Lamy of Santa Fe

by Paul Horgan

  But even if matters moved forward in the long view, there were setbacks. In 1861 a smallpox epidemic greatly reduced the school enrollments, and an outbreak of Indian troubles (so dreadful that Lamy called it “war in the west”) endangered the daily life of the territory. The mail service, monthly until 1858 and weekly thereafter, and all other communications, were cut off—even the Army received no official papers from the government. Twenty men were killed at one mission, where sheep, cattle, and other supplies were stolen. Citizen volunteers mobilized to fight the depredations. It was, said the bishop, “a reign of terror.” A speculative soldier decided the Navajos were descended from Welsh families cast away long ago on the Texas Gulf Coast. “Persons,” he said, “who speak the Welsh language find no difficulty in understanding them and being understood by them …” Such interesting knowledge did little to help the general situation, which was even more difficult because of the effects of a drought which for three years had held the country. Produce was scarce, prices “were frightful”—so high that many poor people were in great want, said Lamy. Increased illness of all sorts kept reminding him of the need for a hospital.

  Meanwhile, the routine of his office—administrative affairs with Rome, and now Denver—kept him at his desk for long hours when he was not out on the dusty highways to the remote missions.

  He seemed to ignore his none-too-robust health, but there were moments when it failed him. In 1859 he had fainted at the altar while saying Mass on the Feast of SS Peter and Paul in the convent oratory. Mother Magdalen was present. During the Epistle she heard a great noise and looked up. The bishop was not in sight. She ran forward. He was lying unconscious, face upward, across the top step of the altar. She tried to raise him but could not, and then ran to fetch camphor. By the time she returned, some men had lifted him up. He regained consciousness and sat down for a little while, bathing his hands in cold water; and then, “though with difficulty,” he completed the Mass. Afterward he drank a little coffee and was helped to his house. “You can imagine,” noted Mother Magdalen, “better than I can describe what I felt on seeing his Lordship prostrated in his vestments as though dead.…”

  Within a short while he was writing as vigorously as ever to Barnabo pursuing the elusive decision on the Gadsden Purchase. His life continued in Spartan simplicity, and one time on returning from his little ranch four miles north of town where he had been ill, he found that the Mother Superior had installed a stove in the chapel where he said Mass, the better to keep him warm. It was instantly removed when he said that “if he was to say Mass there, that stove should be taken out.”

  But he knew, too, when to provide warmth and gaiety himself for his helpers, and after school term in 1860 invited the nuns and others to a picnic at his ranchito, thirty-two of them. They took their lunch with them, some sat on the floor of the little two-room stone cabin where he had already planted trees by the porch. Nobody was left to take care of the convent but “the little musician Francis.” Lamy loved the country and stayed several days after the picnic.

  At his desk, he conducted his entire correspondence by himself until very late in life. Always clear and deliberate, changes in his handwriting reflected the labor and the passing of the years. Routine reports (there was still opposition, though lessened, among some of the native clergy); finances (he regularly consulted Purcell about business plans and when he had to borrow from him said he would rather help Purcell than ask for help); regular, if modest, payments of Peter’s Pence to Rome; whenever possible repayment by installment of his debt to the Society in Paris by requesting them to withhold what he could afford to spare from their annual allocation to him, which was for him “a great pleasure.”

  After ten years of struggling with the tithing regulations, he wrote to Cardinal Barnabo: “Here the principal revenue of the church comes from the tithe. A good number of worshippers give it reluctantly and almost never completely; an even greater number refuse to give it at all. All this makes the administration very difficult. Could we be authorized to change this custom and to adopt rules more suited to our present circumstances, after having consulted our clergy on the matter?”

