by Paul Horgan
Meriwether soon saw how things stood concerning Indians. There had been a United States Army battle against Apaches north of Santa Fe a few months before his arrival in which the soldiers had been defeated with heavy losses. Mexican shepherds were in constant danger from Indian raiders. Meriwether officially recommended to the Indian Office at Washington that the Indians should either be impartially fed and clothed to a certain extent or chastised decisively. Neither course was followed. The suspenseful combination of general Indian unrest broken by periodic outbreaks prevailed.
But the Indians soon had their own view of Lamy. He wrote to Paris about a recent event which touched him. “Our good Indians are of a primitive simplicity. Lately a few chiefs [presumably from various pueblos] came to visit me.” He showed them the chapel of the Loretto sisters—”a simple room with a few decorations”—liturgical objects—which he had brought from the recent Baltimore trip, and they were astonished. They knelt and asked if they might touch the sacred articles with their lips. The bishop gave each of them a medal and a rosary, “but then I saw on their faces that they were still expecting something, so I asked them to tell me what they wished for.” One of them said to him in Spanish,
“Grandfather, Father of prayer, we came from far to see you, we are hungry, and therefore you must give us bread to go back to our family.”
The bishop replied,
“I am poor, but I will try to give you some provisions.”
“You poor!” said the chief. “See the beautiful red robe you wear”—pointing to the bishop’s cassock—”while we are scarcely covered with scraps of fur.…”
Long later, Lamy’s nephew Hippolyte, reminiscing about his uncle, said that Indians regarded him highly—”for them, he was the Great Captain.”
As always, Santa Fe remained a city with its own special character; and when strangers were not noticing the Indians who came and went, they were making observations on the local morality, which offered enlivening differences—in public, certainly—from the customs of the Atlantic coast. Immigrants from that quarter were fluent in their descriptions and judgements of the Santa Fe society.
At mid-nineteenth century, “the people of New Mexico,” noted the United States territorial secretary, “have never received moral training, in the American sense of the word.” They had been allowed to grow up from infancy to manhood without being taught that it was wrong to indulge in vicious habits, and he particularized: the standard of female chastity was “deplorably low”; prostitution was carried to a fearful extent; it was quite common for parents to “sell their daughters for money to gratify the lust of the purchaser.” The catalogue, as evidence, supported Lamy’s findings, and his ameliorative efforts. Gambling flourished, and its presiding professional in Santa Fe was Señora Gertrudes Barcelo, a native of Taos. She made such a success of her work that she became a member of the city’s best society. When she died during Lamy’s early days in New Mexico, mortuary honors were heaped upon her and the high style of her funeral scandalized an Anglican bishop who later happened to be in Santa Fe and heard about it. He told his diary that the funeral of this “notorious prostitute and gambler [was] utterly disgraceful to Bishop Lamy,” for “she was buried with great pomp. Streets swept clean, grand procession. Bishop’s bill on record in court … amounting to $1597.” Though done in Lamy’s name, the obsequies, according to later evidence, seemed to have been the work of Ortiz, the rural dean.
Other spectacles also interested newcomers. The daily market in the plaza was lively. Country ranchers and Indians from the pueblos brought their produce to sell in town, displayed it under the porticoes of the plaza, and sat all day by their wares. They strung their meat on lines attached to the pillars of the portales, put their vegetables in rows on the ground, in season offered daily bundles of fresh-cut hay weighing twelve pounds at twelve and a half cents per sheaf. The shoppers could find mutton, a pig, “red peppers, beans, onions … enormous … milk, bread, cheese, and in the proper season, grapes, wild plums, and wild berries.” Winter brought fresh game shot in the mountains above town—venison, turkeys, even bear. At the Exchange Hotel the family-style table was spread with such provisions, and even, at times, “luxuries.” On Sundays crowds gathered to watch cock fights, with the glaring birds cheered on by everyone from beggar to priest.
