by Paul Horgan
It was all the more a stunning disappointment when instead of coming to Santa Fe, the railroad, reaching a natural turning point for the capital, merely established there a way station which they called Lamy after the bishop’s former property there, and moved directly on to Albuquerque. It appeared that certain citizens of Santa Fe, knowing the usual “good thing” in business, had bought property along the old Santa Fe Trail by which the rails would most naturally have approached Santa Fe, and had demanded a price for it which the line refused to pay. The engineering difficulties for the line to the capital were also more expensive than anticipated. Santa Fe was dismayed. Of all times when a commercial lift was needed it was the worst in which to discourage the benefits which the rails would bring. There was depression in the country as a whole, and it was especially acute for New Mexicans. No native workers were used in the line construction after all. Herds and flocks were starving to death. Near-famine conditions prevailed in parts of the diocese. Somehow the railway must be brought to town.
A committee was formed, with Lamy as a member, and a bond issue was proposed to the people to finance a spur line from Lamy junction to the capital—a distance of seventeen miles. The archbishop was the first to sign the petition circulated to the voters. The New Mexican strongly urged its approval. It would be expensive—the Topeka treasurer of the line estimated that it cost $12,000 to lay a mile of track. Santa Fe voted its bond issue of $150,000 by a vote of three to one. The future was coming after all.
Its immediate terms, necessarily, were all which Lamy and the others saw. When the rails were ready, he said, “the working of the mines, the raising of the flocks, the cultivation of vineyards, will change entirely the condition of things. We will be able to employ laborers at more reasonable wages, construct houses and churches as in the east. We may probably see factories established in this country, where wool is to be obtained in great abundance. In this general increase of resources, this mission will without doubt find extension and a way of sustaining the great, heavy loads, which are always found in new under takings.’
Who was not excited by the news that “the monster engine to be used on the switchback over the Raton Pass, on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad, has arrived at Atchison on its way west”? Built at the Baldwin locomotive works in Philadelphia, it weighed 188,200 pounds, and would pull a train of seven loaded cars over the mountains. In Santa Fe, the people were topically and “justly proud of the elegant [new] establishment which is known to the admiring public as the Broad Gauge, and patronized by all who prefer the genuine article to a miserable compound.” The finest wines, liquors, and cigars were to be had there. “Hospitality is said to be part of a gentleman’s religion,” mused the New Mexican. “If this be correct, Stimson, of the Broad Gauge, must be a very religious gentleman,” and evidently the public continued to make the Broad Gauge their headquarters, to enjoy “all the luxuries served in such a superb manner by Joe and Harry.”
On 9 February 1880, ex-Governor George T. Anthony of New Mexico telegraphed to President Nickerson at Boston: “Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe are united by an unbroken band of iron, and a continuous path of commerce.” The New Mexican trumpeted “NEW MEXICO’S TRIUMPH,” and added, “the Old Santa Fe Trail passes into oblivion.” The last spike was driven by General Edward Hatch, representing the Army establishment in the territory, by Chief Justice L. Bradford Prince, and by the territorial governor, General Lew Wallace, who was occupying the old palace in the plaza and working on the final chapters of Ben Hur. A parade with bands, flags, school children, citizens, and carriages celebrated the event, and all were told, in florid oratory, of the day’s significance. A month later Governor Wallace was able to write to the Secretary of the Interior, “It gives me pleasure to report New Mexico in a state of quiet. A large immigration is pouring in under inducement of rich mineral discoveries and increased railroad facilities.”
Lamy felt almost immediately an easing of material concerns. The railroad system granted all clergy free passage and half rates for the shipment of goods and supplies for church and school. In the continuing drought, famine was averted by the freighting of food. Prices of everything dropped. The towns to the south were connected to the main east-west line by New Mexico’s internal railroad companies. Trains for the east left Santa Fe every morning at eight, with “sleeping car berths secured at station.” Trains for Albuquerque and the south departed daily at three in the afternoon.