  Meanwhile, to the delight of all, Santa Fe’s old customs continued, such as the manner of celebration on great occasions. On St Francis’s eve—he being the patron of the old New Mexican kingdom and the cathedral—Lamy recorded: “about sundown, first vespers,” then “grand illumination in the whole town, made with small piles of pine wood on the top of every house—the poorest families will have several piles, on the roof of the Cathedral we will have not less than forty fires. We are ignorant of the use of fire-engines. I never witnessed here a house on fire for our buildings are fire proof”—Lamy’s first admission of any value attached to the old earthen architecture of New Mexico.

  He seemed to like best to be off in the country on his pastoral visits. On those of the early 1860s he could see “some amelioration” in both substance and spirit in the missions, whether in the northern chapel towns in their dark mountains or in the leafy Rio Grande Valley, where rudely but passionately made images of Christ and the saints were both portraits of the people and likenesses of their lurid visions of blood made sacred in sacrifice. He saw eight new churches being built, and in several tours of “our poor mountain country” many were “being newly repaired,” and a great number of the people lived by the sacraments. As soon as a newly arrived priest knew enough Spanish for simple exchanges with the people, he was sent out to a country parish which had usually several missions attached to it—visitas they were called. Some of these were days away, and required several nights in the open country. As in the frontier Army, the missioner’s chief valued utensil was his tin cup. He cooked in it, drank from it, showered himself from it with cool water. Wild game or fowl he roasted over a burning stick or two. When he came to take charge of his new parish, his reception was festive, in whatever degree the poor means at hand allowed. Fiddlers, drummers, guitarists, and the general people met him outside his chapel, and often a local rhymer addressed him with complimentary verses “which did not always bear the stamp of novelty.” When he could, the new pastor replied in kind, and then all entered the chapel to hear his first Mass. When Lamy came, often riding alone out of the tawny distance like his newest recruit, the ceremonies were much the same, but enhanced by the noble Latin liturgical observances, with mitre and crook, which accompanied a bishop at Mass, confirmations, and consecrations, and which moved even those observers who could not yet explain them.

  viii.

  The Civil War and Santa Fe

  ARCHBISHOP KENRICK called a provincial council of his bishops to be held in St Louis in May 1861. Lamy took the opportunity to travel to St Louis by way of “Pike’s Peak,” where he could see for himself all that he must learn about his new territory, and hold a reunion with Machebeuf, who would be his guide in all the new activities radiating from Denver. He travelled by way of Las Vegas, Mora, the Huerfano, and saw how rapidly Colorado was being settled.

  He spent two weeks with Machebeuf and Raverdy at Denver. The population was growing so fast—Lamy thought Denver City might have as many as seven thousand inhabitants—that Colorado had already been admitted to the Union as a territory in the previous February. Machebeuf showed the bishop his “nice brick church”—a simple box with a wooden vestibule in front and a wooden lean-to for sacristy in back—”in a beautiful situation.” Machebeuf had secured additional property close by. The city was “nicely laid out,” and already had “many fine buildings.”

  After Easter Machebeuf took Lamy to see the mines. “Some of them are within few miles, but the most stirring place I saw is what is called Gregory diggings forty-five miles northwest of Denver in the midst of the highest mountains.” Central City was nearby. Lamy was struck how each of the mining camps had only one street of “crowded houses in the steepest gully you could imagine,” reaching three or four miles in length. “Quartz mills, stores, shops, dwelling houses, all is mixed up.” Mi
nes were still being discovered daily. He visited some of the mills at work—the “most curious sight” he ever saw. Some of them made as much as five hundred dollars a day. He noted that Denver was over three hundred miles from Santa Fe, and he believed that if the mines continued to produce, the territory of Colorado could not fail of becoming important, with its many rivers, and the land generally good for cultivation. He saw “a great number of farms, already fenced in, some of them with good houses.” The climate was mild and pleasant but for the spring dust storms. Fine timber covered the mountains, and the plains were “very rich with pasture.” No wonder he saw on the road a “great many immigrants who were going there.” Machebeuf and Raverdy, one or the other, were generally out visiting mountain chapels. Lamy, writing his impressions to Purcell, said “Father Machebeuf would be thankful if you would have the kindness of publishing in the Telegraph the information which I give you here about Pike’s Peak.”