Amidst all this local style, New Mexicans, like Americans everywhere in their time, hoped for the coming of the great quickener of the national life—the railroad. Even in the early 1850s the New Mexico territorial assembly asked that a memorial be laid before the House of Representatives in Congress “in favor of the establishing of a national railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean.” The memorial “very briefly gave the reasons why the road in question should be located so as to pass through New Mexico.” First, New Mexico was centrally positioned and would be a connecting point with several western lines; second, construction would be cheap as the track need not cross “a single elevation”; third, the New Mexico route would never be “impeded by snow”; and finally, the region had an abundance of “stone coal” for locomotives. The memorial hoped also that the electric telegraph could be constructed across New Mexico. The petition was referred to the Committee on Printing. Lamy himself said in June 1853, “There is great talk of the Pacific railroad, and some hopes that it will run through New Mexico. Then”—he was writing to Purcell—”you might come and see our beautiful mountains, and breathe purest kind of air.…” (Almost three decades were to pass before the tracks would come that way.)
Meanwhile, Santa Fe was animated by other than mechanical means. All people took pleasure to one or another degree from ceremony; but the Mexicans of Santa Fe, in their world-remoteness, poverty, and innate public style, responded perhaps more than others to the delights of spectacle. The ancient rituals of the Church had been locally enfeebled for generations. Lamy now gave demonstrations in the streets of the city of the veneration owed by Catholics to the very heart of their faith. Spectacle alone may have moved some of the populace, but for the great majority, what was within outward form began to be reawakened in meaning. Writing to Purcell, Lamy gave a simple account of how all responded.
Sunday within the octave of Corpus Christi [1853] we had a solemn procession of the Blessed Sacrament, the weather was beautiful, the streets had been well cleaned, and before every house and store where the Blessed Sacrament was to pass, they had put ornaments of every kind, the Americans who have fine stores most all round la plaza were not behind the Mexicans, they showed a fine spirit. Seven beautiful repositorys had been made in different places, and at each one I had to stop with the Blessed Sacrament. I had deacon and subdeacon with a master of ceremony for the procession, the choir composed of ten small Mexican boys and their two teachers performed well, accompanied by the harmonium, we had eighteen enfants de choeur, four censor-bearers, and some to throw flowers, a great number of banners were carried in the procession, the commanding officer was kind enough to lend us some cannons, and from the evening before until after the procession was over they fired several rounds, the people seemed to be delighted with the ceremony, a good lady from one of the best families of this place said in the evening: ahora tengo gusto para rezar, now I feel a pleasure to say my prayers. All passed off with good order, at high mass which is said every day during the octave, after which benediction is given, we have a great number of people and of communicants.
So in the midst of his stern attention to disciplinary needs, he had the reassurance of “a good lady” that his deepest purpose was taking effect. With the bishop in mitre and cope bringing up the rear, the procession would sway down the well-swept earth of San Francisco street. Fringed and tasselled banners took the breeze, spectators crowded the rooftops and streetsides, and at the head of the street, the old parroquia loomed with its fortress-like towers; and far beyond, the green-blue air of the mountains glistened in the sun. As Lamy was then using the old Castrense as his church, the procession would return to it in t
he plaza after winding past the improvised shrines in the principal streets.
But if this was a first fruitful demonstration, life could not be sustained by processions; and Lamy was making plans to go to Europe in January 1854 “to obtain missionaries and also some help”—the latter in finances. Other help he was powerless to administer—that which was needed to meet the perils of the open country. On 1 August he wrote: “the Indian neighbors … only few days ago they killed four or five Mexican shepherds who were herding their animals at some distance from the settlements, and took away, according to the report, about ten thousand sheep. I don’t know if some measures will be taken to chastise them; I hope, the people will raise en masse to recover their property, if the government suffers passively these murders and depredations, as it has done for some years past.”
