Lamy of Santa Fe

by Paul Horgan

  But it was still evident that Martínez and his allies among the clergy were not yet subdued, even after the excommunication; and Lamy foresaw what would ensue if he should die, leaving the bishropic vacant: the native clergy would at once surge back into power and life would revert to the state of ignorance and worse, which he had found six years ago. To counter such a possibility, he asked his metropolitan, Archbishop P. R. Kenrick of St Louis, to forward a petition to Rome proposing the creation of a chapter of cathedral canons for Santa Fe. Their appointment would rest under the discretion of the bishop. They would of course be members of the clergy loyal to him and his reforms. It was the custom in Mexican dioceses that the chapter elect its vicar, who would temporarily succeed a bishop until his successor was named by Rome. As vicar general, without the chapter, Machebeuf would succeed Lamy; but the Mexican clergy would surely refuse to respect his authority. In that case the cathedral canons would govern in any interim. Since the matter seemed so urgent, Kenrick added the suggestion that, if a chapter were not approved by Rome, at least a council of consultors might be created under his archdiocese which would hold the authority to act in place of a chapter at Santa Fe, to protect the see of Santa Fe in the event of Lamy’s death. Cardinal Barnabo duly forwarded the proposal to Pius IX.

  That it was not acted upon at once was an indication of how difficult—how almost impossible—it was to make real the actual state of affairs, the vast extent of the land and its scattered needs, the primitiveness of all conditions, to those across the world who could see only through clerkly reports, and who, in their great bureaux and palaces, must consider most affairs as abstractions, in a world-wide structure which had to be governed as a whole, rather than in terms of its parts.

  vi.

  Schism

  AND STILL CONTINUING was the nagging indecision about Doñana—the Condado—La Mesilla (the interchangeable terms which helped to confuse the Vatican for years). Lamy wrote to Barnabo in January 1857, begging once more for the final assignment of the great strip of territory across southern New Mexico/Arizona, making the point now that an area under the civil control of one nation (the United States) could never be satisfactorily managed in ecclesiastical matters under the control of another nation (Mexico). The bishop added, “Please note that the priest who is administering these areas was the one [Ortiz?] who revolted against my authority and who has sought refuge in these parts.” The implication was strong that Zubiría was content to have him there to hold the district for Durango.

  Barnabo replied to Lamy in February that he had never had an answer from Zubiría to his letter of three years earlier asking for Durango’s view of the dispute, and said that it was the Vatican’s wish to help Lamy “in any way possible.” Lamy then wrote asking for a copy of Zubiría’s letter of 1854, which Barnabo sent, asking for Lamy’s comments on it. Lamy’s arguments were familiar, and again, in May, he asked for news of a settlement by Rome; but now he went further: he declared that in his opinion the bishop of Durango was “hardly able to write because of his age,” and, added Lamy, “I have very strong reasons for suspecting that one of the vicars from the neighborhood of El Paso is allowed to interpret various orders after his own fashion, even to the decrees from the Holy See.” Yet once again a silence of months descended upon the affair.

  Lamy spent much of the summer in the open land, visiting distant missions. He returned to Santa Fe to carry the Blessed Sacrament in the procession of Corpus Christi, when the garrison band marched and played ahead of him, and “the discharge of cannon balls also added much to the solemnity,” and to the felicity of the Mother Superior.

  On the following day Machebeuf left for the Mississippi to meet two new priests from the diocese of Le Mans, in France, and others who would return with him to Santa Fe. He travelled by the mail carrier’ coach. There was no armed escort. He thought Indians on the whole were well disposed, though when gathered in great numbers were emboldened to do ill, but generally they were “indolent, they stole out of need, and rarely attacked except in self-defense, or to avenge those of their people who had been killed!” So far, he had never had a misadventure with Indians, and felt entirely safe with them.

