by Paul Horgan
At the village of Doñana the malaria gave him a troublesome spell of fever, but he was soon ready to travel, and he arrived at Santa Fe on 24 March, where Lamy “congratulated him heartily” upon his successful undertaking. For two months the malaria and, probably, the accumulated fatigue of his hard journey, kept him resting in Santa Fe. Now both he and Lamy, on similar missions, had travelled to what must have seemed like the ends of the earth, and, having achieved their aims, had come home with enough travellers’ tales to last a lifetime.
iv.
Again to Auvergne
THOUGH BY NOW, in 1859, Lamy had firmly established eighteen parishes with the young clergy he had successively brought from Europe, he knew this was only a beginning for the design he had in mind, which, however ample, would have to be thinly spread over the endless and wonderful spaces of his land. He had not only the land to conquer, but the future.
While Machebeuf was in Arizona and Sonora, Lamy had written to the Society at Paris to say that he was sending Father Peter Eguillon, his present vicar general, to France to find still more priests, and to enlist a group of members of the order of Christian Brothers for the purpose of establishing a permanent school for boys. It was true that from the beginning he had had a boys’ school, “more or less flourishing,” but the faculty consisted of priests who had other pressing duties than those of the teacher. He had seventeen possible candidates for seminary training, and there were a few elementary schools with sixty small scholars. But not all of this was stable, and he needed to have new teachers. He already had a house ready for them if they should come, and he hoped the Society would come to his aid to help pay for their expenses on the long voyage to Santa Fe, if they could be found. He capped his plea with an argument certainly calculated to stir response in Paris—with an educated body of youth in the province, the future would be protected against the “incredible efforts” of Protestant proselytizers who unless opposed would render the young Catholics indifferent, or even turn them into non-Catholics. Luckily, so far, “little damage” had been done; but meanwhile, the young people of the territory really were exposed to “grave dangers.” Sending Eguillon was a sacrifice, as he wrote to Purcell, for he would be left with only one young priest to attend to nine thousand Catholics, half of whom were “scattered through the county,” with “some villages forty miles distant … we will be pretty busy.” It was still evident that he was “very much in need of priests.”
Like Lamy and Machebeuf before him, and Flaget and Purcell before them, Peter Eguillon went direct to Clermont, where he had been educated, and began making his own vivid appeals to the new generation of seminarians at Mont-Ferrand. Irresistible attraction seemed always to lie in eloquent accounts of the worst conditions of hardship, peril, and every obstacle of poverty and isolation. Imagine—and then would come challenging accounts of experience which lost nothing in the telling: the searing travels over endless lands with Indians behind every rock, hunger in the desert, thousands of souls starved for the means of salvation, primitive peoples and their alien ways, a vicious society waiting to be cleansed, the test inherent in the vision of one hardy young man serving God alone in the wilderness.… Hard as they worked, said Eguillon, the few priests of New Mexico were incapable of meeting more than a fraction of the great need which existed.
His eloquence was effective. Almost at once two young priests, Jean Baptiste Salpointe and François Juvenceau, agreed to join him if their bishop would release them; and soon three seminarians also joined up. In addition, and directly in response to Lamy’s most urgent appeal, Eguillon was able to enlist four members of the Clermont establishment of the Brothers of the Christian Schools—Hilarien, Gondulph, Geramius, and Galmier Joseph—who were picked by their superior as the best teachers of his local group. Brother Hilarien already knew Spanish, a great advantage. With four more pre-seminary youths, and Father John B. Raverdy from Reims, Father Eguillon had a party totalling fourteen persons—one of them was to become the first vicar apostolic of Arizona, and, later, second archbishop of Santa Fe. They all embarked with him at Le Havre on 17 August in an American steamer, the Ariel, so old she was considered barely sea-worthy, and was soon afterwards scrapped. But the voyage, which took fourteen days, was without notable incident.
