by Paul Horgan
On 27 September 1860, in his own hand, he wrote out two documents for the expeditioners. The first read, “To all those whom it may concern we make known by the presents that Very Rev. Joseph P. Machebeuf has received from us all the faculties necessary to administer the Sacraments of the holy Catholic Church in the various districts towns and settlements of Pike’s Peak and also that he has the same extraordinary faculties which he has had as Vicar Genl in our Diocese these nine years.” The second stated, “This is to certify that Father John B. Raverdy has received from us all the faculties necessary to administer the Sacraments as assistant missionary to our Vicar Genl Very Rev. Joseph P. Machebeuf, in the new towns and settlements of Pike’s Peak country.” Both were signed “ John B. Lamy, Bp of Sta Fé.” In his own administration Lamy retained the Conejos River area of Colorado.
All the rest—one half great slow-rising plains, the other half the abrupt highest mountains of the Rockies, with their vast interior parks, great range systems, and uncountable secret valleys and canyons—now awaited Machebeuf and his assistant. There the rude, fast-growing settlements were small, obscure agitations of society to be sought out and civilized.
The bishop and his vicar general were colonists in the broadest sense, and the lands they must claim for the values they held had to be trodden upon by each in turn across the whole Rocky Mountain and desert Southwest. The pattern of Lamy’s life was a slowly continuing opening out of widening space, from a closed village world in Auvergne, to metropolitan France, the Atlantic, the Middle West, the Texas Gulf country, New Mexico, Mexico, Arizona, and now Colorado. For him the future was explicit in every day of the present. The works of both needed his patience as well as his vision. Whatever the need, large or small, he seemed to meet it under the precept of a later teacher of his faith who said, “All our raw material of sanctity is in the now, just as it is.…” He saw the small, plodding, inadequate equipage of his deputies draw away up the road to Taos toward known and unknown Colorado. He would hear their news only now and then; but what they found and what they did belonged to him, the father, who must know all out of duty, and the friend, out of love.
Machebeuf and Raverdy came into the wide golden southern plains of Colorado, passed Fort Massachusetts (later Fort Garland), crossed the Huerfano River—a mild flow of reflected sky bordered with cotton-woods turning yellow and willows fox red for the coming winter—and saw mountains at great distance both east and west. Often they looked like clouds on the horizon, but what they saw was snow on the far crests. There was a year-old settlement called Eldorado City in the foothills of Pike’s Peak, and there in camp they said the first Mass to be held in their new territory. As they walked their way again, pushing northward, the great splendor of the Rockies to the west—the “Front Range”—drew closer, and in the evening light of 29 October Machebeuf had his first sight of Denver City, a “village … composed of little [mining] works (fabriques), wooden cabins, Indian tents and wigwams on the banks of the Platte, and only two or three brick houses.”
He was expected. A new friend who had a store in a small wooden building “on the corner of Fifteenth and Holladay” put him and his curate up for the night, and after a good night’s sleep under a roof, they walked around to see the town. Machebeuf was astonished to find that a small congregation, impatient for his arrival, had obtained a gift of two lots on the outskirts of town from the “express company, worth about $15 each, and had given the contract for the erection” of a brick church fifty by thirty feet in size. The specification gave the legal site as in “Denver City, Arapaho County, Kansas Territory.” Machebeuf said, “What folly to build a church so far from the town”—for it stood actually on the prairie. He put up a seventy-five-dollar frame house behind the church, and soon enough both would be engulfed by the spreading city.
In 1858, a party of Kansas prospectors working near Pike’s Peak had heard that gold had been found to the north, on a tributary of the Platte River, had made their way up to the site, had created a township and corporation there, and had returned to Kansas to excite prospective immigrants. In their absence, another party struck gold, set up their own camp of Aurora (named for their own town in Georgia) and soon a third party from Kansas arrived with a charter to organize a settlement given them by General James W. Denver, territorial governor of Kansas. The third place was named for him, and in due course all three areas merged in population as word spread and gold-seekers arrived in a growing rush. Gold in grains was to be had simply for the washing of the sand in the clear, shallow creeks of the region. Other gold was locked away in underground veins and was more laboriously mined by tunneling and by refining the mother ore. The earliest comers had no thought of settling—only of making quick fortunes and getting out. The rush came in a flood of people in 1859. Uncle Dick Wootten, a famous scout, opened the first saloon, serving the whiskey known as Taos Lightning, and a second soon followed under the name of the Hotel de Dunk.