For his own work, he summoned Machebeuf to join him at his small ranch in the country a few miles out in Tesuque Canyon. There he gave his orders to Machebeuf for the administration of the church during his absence. The place enraptured Machebeuf—not the house, it was no palace, he wrote to his sister at Riom. What almost defied description was the romantic and picturesque beauty of the site—”the accidents of the terrain,” as he put it. There Lamy would often go for private study, meditation, rest after long journeys, and renewal of his countryman’s spirit.
The elevation of Santa Fe to diocesan status was a matter of open news when the Cincinnati Catholic Telegraph published it, but with a curious error. It announced the new bishop of Santa Fe to be Don Juan Felipe Ortiz, who had for so long been vicar there. A highly necessary correction was published, in Spanish, for all to read, in the Santa Fe New Mexican for 3 December 1853, making it clear that the matter was a simple confusion of the titles vicar forane (Ortiz) and vicar apostolic (Lamy), and that the most reverend bishop of Santa Fe was of course Lamy. On the Feast of the Epiphany, 6 January 1854, the bishop published a pastoral letter which announced the new status of the diocese and himself. The change from that of vicariate apostolic was taken to be a great honor to come to Santa Fe and its spiritual leader; and “the dullness of Santa Fe was somewhat broken in upon by an entertainment given in the vestry-rooms of the parish church to Bishop Lamy, on the eve of his departure for Rome.”
It was a formal party, with cards of invitation for five in the afternoon. The governor attended, along with the top military command, leading citizens and merchants, and members of the two houses of the legislative assembly. At the proper moment, a committee went to fetch the bishop and escorted him to the vestry, where all rose at his appearance “with the respect due to his personal and official character.” An hour of genteel conversation and seasonal compliments followed until supper was announced at seven o’clock, to be served across the patio in another building. The guests were met with “an abundance of the necessaries and the luxuries of life,” including various kinds of wines. The bishop said grace, the guests fell to, a group of students made music, and at the end of the banquet, while the wine still went round, a deputation of schoolboys read a farewell address to the bishop in English, French, and Spanish. Words, they said, were but the faint echo of their heartfelt feelings; but in looking upon the present concourse, His Excellency could perceive what their lips were unable to express. A grand motive carried him to Europe. The speakers were convinced that he would defend their interests with dignity, and they were certain that the smallest shade of an eclipse would never darken the brightness of his character. Their fervent prayers would ascend for his happiness and success in his journey, surrounded as he would be by numerous cares and troubles at every step in the discharge of his high duties. They begged him to remember that he would be leaving there, in his true country, souls innumerable who sought his personal happiness, and who prayed God that the same hand of Omnipotence which would conduct the bark which would carry him over the boundless ocean seas would, in his return to these shores, cause to shine on his noble brow the rays of a new star on its appearance in the heavens.
Excessive adulation was to be listened to impassively. If such rhetoric of the period gave more pleasure to those who made use of it (the nuns who, carried away, probably wrote it, and the scholars who spoke it) than to the listener, it was his nature to accept reverence more for the pleasure of those who gave than received it. His plans for the journey were completed. He was taking with him two promising Mexican youths to further their studies in the classics and theology at Rome. They would come back as priests to Santa Fe “to help prune away that portion of the Lord’s vineyard so covered with brambles and thorns,” as Machebeuf put it. With him also he took as his trusted chaplain and secretary Father Eulógio Ortiz, the old vicar’s brother. Two days after the farewell party he published another pastoral letter—14 January 1854—admonishing pastors and people about proper preparation for the sacraments, matrimonial conduct, observance of tithing support, and a firm command that “not a single peso of the holy parish fund was to be spent for theatrical comedies, dances, and other profane diversions.”
Soon afterward, Lamy left for the plains, the Atlantic, England, Rome, and France, while Machebeuf remained in charge as vicar general, with the particular charge of consolidating Albuquerque in its recovery from the style, clerical and secular, of Father Gallegos. This, for the past two years, had been largely Machebeuf’s to cope with, while under assault from clergy and citizens almost everywhere.
iv.