  For all his courage and gaiety, Machebeuf’s sense of what was fun had on at least one occasion that streak of mockery or cruelty which newcomers often showed to races whom they saw as inferior. One day a dozen or so Indians appeared in the mail carrier’s camp during the halt for a meal of ham and biscuits. As one of them already knew Machebeuf, he brought friends to join him for dinner on the ground. Machebeuf offered them salty meat, which they refused. An Indian then saw “a little gray powder and he wanted some of that. I gave him a spoonful of it, and he gave us a free exhibition of facial contortion which was interesting and amusing. The powder was pepper! Another spied a bottle half full of what he thought was whiskey, and he wanted a taste. I gave him a big spoonful, which he swallowed, but he threw the spoon away and began to cough. He said that such whiskey was good only for dogs. He had tasted of my vinegar!” When his little jokes were done with, Machebeuf gave his guests some coffee, sugar, and biscuits.

  He met with a disappointment at St Louis—the bishop of Le Mans had at the last minute withdrawn permission for the two expected priests to sail for America. He went on to Louisville, where Lamy’s niece Marie, and another girl her age—she was then fourteen—were waiting for him. Both would return with him to Santa Fe, to enter the Loretto convent there, first as students, later as postulants. Marie by now had spent six years with the New Orleans Ursulines. She was a lovely, round-faced child, with the dark hair and brilliant dark eyes of the family. She wore discreet little gold earrings, and when dressed up for a daguerreotype to send home to France, a short-caped black bombazine dress. Gravity, charm, and intelligence shone in her expression. Joining her uncle out West was the great adventure of her life. She was, said Machebeuf, “innocent as an angel.”

  His westward party included also a French gardener from Versailles, who had already spent two years at Santa Fe and was now going back again, three Mexican servants to attend to the vicar general’s two carriages and equipment, two Frenchmen from Besançon, an Irish seminarian, and others to the number of ten. Two caravans had started out on to the trail on 7 September, but they went slowly, and Machebeuf with his people would leave on the tenth to overtake one of them which had an Army detachment of four hundred and fifty men, whose commanding officer he knew well. It was not in his nature to fear anything for himself, but with the two girls in his care, he was glad to have the protection of the soldiers. “You will understand the reason,” he wrote to his sister. A few days out from Kansas City they passed the Last Chance Store at Council Grove—a one-storey stone building by a single cottonwood tree—and slowly drew away into the empty distance of the prairie crossing.

  At Santa Fe, Lamy heard strange news from Mexico—it seemed that in Chihuahua, things were in “a very bad state,” and that some of the local clergy wanted to be allied with Santa Fe. He had thought earlier in the year that he might travel to Mexico to try to raise money for his diocese, but duties had kept him home, visiting his own missions in their isolation. He went by horseback, often alone. In his saddlebag he kept bread, crackers, and a few hard-boiled eggs. For the rest, as he said, he lived on the “fat of the land,” by which he meant the principal fare in the Mexican diet—“el bendito frijole y el santo atole (the blessed bean and the holy corn mush).” On a visit to a Pueblo mission he was obliged by his good manners to eat a piece of a butchered dog which had been dragged out before him as a special delicacy.

  New villages were founded every year, and when attended by a newly assigned missionary, could serve as bases for restoring the Church to the various pueblos. A dot on the map here, another there, where before nothing had been, would in time make a network of society possible, and with it, increased safety from the thousands of unsettled Indians who, as Lamy told Purcell, made it perilous to venture out even six miles from the capital. To be sure
, there were United States soldiers stationed here and there, but not as many as needed, and moreover, he remarked in his dry style, it would require, to be effective, ten thousand men “a little more accustomed to fatigue and hardship” than those already on station. Meanwhile, there were conversions among the troops. Lamy noted that Machebeuf baptized them, and also a “very intelligent negro, who is free, as we have no slaves here.”

  Distance and poverty were not so fully disposed of in those years as the long troubles with the clergy revolt. Lamy paid what he could of his accumulated debts to Purcell, and regretted that in his old church of Covington he had been obliged to leave other parish debts behind him, but hoped these would be assumed by Bishop Carrel of that diocese. Meanwhile he must see that new seminarians were educated for New Mexico—the two young Mexicans at Clermont, whose board of a thousand francs per year must be paid by the Society at Paris, and another young man named Peter Hart, whom he was sending to Purcell for theological studies. Hart had already been ordained subdeacon by Lamy, and was an “excellent young man … not of bright talents but his application and his virtue will make up for that.”