Maintenance of the lines called for a large labor force, but as yet, few of the native New Mexicans were employed by the main railroad. Lamy wrote to the company asking that they be recruited for the well-paying work, saying “let them bring their wages to their families and let them secure the necessities of life and honest comforts to which a family have a right.” There could be blessings in material things. In 1880, on 17 March, the first train of the Southern Pacific went west to reach Tucson. As it connected with the long spur of the Santa Fe reaching from Belen to El Paso, travel to Arizona was now possible in great comfort. A year later Lamy and Machebeuf and a Father Phillips of the Denver diocese were carried in Pullman Palace coaches to Tucson, for the first time with dispatch and safety, there to pay a visit to their old confrere Salpointe.
iv.
Styles
LIKE ANYONE moving from his own culture to an alien one, Lamy brought his with him, and when conditions allowed, he bestowed what he believed to be its best character upon an environment new to him. He had not been alone in viewing the adobe style of New Mexican construction as primitive, often barbaric, by its very nature subject to rapid deterioration. Even so, he could recognize the native appropriateness, in surroundings of poverty and social simplicity, of the New Mexican style which was so directly derived from the hive-like enclosures seen in the terraced towns of the Pueblo Indians; and it was only natural that the Franciscan friars, the Spanish colonizers of the sixteenth century, coming into the strange land, with few engineering resources or imported building materials, should build their own churches and houses after the manner of the Indians. New Mexico’s isolation for centuries embedded the style of these as a tradition, which served the Spanish and later Mexican settlements well. Harsh necessity caused even European Spaniards to do with what was to be had, even if they remembered the great shrines and palaces, the castles and estancias, of Spain, and would have had them again if they could.
But Lamy came with a time of growing communication and transport, with a fixed vision of what was seemly. The Romanesque, the Gothic, the mansard styles of France were what had always enclosed the religious activities of his early life; and at Santa Fe, when it was time to build, it was the manner of these that he brought to his low-storied earthen city—the reminders of France which affected the whole material character of a place as his French clergy were affecting its spiritual life. That a remote imitation was all that could be managed he would have been willing to agree. But even so, in his view, what he wrought seemed more suitable, more beautiful, than what he had found.
Twentieth-century immigrants from the Anglo-American East and elsewhere found the old New Mexican atmosphere appealing for its very difference from the commonplace sophistication of their brick and wooden cities, with all their mechanical uses; and some held Lamy to blame for the changes in character he had put upon the cities of New Mexico in his time. But what such new settlers saw were not the Santa Fe, the Albuquerque, the Taos, of his time, in all the dusty, desiccated poverty they then showed, where every street was like a section of barnyard, and walls and roofs cracked and shed their substance under long drought and infrequent but violent downpour. Any photograph of Santa Fe in the previous century bore the likeness of a run-down collection of sheds and byres, corrals and poor open fields, irregular paths and alleys and stretches of wall, all in the same color of dried earth mixed with straw; and with only the church building rising higher than the hand of a man reaching to touch the ceiling.
It was this view of the place which had moved t
he soldiers, traders, and immigrants of the time to their descriptions of the city as a prairie-dog town, a random collection of flatboats grounded on a dusty plain, an enlarged scatter of dusty bricks lying about. If he had been an artist Lamy might have seen what later comers saw in the harmony between the landscape and the human dwellings made from its clay and the undemanding life of the native people. He might have felt the passionate devoutness of the Mexicans as they expressed this in their natively carved and painted devotional pieces, with all the blood and suffering and fear of God which honestly primitive crafts could simulate. These were appropriate for the Spaniard and Indian to venerate, for to them, holy tortures found some luxurious echo in their temperaments. Later collectors loved them less for religious than for aesthetic reasons.