It was a spontaneous society. Thieves or other criminals were given summary mob justice, and—the usual frontier style—were often shot to death or hanged within minutes of their crimes. As always, there was an element which stood for law and order, but vastly the greater population consisted of lonely men, living a hard life, and taking loose pleasures in compensation, though at high cost. Gambling, whoring in dance halls, horse-racing, gun-fighting, claim-jumping and consequent killings, were common. The promise of riches and the less material but almost equally strong pull of the West as an idea brought party after party over the plains into the mountains. Many never forgot their first view of the Rockies from a hundred miles away—again the illusion was of cloud, often of a symbolic golden hue. Guide books were rushed through eastern presses to help the emigrants. Indian tempers were uncertain and many a survivor arriving at the camps could tell of massacre and pillage on the way.
But the energy of the whole nation seemed to be behind the movement westward, and already the shores of the continent were connected by a vital link which closed the gap between the steamboat terminus of St Joseph, where the Missouri River was almost four hundred yards wide, and the ports of the Pacific. This was the pony express. The riders went in relays of twenty-five miles each, taking two and a half hours, mostly at headlong gallop. Fresh horses waited at each stage, the saddle-bags were transferred, and the courier was off again, never to pause for any reason until his span was complete. A Colorado immigrant in 1860 after weeks on the plains longed for news, and seeing the Pony Express—he capitalized it—approaching in a thunder of hooves, hoped for a little exchange. But “the Pony Express returning from San Francisco … passed us like the wind and we could not get a single word of news.” It became a familiar, possibly comic, sight, the rider leaning forward in his saddle, scowling in the importance of his mission, his hat brim pressed flat against his crown by the wind, his driven pony, like the rider, distracted by nothing, as the pony’s loyal triple beat faded at the gallop into the empty distance.
Beyond the open Platte River valley of Denver City rose the wonderful mountains with their infinite complexity of form. Entry into them followed creek and river beds, which were soon accompanied by the rudest of roads, leading to side canyons or hardly accessible slopes where mining camps were put up out of raw timber. The miner’s life could hardly have been harder; yet camp after camp grew into village, then town, and "in some instances, cities which endured.
In the beginning, Denver City was the miner’s only change from the camps, and with a nugget, or a little pouch of gold dust, he went, when he could, for the violent relief to be had in a town whose chief industry was the assuagement, in various ways, of the hungers of lonely men. One such remembered coming to town from the lost gulches.
We made a most woeful appearance. When we started out we had a gay suit of miner’s dress. Only two weeks passed and we came back our clothes hanging in shreds from our backs, our hats in ribbons and scarcely affording us any protection from the sun. Our boots were left behind more than twenty
miles back and our feet entirely bare and cut from the sharp jagged rocks. They had a thousand questions to ask us but before we would answer any of them we made them get us something to eat and a change of clothing. We did not have one for two weeks. It was almost as good as renewing life when we got new clothes and I felt as if it was worth going through all those hardships for the rare enjoyment of that hour.