They travelled by rail to St Louis, then to “a small village” called Kansas City, and set out from there for the plains adventure. Salpointe saw “the green prairie undulated by the accidents of the ground, representing well enough a sea becoming swollen by a rising wind.” As usual, Lamy had sent waggoners and equipment to meet them, and the party now had seventeen men. The report was that Comanches were making war, so the newcomers waited for a caravan, found one to join, and were surprised to meet with cold wet weather, and even more so, to discover that Lamy had sent them heavy overcoats and thick boots in anticipation of just such a condition. After the usual marvels, observed in peace, the party came to Santa Fe on 27 October 1858, seventy-one days out of Le Havre, and were received by Lamy.
They were all amazed at his “affable simplicity,” for of a lord bishop they expected the grand manner. He gave them their first supper at his own table. Excited over their arrival, and eager to work, and, as one of them said, feeling at home, they “commenced to speak like Frenchmen, and, of course, exclusively in French.” The bishop sternly interrupted them.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “you do not know, it seems, that two languages only are necessary here—the Spanish, which is spoken generally by the people of this territory, and the English, which is the language of the government. Make your choice between the two, for the present, but leave your French parley for the country you have come from.”
The young men were abashed and fell silent, eating “with as little noise as possible, and with a kind of lost appetite.” The bishop watched them for a moment as chastened they bent their heads over his table to take his fare. Remembering what it was to be young, without experience, in a strange land, he felt a pang of compunction, and breaking into laughter, he reopened the conversation—in French.
Even so, he admonished them to study Spanish and English, and sent them to bed in a large dormitory room where they spread mattresses on the floor, though they would have preferred despite the late hour to visit the town. Reporting on their arrival, Lamy told the Society at Lyon what the young men had been spared—that all unknowing they had passed through a summer of terror, when many a massacre by Indians had occurred among the caravans, and that Providence had protected them “in an altogether special manner.” His new school was assured, and work began immediately to organize it.
Since May, Machebeuf was again in Arizona, with plans to visit all the western portions of New Mexico and even to push on to California. New silver mines were discovered over the area, and immigration began to increase. Once recovered from his malaria, he had wanted to set out for the West again without delay, but Lamy kept him in Santa Fe. When Machebeuf asked him why, Lamy replied,
“Oh, there was nothing in particular, and you were so long away that I was lonesome for your return. Just stay here with me for a while and rest. It will be pleasant to talk over old times. We have not had too much consolation of this intimate sort and I feel that we need some now. In a short time you can go again.”
There it was again—patience tempering impulse; but Lamy knew when to judge his friend ready for the road, and let him go. Machebeuf was off to the West again travelling now along the Gila Valley, in its long course from its source country in the Mogollon Mountains to central Arizona. He visited even the most isolated of settlements along the way until he came again to Tucson, having left the Gila, which ran itself to its confluence with the Colorado River. He stayed in the Tucson country for two months, and during that time began the repairs which would eventually bring much of its original state back to the mission of San Xavier, where he said Mass often, ministering to the Indians whose little jacales clustered about its heavy walls. He was arranging to go farther west when word came from
Lamy calling him back to Santa Fe once again. Dutifully he returned—but not before he heard of remarkable discoveries of gold in Colorado, far north of Pike’s Peak. It was information which would bear upon the rest of his life.
v.
Quarrel with Durango
BUT BEFORE MACHEBEUF reached Santa Fe in early summer, the continuing paper battle over the disputed southern areas of the diocese had flared alive again. Rome had sent Lamy a decree, in the hope that it was final, which recognized the cession granted by Bishop Loza, and equated it with Zubiría’s action in yielding up “Doñana and Las Cruces.” In other words, Rome had given Lamy the entire comitatus or condado—the vast county of the entire Gadsden Purchase, assuming that Zubiría and Loza were in agreement in the matter.
Yet even now Zubiría had not agreed that he yielded all; he retained “La Mesilla,” simply because it was not specifically itemized in the Vatican decree. La Mesilla was far the most important area in the entire region—both the village of that name, and the long agricultural Mesilla Valley, which stretched southward along the Rio Grande for thirty miles and sustained the densest population of the region. As it lay within the boundaries of “Doñana” the county, i.e., the Purchase, how could La Mesilla be kept as an enclave of Durango? But this was precisely what Zubiría demanded in a letter to Rome on 16 May. Lamy had assured him in April 1859 that Bishop Loza of Sonora had ceded the entire area, including La Mesilla.