But Lamy knew also the European religious art of his time, which was already turning bland in the spirit of bondieuserie reproduced in commercial plaster and print. Machine processes banished aesthetic awe which was the inheritance of sixteen centuries of Christian conviction. So it was that in his labors to reach both economy, utility, and dignity in his monuments to piety and decorum, Lamy drew upon his own native tradition with its inheritance of masterpieces of style in daily use since the thirteenth century—and also on the growing industry which produced plaster saints and lithographed Stations of the Cross. In doing so he wrought results which were admired in their time, when progress meant change, especially in matters of style and taste. It was left to a later age to find beauty inherent in the Spanish colonial and Pueblo traditions of building, and to mingle with these the convenient niceties of plumbing and other technical construction so that prosperous modern settlers were able to have their native culture both ways.
It was the poverty of the environment which prevented high aesthetic achievement of the Old World sort in the bishop’s buildings. Falling between two traditions—the grand European and the uncultivated but fervent native—Lamy’s style reached only a gesture and a function of devout memory.
Now, as the cathedral began to take shape, the Moorish arches of Spain, as repeated in the French Romanesque in many places such as Vezelay and—closer to the old home—Notre-Dame de Port, and even Lempdes, began to show. “The front.’ wrote the archbishop too confidently at the start, “is of a variety of stones, yellow and red, representing a mosaic.… The front has columns ornamented with capitals on which large figures en relief are nicely worked.” He was speaking of the ideal, not the real, but what was real enough was that the cathedral had no roof as yet—would not have for years—but he said it would be a “stone arch roof.” He estimated that the church would measure two hundred by sixty-six, “all cut stone in the Roman Byzantine style.” One of the southwest entrances, observed the New Mexican, was beginning “to indicate the fine and massive style of the architecture [and] makes us impatient to see the whole imposing plan completed.”
Work was advancing in the nave in 1873, with a wide central aisle separated from two narrower side aisles by the first indications of plain stone columns, which were to be surmounted by Corinthian capitals and connected by semicircular arches which recalled the interior of Notre-Dame de Bonne Nouvelle at Lempdes. The adobe north transept and sanctuary of the old cathedral would have to remain part of the new—it was impossible to know where funds would come from to replace these in addition to the old nave. But the trouble was even more general, for despite all efforts to continue, work on the cathedral was halted from 1873 until 1878. Lamy had already spent fifty thousand dollars and in 1875 he said it would take as much more to complete the new stone section, and a year later he had to report that in fact he would need twenty-five thousand francs a year for seven or eight years to reach the end of the project.
Even at that, he saw that the original plans would have to be simplified—no carved figures could now be expected to take their places in the facade, and the only ‘‘mosaic” effect would survive in alternate large red and yellow blocks of sandstone in the arches of door and shallow niches on the ground level at front and sides. The modifications which had to be accepted were planned during the five-year hiatus in the construction. A new architect was found to replace the departed Antoine Mouly, but proved unsatisfactory. The cathedral rectors in turn assumed responsibility for what could be done, and in fact when work was resumed in 1878, directed much of it. But again the progress was slow, falling behind schedule, and again for lack of means to pay for workmen and supplies. In 1881 “the good and saintly archbishop was never in greater need than now.”
But during all the intermittent labor on the exterior of the new cathedral, services continued within the old. Going there was like passing through an outer shell to enter an inner tabernacle. The great ornament of the adobe interior was the carved and polychromed stone reredos above the main altar. When Lamy sold the Castrense in 1859, he had had the reredos removed from there to the cathedral, and had put the newly arrived Father Salpointe in charge of it to replace an old tinselled altar piece which newcomers had seen with such amazement after the mid-century war. It was fitted into the sanctuary, which as in other native churches narrowed like the head of a coffin, and the adobe plaster embraced it in dusty plainness. The carved stone panels and their faded colors showed the more beautifully for the starkness of the enclosing walls, in one of which a humble wooden door frame opened into the sacristy. The eighteenth-century carving was thought to be “stucco and fresco work” when an American captain saw it in 1881. He gave one of the last descriptions of the interior of the old St Francis Cathedral after he attended Mass there and, later, vespers, on Holy Thursday in 1881.