By the time Machebeuf arrived, the city was already swelling with commerce and growth. Overland waggons brought goods to the wooden warehouses, including “to some extent the luxuries” of life. Hundreds came not to find gold in mines but in the pockets of the miners—billiard-hall proprietors, the milkman ringing his bell as he went along the mud streets, even a theatre manager whose place was running “full blast with the Bateman sisters as the great attraction.” The United States mail had a regular route to Denver, and men lined up a hundred at a time to get their letters. The Rocky Mountain News already had a two-storey building with a pitched roof and a great sign at one end which read PRINTING. It was a mark of Denver’s isolation when a miner, “coming round one corner … found an auctioneer in full blast, selling as cheap and cheaper he said than the things could be bought in America”
The young Bishop Lamy of Santa Fe in the 1860s
Marie Lamy, the bishop’s niece, as a young girl. She came to America with him in 1849, was put to school with the Ursulines in New Orleans, and in 1857 Joined him at Santa Fe as a pupil in the Loretto Academy
Marie Lamy, while a pupil in the Loretto Academy, entered the novitiate, became a nun as Sister M. Francesca. She later became mother superior of the Loretto Convent at Santa Fe, and outlived her uncle by twenty-four years, dying in 1912
Christopher (Kit) Carson as colonel of the First New Mexican Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War period
Joseph Priest Machebeuf, Lamy’s lifelong friend and lieutenant, as Bishop of Denver in his late years
The aged and ailing Archbishop Lamy in retirement
Archbishop Lamy lying in state in the Loretto Chapel of Our Lady of Light, night of 13 February 1888
Statue of Lamy in front of his cathedral in Santa Fe, which was unveiled in 1915. Willa Cather thought he looked “well-bred and distinguished… there was about him something fearless and fine….”
Machebeuf—like Lamy—could readily countenance the common longing of people for material things. It was an energy which given opportunity worked toward commercial civilization. As powerful was that other energy which called for the unseen spirit of men and women to be given visible form. Once again in an alien place Machebeuf went to work in its behalf. Before a year was out, he wrote to his brother Marius,
Since you are the head of the family, I send you this little sign of life to give to all the others.… Here I am, firmly established at the foot of the Rocky Mountains (at least for a while, as I don’t know where I’ll die). This evening I leave for my eighth trip across the Middle and South Parks. N.B.: consult a map and follow me if you can, even though I have to cross the highest range several times to visit our poor Catholics, who are almost buried alive in the depths of the mines. I am very well. Providence has given me strength according to the need. To get to California Gulch, which is on the western slope of the mountains, I often have to sleep under the stars, sometimes surrounded by snow, as in last July, but thanks be to God, I sleep there as soundly as in a feather bed. Besides the principal parish, established at Denver, we have begun another in the center of the mountains at a flourishing place called Central City. I go there next Sunday to say Mass for the first time in our temporary church [it was the hall of a lodge called the Sons of Malta]. After several days there I’ll go on to South Park—and from the crest of the Snowy-Range (or chain white with snow) I’ll be able to see through the gorges far off the territory of Utah where the Mormons live. I’ll be returning only at the end of September [1861] to pass a few days at Denver and Central City, and then, in October, I’ll move on again to the same South Park, and New Mexico, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque [sic] & after procuring some vestments which the nuns are busy making, and some good Mexican wine for Mass, and for the table now and then, I’ll return to Denver by Christmas at the latest.
“Father Machebeuf,” observed Lamy, “seems to be in fine spirits.”
vii.
Marie, the Convent, the Country
WHEN MARIE LAMY came to her uncle at Santa Fe in 1859 she was a “parlor boarder.” At sixteen, she gave herself airs, tossing her freshly laundered collars back to be washed again if they did not suit her. The convent suffered her—she was lovely, she was the bishop’s niece, and there was that moving within her which led her to become a postulant on 1 October 1859, two years after her arrival. She wore silk dresses—this was remarked upon—but even so, she never shirked her duties, however unpleasant, for they included the responsibility of cleaning the outdoor toilets. When Lamy received her into the first stage of the sisterhood, he was proud. She assumed the name Sister Mary Francesca. With her addition, the membership of the Loretto convent reached twenty-six. There were those among them who eventually came to think of Sister Francesca as a saint. One who grew to a great age kept all her life a towel with Francesca’s name on it. The lovely child from the Ursulines was growing into a remarkable maturity.