Daily the matter was becoming more urgent, since a new American town called Franklin was growing up around Fort Bliss on the American side of the Rio Grande, opposite the old El Paso—a name which finally crossed the river to designate the new Franklin as it grew, while the old El Paso was eventually renamed Ciudad Juarez. The growing population of Franklin was Anglo-American—the Mexican priests of the old El Paso, or the parish of Santa Maria (as Zubiría always called it, after its tutelary saint the Virgin of Guadalupe), could not successfully serve the new English-speaking population.
Lamy at last was out of patience. If Durango did not accede to the Roman decree, he told Zubiría, “I will be obliged to notify the Holy See in Rome of the poor attention given to their Apostolic authority.” He hoped Zubiría would forgive him for speaking so frankly.
In an angry reply on 28 June the bishop of Durango confirmed that he had ordered his northern vicar at Santa Maria to retain La Mesilla, he disputed Lamy’s interpretation of the meaning and extent of the comitatus/condado, and he bitterly took notice of Lamy’s threat to report him to Rome for disobedience.
“This is not the first time,” he declared darkly, while the image of the old rebellious Vicar Juan Felipe Ortiz rose in the background, “nor the only proof made to me, of the discreditable image I seem to invite from the first Titular Bishop of Santa Fe of New Mexico”; but he thanked God that “in Rome they think very differently of me than you do.”
He then had an astonishing rebuttal to exhibit: only a week after receiving Lamy’s offensive letter, into his hands had come a document from Barnabo which quoted the St Louis synod’s petition for the aggregation of the southern territory to New Mexico. The Holy Father had seen it and approved it, and there had been no mention in it of La Mesilla, even though Lamy himself had been at the synod and could have made the specification. Moreover, how could Tucson, Tubac, and other localities of Arizona legitimately belong now to Santa Fe? Zubiría strongly implied that Bishop Loza had been the victim of “the lack of exact news” and what was more, had been given wrong information—videlicet, lied to.
Once again—the exasperating affair raged on all summer and winter in 1859—Lamy had to write Barnabo explaining the whole situation, declaring, as to Arizona, that Zubiría “goes so far as saying that the Bishop of Sonora was wrong and that we have no jurisdiction what so ever in the places he has ceded to us”—this, even though Rome had directly charged Santa Fe with jurisdiction over Arizona. Pressing his claim later, “the Bishop of Durango still wishes to keep three-quarters of the same ‘condado’ (Doñana).” There was also the issue of the three small villages on the Rio Grande southeast of El Paso on the United States bank which lay at the extreme western tip of Texas. These, too, Zubiría still claimed, never having recognized their transfer to Lamy’s care in 1851 by Odin of Galveston. The fact was, they also lay within the confines of the Gadsden Purchase, and should accrue to Santa Fe. But Zubiría in refusing to yield them declared, in truth, that their population was still largely Mexican, and required Mexican clergy. He went further, claiming that they were still territorially Mexican, which was not the case any longer, since the shift of the course of the Rio Grande—a notoriously vagrant river—had moved to the south of the villages, thus depositing them within United States limits. If Zubiría may have had a cultural claim to the three villages, they now belonged not only politically but geographically to the United States. Lamy therefore once more begged for a new decree for the whole of the Condado de Doñana, without excepting any of the places attached to Santa Fe or the county of El Paso in Texas.
Months later, Rome was still inviting contrary interpretations from Durango and Santa Fe; and a year later still, Lamy, writing to Barnabo, said, “I am afraid I have tired you of this affair” but “Durango had kept three quarters of the inhabitants of the county despite the decrees of the Holy See”—so slowly did some matters move between the hemispheres.
But not all.
Now struggling to meet the spiritual and cultural needs of Santa Fe, and all New Mexico and Arizona, Lamy on returning from a seven-week tour in the desert, was suddenly presented with a great new responsibility.
vi.