  Not all problems were dramatic but for all that, must be heeded—to work with what was at hand; to measure time itself by patience when snows closed the direct trail eastward for months at a time and mail had to be sent by way of the New Orleans courier; to educate children free whose family had nothing; and in fact, to help establish free public schools for the territory at large (Lamy was one of the three commissioners who would guide free public education into being in New Mexico). Satisfactions had to be modestly measured: “our schools are going on pretty well, specially the sister’s.” He had given the Lorettines a deed, now, to the house he had vacated for them: the land, the buildings and furniture, including fifty bedsteads with bedding, chairs, carpets, and pianos, all for three thousand dollars to be repaid in three years (without interest) from the fees of pupils who could afford to pay. He hoped to procure “a good Mexican pony” for Purcell, which he would send him next year—it was too late for this year as the autumn of 1857 was drawing into winter when the trail would be precarious. Political affairs looked auspicious, now that Gallegos was out of power in Washington.

  But it was too much to hope that Martínez could long remain silent. In October he wrote to Lamy, reporting—surely to make trouble—that Pastor Ortiz and he had come to an agreement about dividing the parish duties of Taos, quite as though Martínez had now assigned to Ortiz what was already and only his. As an afterthought to his old dispute with Lamy, he could not resist raising again his position on tithing, to point out that as long ago as 1829 he had made his familiar objections on the subject to the “High Mexican government,” and had newspaper clippings to prove it. He wrote also to Ortiz to bestow on him a share of the Taos priestly duties, citing an agreement he said Ortiz had given him in writing, and magnanimously noted that he, Martínez, had already referred to Ortiz one case of a marriage and another of a burial, blandly in the tone of one reputable professional to another. He chided Ortiz for presuming to call at the house of a Martínez brother to collect tithes, and for stating that those who would not pay would not be granted the sacraments, and accused him of working to establish for himself an “emphyteusis” or personal domain. It would be a disastrous document to fall under the eye of a superior, and Ortiz replied indignantly the next day, refuting every statement—“I have never consented to your administering any Sacraments to any persons”—and stressing further that in respect to tithes, that “he who does not pay what he owes, because he cannot pay, will certainly not be condemned.”

  Driven by enmities which tormented him long after he could have any effect, Martínez again turned to the public print in the Gaceta de Santa Fe, and in a series of tracts in pamphlet form which he issued from Taos. Variously, in such publications, he pursued Lamy for years with shrieks all the louder for their impotence. All the old charges came forth again—Lamy was concerned only with “money, money, money,” Lamy “profaned the sacred temples,” Lamy had collected for his own party “one hundred thousand dollars” (1859); Lamy was not a true religionist but a “fanatic,” while Martínez took to himself the new rationalism of “this century of light”; repudiated the bishop as his religious superior; called him a liar; accused him outright of simony; of “acting against the laws of the church”; and referred to him and Machebeuf as “ravening wolves”—Matthew 7: 15,16 (1860); justified his own schisms by quoting from Thomas Aquinas to prove that even a layman could absolve sinners (1861); all in frenzies of rhetoric which reflected his ceaseless miseries of mind.

  For there could be no doubt that Martínez, seeing himself in the libertarian posture (similar to Diderot’s definition of liberté naturelle in the Encyclopedic), was wretchedly unhappy in his schism. His whole life, with its often generous efforts to civilize in isolation the oncoming generations through his own diligent but restricted learning, had been set awry by several forces any one of which he might have been able to face peacefully, but which together brought him only torment against which he was powerless, if defiant.