Trouble at Albuquerque
EVEN BEFORE HIS JOURNEY to Durango and back in 1851, Lamy had received petitions against Gallegos from some of the more concerned citizens. These were grave enough to induce Lamy to confront Gallegos with them, who rather wittily replied that any improprieties on his part were “exaggerated”—this despite the public knowledge of his irregular domestic life, his love of gambling, his involvement in private business affairs to the detriment of his duties as pastor of San Felipe de Neri at Albuquerque. Lamy sent him warnings for a year which he more or less appeared to heed; but no sooner had the bishop gone to the Baltimore Council than Gallegos, openly indifferent to the authority of Machebeuf acting for Lamy, resumed his old habits, including his lively involvement in private mercantile ventures. In the late summer of 1852, as Lamy was returning from Baltimore, Gallegos was completing arrangements for a journey to Mexico. A prosperous trader, he would take seven waggon loads of merchandise. Letting it be known that the vicar general had, in the name of the bishop, given him permission to make the trip, he delegated his parish duties to Father José de Jesús Lujan, and was just about to start when he heard that Lamy had returned to Santa Fe. It was too late for Gallegos to abandon his intention. He departed as planned.
But it seemed after all that he had gone without permission, and Lamy swiftly sent Machebeuf to take charge of the Albuquerque parish, and to publish a decree of suspension against the absent Gallegos. Machebeuf ordered Father Lujan to remove himself from parish affairs, declaring that he himself would henceforth administer them exclusively, even if this must mean intermittently, as he would also have to be absent on service to the lesser towns of the Rio Grande.
The resulting outcry was immediate. Martínez wrote Lamy from Taos making charges of violation of Canon Law and once again animating the old accusations against Machebeuf. Through a spokesman, Ambrosio Armijo, probate judge, nine hundred fifty citizens of Albuquerque sent a petition to Lamy in defense of Gallegos, making their case out of what he had told them, and of what they now suffered. Gallegos, they claimed, had gone to Mexico on “important business” with Bishop Zubiría. He had gone with the permission, he insisted, of the vicar general, leaving Father Lujan to act for him. Imagine their sorrow and misfortune when a few days later Lujan had been removed, leaving them to spiritual abandonment in the “infrequent visitations of Senor Machebeuf,” who “under the fictitious guise of an apostle” neglected everyone, even those needing the last rites for the dying. Think of the many who had died without this consolation. More, in his “boring and annoying preachings,” M
achebeuf threatened denial of the sacraments to all who did not pay tithes. If he began his sermons with the Gospel, he ended up with “the private lives of the Faithful.” He was driving Catholics into the arms of the Protestant churches. Disgracefully he appropriated benefices for his own appetites. But two weeks ago—on 1 March 1853—Gallegos had returned from Mexico. They hailed him with joy and love, and they now begged the bishop to restore their pastor to them and to withdraw Machebeuf, and they kissed the hands of His Illustrious Lordship.
Two days later Lamy, addressing Judge Armijo, replied curtly. “The rehabilitation of Father Gallegos will be very difficult indeed, at least for now, because he did not obey my orders during my absence, and furthermore, he left his parish without the permission of his superiors. As for the removal … of the Vicar Machebeuf; let me tell you this: that this is my business alone, and I myself will decide what is to be done about the errors of which you accuse him. At the same time, let me give you some advice in all charity: that you ought to adhere closely to Ecclesiastical Authority; otherwise, you place yourselves in the gravest of difficulties.”
After a hiatus of six weeks, the correspondence was resumed with Armijo protesting that his petitioners recognized the bishop’s authority “as such,” but they were surprised that the Ecclesiastical Authority now worked so hard “thus to intimidate them with threats of future difficulties, in order that they should now begin to keep the necessary silence.” To this Lamy replied, “I don’t want to threaten anybody, even though I have been threatened myself; and he dismissed complaints against Machebeuf by declaring that the vast majority of the people gave him their support—they went to confession in such numbers that they kept him in the confessional “until very late at night,” which they surely would not do if they feared for any betrayal of the secrecy of the confessional.