“Pike’s Peak”
WHEN IN THE 1850S GOLD WAS DISCOVERED in Colorado—or, as the whole area was popularly called, “Pike’s Peak”—immigration was sudden and numerous. “Pike’s Peak” was part of the huge vicariate apostolic of the Indian Territory and the plains. The Kansas bishop—it was still J. B. Miège, the hunter who had turned up alone one day five years before in Lamy’s prairie camp—was unable to visit Pike’s Peak regularly, or send clergy in residence; and accordingly requested Archbishop Kenrick of St Louis and the other bishops of the province to ask Rome to assign the new gold country to Santa Fe, which was much nearer to it. Kenrick notified Lamy that he had petitioned Rome to make the new assignment to him.
It was an unwelcome surprise. Lamy was hardly able to manage what he already was responsible for. On hearing about the affair, he wrote immediately to Barnabo declaring that he had no “desire to extend the jurisdiction” of his diocese—though he had to agree that he was much nearer to Pike’s Peak than Miège. Rather, said Lamy wryly, it would be far more suitable to have all of his own legitimate territory firmly assigned to him all the way to the Mexican border than to add another vast empire to the north. He regretted bringing the old nuisance up again, but there it was, even now not resolved. The Vatican, at its blandest, replied that they had received Lamy’s letter in which—they quoted—’’you indicated that you are unable to take any care of the spiritual needs of the Catholics in the territory of Pike’s Peak.” Rome cited the reasons he gave; and then, with no further reference to his unwillingness, recalled that he had admitted that “a priest should be sent” to Pike’s Peak, and firmly gave him “the information how to proceed legally” in this matter. Almost as an afterthought, the Vatican added, “As regards the county of Doñana, the question is already sufficiently settled and His Eminence, the Prefect of this Congregation, has sent his reply to the Bishop of Durango.” In whose favor? They did not say.
Rome then wrote to Miège, approving his proposal of the Pike’s Peak transfer. Miège in his turn had sent Lamy a description of his recent visit to Denver City, the largest mining town of the area, and had done his best to have the people begin the building of a church. But there were 100,000 people in the region, more towns were going up, the need was severe, however exaggerated it may have been in Bishop Miège’s reckoning of figures. Lamy told Barnabo, “It is true that I am much cl
oser than is Mgr. Miège, and we have good routes going there as well as large towns all along the route. It is only five days in walking from one of our missions”—for Lamy and Machebeuf had both penetrated lower Colorado much earlier. There was nothing for him to do but agree, conditionally. “I consent to it until the new order,” he wrote, evidently expecting that the diocesan lines would soon be redrawn and he would be relieved of the Pike’s Peak area. Barnabo duly thanked him ‘‘sincerely.” Nothing more was said about Doñana.
Lamy took the matter up in detail with Machebeuf. The problems were almost unthinkable: the extent of the new territory; the lack of civilized resources in rude frontier shack towns; the distance—almost four hundred miles—from Santa Fe, which was the responsible see; above all, the question of whom to send, and where to find him. At last, “I see but one thing to be done,” said Lamy to Machebeuf, and a sigh of resignation seems to breathe between his words. “You have been complaining because I sent for you and have kept you here at Santa Fe—now, don’t you see that there was something providential in all this? I do not like to part with you, but you are the only one I have to send, and you are the very man for Pike’s Peak.”
In his familiar impulsive way, Machebeuf replied,
“Very well. I will go! Give me another priest, some money for our expenses, and we will be ready for the road in twenty-four hours.”
It was the sort of flourish to make the bishop laugh at his closest friend, for nobody could be ready that soon. A companion in the field had to be found. Lamy appointed the young John B. Raverdy, who had come from Clermont as a deacon in 1858, and had lately been ordained. The equipage was presently in order: “a waggon with the necessaries of church service in [Machebeuf s] new field where he might have several chapels, a few personal effects, blankets and buffalo robes for their bedding, and provisions for the journey. This, with a lighter conveyance called an ambulance, for their personal comfort and for later travel among the mines, was the preparation, and four mules, including the span of mules, furnished the locomotion.” Once again Lamy, sacrificing his strongest friend and helper to the wants of others, would be left to govern New Mexico, Arizona, and now Colorado, from Santa Fe with only one or two priests in the capital.