“Our little schools are on the increase,” Lamy had said in 1859, “we have at least two hundred children, between boys and girls.” What he had to offer was being eagerly taken, and the nuns were pleased to present their curriculum of “Spanish grammar, English, French Reading, Orthography, Spanish Geography, Maps, Spanish and American History, Pizarro’s Dialogues, Mythology, Copybook Penmanship … Piano, oil painting, crocheting, and”—what appeared to be an especially nun-like craft—”embroidery on perforated paper.”
If parts of the course seem mystifying, occasionally there was more in the convent by which to be both mystified and edified, as in the case of Sister Hilaria and the Devil. It seemed that Mother Magdalen, in order to improve the instruction in piano, which was in the charge of Sister Hilaria, engaged a professor of music to teach her the art, in which she “showed much promise.” As a matter of course, she was always chaperoned by another nun, usually Sister Filomena Lujan, when the professor came to the convent to give the lessons. Both sisters were young, and Sister Filomena did not understand English and so missed certain meanings in the remarks made by the musician to his pupil, who, young as she was, also did not take what was meant for what it was—an infatuation on the professor’s part. “One day he asked her to go to a concert being given in the town and she asked and obtained the permission. The Professor called in his carriage for Sister Hilaria and her companion.” An appalling revelation then took place. “As she was about to enter the vehicle, Sister Hilaria looked down and saw cloven hoofs where the professor’s feet should have been.” As fast as she could she turned and followed by Sister Filomena ran back into the convent. To think—! It was an inexhaustible subject within the walls. Changing her name to Sister Rosanna, Hilaria never again left the convent.
It was gratifying to Loretto that “a smart and fine young lady,” the heiress of one of the richest native families in New Mexico, entered the order. Lamy remarked that her father and grandfather “could beat the patriarch Job for the number of stock, out of the increase of their sheep, they have sold upwards of seventy thousand heads in few years …” When she died some years later, she left her property to the nuns, and her will was contested by her family, but was finally upheld by the courts. By 1861 there were over three hundred pupils in Lamy’s schools, and it was plain to see that the holy training of the children had its good effect on their parents also. The convent property was being improved through the years—”Our place is beautiful,” said Mother Magdalen, who had assumed her unknown responsibilities on the bank of the Missouri in 1852, “everybody says there is not another such in the Territory.” A wall was built around the grounds, the trees grew so tall that they could soon be seen from a great distance, wate
r flowed in acequias to the flower and vegetable beds and Sister Catalina was kept busy in the garden. To add to the convent fruit trees, Machebeuf brought oranges from the West in 1860.
A year before the arrival of the Christian Brothers with Vicar General Eguillon in 1859, Lamy had made ready for them, asking Rome to let him exchange certain pieces of church land so that he would have a convenient place in which to receive the Brothers and start their boys’ school, which would grow in its educational reach until it became a college named after St Michael the Archangel (and which long later in an act of administrative expediency changed its name to the College of Santa Fe). When they arrived the Brothers must be content with “an adobe hut with four walls,” five mattresses, five blankets, two tables, a few benches and some old carpets. They were invited to share Lamy’s table until their own kitchen should be ready. The bishop presented them with a contract, assuming all their debts until they should become self-supporting, paying them eight hundred dollars a year, and perquisites including board and laundry. The contract specified that for breakfast they should be fed bread, meat, and coffee; for dinner, bread, meat, vegetables, dessert, and on occasion, wine. Within a month of their arrival they were open for enrollment, took in at once thirty boarders and more than a hundred and fifty day scholars. It would be, thought Lamy, a “pretty good school.” The Santa Fe newspaper took pleasure, daily, in seeing what had never been seen there before: “the cleanly, joyous little fellows, going and coming from the place”—the school stood next to San Miguel’s, the oldest church in Santa Fe and probably in the nation—”where they receive the seeds of instruction, from which shall grow the future rulers, teachers and business men of New Mexico.” Lamy would have the school grow, and asked Purcell to procure him a loan of “four or five thousand for five years.… I have got good property to answer for it” as security. Above all, he kept urging, the great need for a seminary remained.