  To begin with, his ire was undoubtedly patriotic—that of an educated native full of resistance to foreign authority—a double authority at that. It was bad enough to come under Anglo-American control, but when to that was added another foreign domination through the presence of a strict French prelate, Martínez (like his colleagues) could not contain his sense of injury. Further, a whole tradition of patronal style was being heedlessly discredited: everything Mexican was treated as inferior by the two sets of newcomers. Mexicans, rich or poor, ignorant or informed, were as proud as the Spaniards and Indians of their heritage, and as properly resentful of slights. Martínez saw himself as a learned man, a social benefactor, and when made to feel inferior, he was bitterly offended. Again, he felt himself, though a sincere churchman, an exponent of the modern civil enlightenment; and it was galling to submit to the rectitude of a conservative bishop to whom the anti-clericalism of the French Revolution and its aftermath was disgraceful. Acting against Lamy, Martínez oddly invoked the sanctions both of scriptural precedent and libertarian tolerance. And finally, his intemperate behavior might have been a result of his increasingly bad health in the malaise of premature old age. chronic toxicity of his affliction may well have exacerbated his mental distress, inducing him to the cholers which embittered his last years, until he was left with only the ashes of the old consuming conflict, in the pathos of learned agonies spent for a footless cause.

  But if Martínez was the protagonist of one culture, the bishop was the custodian and exemplar of another, which under his responsibility for the general good had to win the day in both spiritual and temporal affairs. Though the belief and vocation of both men stemmed from the same source—Rome—the modifying forces to which each was subject in his own history accounted for most of the differences between them.

  Lamy was closer to the source than Martínez, and as bishop must speak with finality in its name. Post-Revolutionary France had revived the piety, the social rectitude, which the Enlightenment had discredited for a generation or two. Lamy came into his fullness of mind after the reign of libertarian principles, and during the restoration of the Church.

  Martínez, on the other hand, so far removed not only from Mexico, but from Europe, was the victim of that cultural lag always suffered by the provincial: his ideas had been formed by imported styles of mind long after they had lost novelty at the point of origin.

  Martínez thought of his basic ideas as modern. Lamy believed his own to be eternal. In any case, beyond theological and cultural differences, the temperaments of the two men inevitably must have clashed; for one was a supreme egotist, a master in a little house who could never be a servant, while the other, self-disciplined in mildness, was a servant in a great domain who knew, when necessary, how to be a master. The bishop’s Romanesque mysticism, embedded in the sacred traditionalism of both peasant and priest, met head on the imperfectly a
ssimilated spirit of the Mexican effort to create its own character out of tumultuous elements—rebellion against Spain, survivals of the Indian strains in the mixed blood of post-Cortez Mexico, the struggle to retain its proud native nature by a Mexican population subject to recent waves of conquest and condescension in several forms.

  In the end, Lamy, once his dismissal of Martínez was done, simply had to ignore him and his allies thereafter, and get on with work more demanding and productive, in a frame of responsibility as vast as the lands, with their far people in desert and mountain, awaiting what he had been sent to bring to them across the whole desert Southwest.

  VII

  THE COLONISTS

  1858–1863

  i.

  Niceties of Geography

  “LA COUR DE ROME”—in Machebeuf’s words—”dont les lenteurs sont bien connues,” had yet to resolve, in its “well-known procrastination,” Lamy’s official claim to his Gadsden Purchase lands. In the spring of 1858, nobody yet had a clear legal right to act as spiritual proprietors of Doñana (the village or the county), Las Cruces (the town), La Mesilla (the valley or the village), or the comitatus or condado (the whole ill-defined “county”). None of the parties to the dispute understood in common what these terms precisely designated. Rome heard them referred to interchangeably by Durango, and such was the practice of the local people themselves. Lamy knew exactly what he himself meant—all that land granted to the United States under the final boundary survey, by which he should control the religious aspects of everything from El Paso-Fort Bliss on the Rio Grande west to “Arizona,” and north in a parallel line which passed through Las Cruces at the southern end of the Dead Man’s March. All the rest of New Mexico was already in his diocese, which was taken unofficially to include what later was demarked as Arizona. It was not that the Vatican was ignoring the issue, but that all its machinery moved in such agonizing indecision. The affair was under study there in March, in an exhaustive review of the whole problem, and the Propaganda Fide slowly concluded that Lamy’s claims were the more legitimate, and recommended to the Pope that his petition be granted, and that the disputed lands be assigned to him. Pius was inclined to agree, and the bureau was gratified to learn at last that Zubiría seemed willing to yield out of his knowledge of his earlier visits to the area. But he and Lamy and Rome were still all talking about different niceties of geography, thanks to the old confusion of place names. Debate on these points consumed months and a firm decision was not yet promulgated.