was a vast repetition of land which in many ways resembled New Mexico—there was a great terrestrial rhythm which repeated mountain, desert, and river course (whether wet or dry), which he crossed innumerable times as he rode. Such a sequence of land supported a great variety of animals—the grizzly and brown bears, big-horn sheep, elk, many kinds of deer and antelope, the peccary, rabbits, and the wolf, and the coyote who sang dolefully at night. He could see fantastic birds—the paysano or chaparral cock, the great cranes of the sand hills, quail—a wonderful variety of insects, including the centipede, and the tarantula; and the rattlesnake, the copperhead, the horned toad, and the scorpion “whose sting, was sometimes fatal to children or,” noted the Englishman with originality, “persons of inflammable temperament.” Where anything grew from the ground, it was likely to be the mesquite or greasewood, unless near a ranch or in a wet arroyo a few willows or alamito—little cotton-wood—were to be seen.
With human habitations so far apart, it was occasionally reassuring to see in the distance—which diminished so slowly—an occasional wayside chapel, with a tiled dome, pink or blue, and a corner tower, and a frame of trees; and yet seen more closely, it would show a black cavern of an open door in its ornamented plaster front, the doors awry on their hinges, or thrown down, and within, drifts of desert sand and cracked walls—the work of such Indian people as never stayed, but who must destroy the works of strangers on the land.
It was a welcome, if implausible sight, in that vast vacancy, to discern at last, two hundred thirty miles south of El Paso del Norte, the city of Chihuahua, which lay against dust-colored hills. It was built on rolling land, and its Spanish aqueduct, with its “stupendous arches,” whitewashed houses, and the towers of its churches and its reaches of trees rising from patio gardens under the pitiless sun, made it seem larger than it was. Not as old as Santa Fe, it had a population of perhaps ten thousand. It was the most considerable town of northern Mexico, where trade routes converged from New Mexico, Sonora, and California, and where silver from thriving mines in the sierra to the west was hauled into town. What was known as the Santa Fe Trail, which began at Independence, Missouri, actually ended in Chihuahua, with Santa Fe as a midway point. A merchant city, Chihuahua was twelve hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies from the capital city of Mexico, but even in its isolation it had been reasonably well sustained by the viceregal government of Spain. Since the independence of Mexico, the city had been left more or less as a wilderness outpost, to live on its own resources.
Lamy rode into town through streets laid out in squares, unlike those of Santa Fe, which had seemed to follow the trails of animals seeking the meagre watercourse of the Santa Fe Creek. The houses of the Chihuahueños were of adobe, but many were cornered and corniced with cut stone from the dusty hills about. At the center rose the cathedral, with its towers over a hundred feet tall, whose bells marked the many services of the day. The great bell, said a Santa Fe trader, could be heard at a distance of twenty-five miles. Lamy could see that the façade of the cathedral, which the English traveller said was built “in no style of architecture,” displayed niches which contained life-sized figures of Christ and the twelve apostles. Behind the grand façade was an interior which bore “striking marks of poverty and neglect,” Across from the cathedral was a portal or portico running the whole length of one side of the plaza. It was the habit of the residents to string along the portal roof the scalps of raiding Indians which had been taken by hunters paid by the local government. Not long before Lamy’s passage through town, one hundred and seventy fresh Apache scalps had been paraded through the streets by a procession of men, women, and children. The display was a daily reminder of what a journey away from the protection of the city might mean. Americans and “Northerners” were not warmly welcomed in Chihuahua either—the Chihuahueños, from the governor on down, still remembered “every class of excesses” committed against them by the invading army from the States in the recent war.
Lamy now had five hundred miles left to go across the open country. In long stretches the road became a trail which was at times hard to follow. Having crossed mountain, desert, valley, in the familiar sequence, by now he had become a plainsman who knew how to watch for features of the land which would serve Indians as hiding places. Space and silence and pouring light by day; and sometimes in optical illusions the strange, imagined presence of savages—a species of cactus which had a thick body and stood at about the height of a man, crowned with spikes which at certain distances and lights looked startlingly like an Indian with a great crest of feathers. By night, under the stars, a sense greater than ever of the vastness of the land and its emptiness, and its silence, until the long cry of the coyote came over the distance; or, nearby, the obscure crackings and rattlings of shelled insects alerting the ground sleeper.
He passed the small town of Camargo, where the church was distempered in pale yellow, while its tower was rose-pink and the dome over the sanctuary a faded blue, all against bare rock mountains in the distance. There were hardships and glories in the weather—sometimes came storms which seemed as wide as a continent, the airy equivalent of the desert reaches in size; and then the riders took shelter beside their horses. Again, there were storms of light itself, breaking through clouds above mountains, and standing rays of gold air against distant blue, and trailing far veils of rain which often never reached the ground but seemed to become part of the very light itself; and infinity, perhaps even eternity, had an image.
Coming to a settlement days apart from any other, the traveller might find himself in the midst of an alarum—I
ndians had been sighted and lost and seen again, and the hacienda within its fortress limits was a turmoil of action, as the master and all his household prepared to resist attack. Animals to secure within the walls; children to put safely away; food to be cooked and stored by the terrified women; water drawn; weapons cleaned and loaded; prayers recited; farmers called in from the fields; and then the long wait. And if it was a needless scare, then what followed would be relief expressed in festivity, with music and abundant food dipped with tortillas out of common bowls and all hospitality for the harmless stranger. He found the ways of the house much like those of Santa Fe—some furniture left over from the Spanish centuries, and some from memories of the Moors.
If Indians did not come, traders sometimes did, and then the household spent hours going over goods, bartering for stuffs, pulling silver pieces out of buckskin bolsónes to buy utensils or pretty trifles. Everyone had stories to exchange—odd weather, escapes from Indians, good advice as to landmarks and passages for anyone travelling alone, locations, and of these, like the Arroyo de los Indios, where the rider might find enough water, caught in deep places, and cool, and perhaps shaded by a high bank from the hot sky, where he could pause for a bath, even then keeping watch for those after whom the arroyo was named, for they had made a trail which crossed it.
It was a land rich in mines—the road passed through Hidalgo del Parral, where pale tailing lay against the slate-gray mountains from which the ore was taken. The village had a three-tiered bell tower rising above its small, square adobe houses which were washed in many different colors. Durango state was a center for iron mining. If Parral seemed like an outpost of Durango city, it was not quite halfway there from Chihuahua.