“I arrived,” he wrote, “as the bells were tolling and was fully rewarded for my trouble. The old church is in itself a study (the parroquia) of great interest; it is cruciform in shape, with walls of adobe, bent slightly out of perpendicular. Along these walls, at regular intervals, are arranged rows of candles in tin sconces with tin reflectors. The roof is contained by bare beams. The plaster work of the interior evinces a barbaric taste, but there is much worthy of admiration. The ceilings are blocked out in square panels tinted in green; two of the walls are laid off in pink and two in light brown. The pictures are, with scarcely an exception, tawdry in execution, loud colors predominating, no doubt with good effect upon the minds of the Indians.… In one place, a picture of the Madonna and Child represents them both with gaudy crowns of gold and red velvet.”
He was fascinated by the styles of the service, both the august and the plebeian. “The vestments of Archbishop Lamy and the attendant priests were gorgeous fabrics of golden damask.” The archbishop’s throne was a walnut armchair carved in motifs of Victorian Gothic which rose along sides and top to a tall pinnacle flanked by finials resembling miniature pyramids connected by their bases. The arms, seat, and back were upholstered in dark cherry velvet bound by gold tape. The whole—surely the grandest piece of furniture in Santa Fe—stood on casters, and expressed a character of both ceremonial and period style.
“The congregation,” continued the captain with growing amazement, “was largely composed of women and children almost all of whom were of Mexican or Indian blood, swarthy countenances, coal black manes and flashing eyes being the rule, although there was by no means a total absence of beautiful faces. Fashion had made some innovations upon the ancient style of dress; cheap straw bonnets and the last Chatham street outrage in the shape of cheap hats were ranged alongside the traditional tapalo and rebosa [sic].” There was an excellent sermon, but the captain could scarcely hear it, for “such an epidemic of coughing, hawking, spitting, and snuffling seized upon the congregation that it was impossible for me, a foreigner, to make out one third of what was being said,” which was “utterly ruined in its effect by the continuous barking of the women and children. The sermon over, Archbishop Lamy washed the feet of the twelve altar boys, a custom which I have never before seen in this country.”
At various times, Lamy raffled off his horses, his carriage, to gain a little money for the build
ing, and most of the meagre funds regularly due to the archdiocese went for the cathedral expenses. The local citizens were as generous as the times allowed—Major José Sena in the end managed to raise contributions totalling $135,000, the Contreras family gave $10,000, José Leandro Perea $5000, and the Protestants, Jewish, and military residents were responsive with gifts; but there never seemed enough, either of money or time. The Jews of Santa Fe were happy to see the Hebrew symbol for Yahweh carved and set within a stone triangle over the main door, and some said this was done by Lamy out of gratitude for Jewish support—though theologians pointed out that the triangle and the Hebraic letters symbolized the Holy Trinity enclosing the Godhead, a device long known in traditional use by the Church.
In 1884 the new nave would be closed over by the vaultings of the roof, finished in volcanic tufa from the Cerro Mogino twelve miles from Santa Fe. The originally planned dimensions would then be seen in their reduced measure: from the front to the transepts, one hundred twenty feet; width, sixty feet; height of nave, fifty-five feet. The towers first designed to reach upward in three diminishing drums would never have their spires topping off at one hundred thirty-five feet, but would stop short by eighty-five feet—a modification proper for both aesthetic and engineering considerations, since the planned height was out of proportion to the scale of the rest, and the added weight might have caused the spires to fall. The fundamental land of the site, porous with generations of old graves, seemed in a constant state of settling—so much so that the architect finally in charge (it was Machebeuf’s nephew Michael) added subordinate arches to uphold the main side arches of the nave to arrest cracking which had already begun. The walls of the nave were not strictly parallel—a possible reflection of the original conformation of the old adobe walls which they were to replace, and which, in their imprecision, had given such touching evidence of the craftsman’s hand upon the very surface.