  Seeing it at first hand, Lamy now saw how Machebeuf’s work would be concentrated mostly in the Denver region; and so realigned the boundaries of the Colorado division of the diocese, taking under Santa Fe a large portion of southern Colorado, including the site of the later Pueblo, and the lands of the rivers Las Animas, Huerfano, and San Carlo, and assigning all this to the New Mexico parish of Mora, north of Las Vegas. It was an exhilarating visit to wonderful country, but he had to leave in April to cross the plains for the St Louis council.

  Now a veteran of the prairies, he arrived without incident, only to discover that he had made the crossing to no purpose; for while he was on the trail, southern states had seceded, Fort Sumter had been fired on at Charleston, and the United States was in the first weeks of the furious upheaval of the Civil War, with allegiances newly divided, and two governments improvising with every confusion the wildly complicated order of troops for the battle lines, and, behind them, the support in states and cities and farms which nobody had been ready to organize. From St Louis on 10 May 1861, Lamy wrote to Purcell, “When I arrived here, our Archbishop had just sent a notice to his suffragants [sic] that on account of the political troubles there would be no council. I intend to return in a few days.”

  In the following forty-eight hours St Louis was torn by massacres, for the city was divided into the two loyalties of North and South. Martial law ruled. Lamy said the tension was running high. The nation’s war was repeated in desperate miniature within the very city itself. Anthony Trollope, there at the time, said, “The only trade open is the trade of war … Sick soldiers, who have never seen a battlefield, are dying by hundreds in the squalid dirt of their unaccustomed camps,” and he was indignant at the “terrible dishonesty of those who were trusted” to take care of them. Lamy observed that “we are in a very dangerous time,” and he was thinking of his journey homeward, for at Kansas City a party of six priests and three Christian Brothers from France were waiting for him to take them across the plains.

  He felt it urgent to return, for he had heard of “troubles” in New Mexico, and, in fact, the Confederate Texans were moving into positions about El Paso, other Confederate forces were mobilizing in Arizona, and a march of conquest up the Rio Grande was clearly in the making.

  He took time to write to the official Jesuit visitor to the United States, the Very Reverend Father Sopranis in San Francisco (which would be hand-delivered by Father De Smet), asking for a Jesuit establishment in his diocese. He could promise little in money, but there was a good house to offer in Santa Fe, there was fine church farmland, and heaven knew there was enough to be done professionally, and he cited not only the needs of New Mexico but of Colorado. He reminded the Father Provincial of the great Jesuit work done long ago, and still remembered longingly, by the people of Mexico. He himself had seen ruins of the fine Jesuit churches of northern Mexico which had been not quite destroyed in the various waves of the Mexican revolution.

  In haste Lamy left St Louis for Kansas City, presently found his party there, and set out for Santa Fe on 21 May.

  They made a forced march. The summer heat was particularly dreadful. They sometimes omitted meals, often marched thirty miles without pause, took turns riding in the waggons or on horseback, and had particular trouble crossing rivers—once one of the waggons broke apart in the ford and Lamy feared the loss of the supplies it carried. But these were rescued at six in the morning, and it was not long until at every camping site each newcomer knew a particular job to do, taught him by the bishop. They made the whole crossing in “18 days”—an extraordinarily rapid rate for a passage which often took six weeks or more. He arrived home to find “troubles” on two fronts—”on one side, the Indians, and on the other, the inhabitants of Texas, making war against us. Thus, we may expect great ordeals,” not the least of which would be the financial upheaval and hardship sure to come with the war. He had not heard from the Society at Paris for a year, which gave him reason to worry about his treasury; and he asked them to carry over his debt of twelve thousand francs for another year without any of the usual, and gradual, deductions.

  By the time Lamy returned to Santa Fe the sentiment of many citizens was against taking any part in the emerging Civil War. The Gazette asked editorially, “What is the position of New Mexico? The answer is a short one. She desires to be left alone.” But the Texans were already mobilizing.

  The Confederacy did not want New Mexico only—the goal of the forming campaign was to use New Mexico as the road to the Colorado gold fields, and from there, to turn west and capture California and its great gold deposits. It was a large strategy, for it would give the Confederate States seaports on both oceans, and at one blow, a land mass one third of the nation in size, and most desirable of all, the gold with which to pay for the war—so essential to the North itself that Lincoln called the western gold fields “the life-blood of our financial credit.” First take Santa Fe, then Fort Union to the east, then on to Denver—this was the Confederate plan. The approach was already open, for even before the declaration of war, people at La Mesilla had held a convention and voted to ally southern New Mexico to the Confederacy. Santa Fe heard of the invasion of the southern part of the diocese by a small Confederate force under Colonel William Baylor, which captured Fort Fillmore on the Rio Grande near Mesilla. On 1 August, Baylor proclaimed Mesilla the capital of a new Confederate state taking in southern New Mexico and Arizona—once again the Gadsden Purchase lands.

  At this point, New Mexico spoke out. The territorial governor proclaimed New Mexico’s loyalty to the Union and ordered conscription of “all males from 18 to 45 in age” for her defense. A grave war issue had already gone through several phases. Though in 1857 Lamy had said, “we have no slaves here,” the New Mexico legislature had enacted a pro-slavery law in 1859; but this was repealed two years later and New Mexico was again slave-free. “We have condemned, and put slavery from among our laws. It is not congenial with our history,” declared the governor in December 1861.

  General Sibley, earlier the United States Army commander in New Mexico, had defected to the Confederacy and was now in Texas. His brother-in-law, General Canby, received the Federal command in New Mexico. As the summer advanced, Canby set about strengthening the Rio Grande forts with his few regular soldiers and the more numerous conscripted native and immigrant New Mexicans. Troop movements faced violent harassment from Indians who raided trails and towns. News from the south was disquieting—Sibley was about to move his large invasion force up from Texas. Travellers went about at extreme peril.

  But fortunately, Colorado was quiet, and when Lamy heard late in the autumn of 1861 that Machebeuf was dangerously ill in Denver, he sent Ussel, the pastor of Taos, to bring Machebeuf to Santa Fe for proper care. Ussel went at once, taking a youth as his aide. They went by horseback across the distance of over three hundred miles, and found Machebeuf weak but walking about his garden patch with a cane. He had fallen ill of “mountain fever” in September at California Gulch and for two months had been unable even to say Mass. Because of the war, t
here was no mail service to New Mexico, but some travellers had taken news of his condition to Santa Fe. He kept Ussel for two weeks, and then feeling strong enough for the journey, returned with him to New Mexico. “The thought of a visit to Santa Fe seemed to act like a tonic in building him up,” said Ussel. After a long reunion with the bishop, Machebeuf went on to spend almost all of December with his old parishioners in Albuquerque, “where the care and good old wine of Father Paulet” quickened his recovery.

  He thought New Mexico was “in a bad way.” The Texan armies had already taken two Rio Grande forts, Apaches and Navajos were on the rampage and new reports came every week of their latest acts of violence. When Machebeuf went for a few days to the bishop’s ranch a band of forty Indians passed within a mile of the place, attacked the shepherds at night, and stole all their sheep. A year before, sixty people had been massacred in a parish west of Albuquerque. Smallpox was still ravaging the population. More than a thousand children had lately died of it. Machebeuf went on his way back to peaceful work in Colorado in January 1862.

  Lamy reported these and other troubles to Purcell as the invading Confederate Army pressed its way up the central valley of the territory, after “two very important posts [Fillmore and Stanton] were given up with provision, arms and all to a handful of Texans.” Since then New Mexico had raised three thousand volunteers, but as there was no money with which to pay them, they were “very much discontented,” and nobody knew whether or not they would join the Army regulars to stand against a “large force of Texians who are now 150 miles south from Sta. Fé.”