Lamy of Santa Fe

by Paul Horgan

  Privately, Machebeuf feared Lamy might not be well enough to sail with the mission party on 8 July, and only hoped that if this were so he might follow with another party sailing ten or eleven days later. Hard as it was to leave his friend ill in bed, Machebeuf must go to meet Purcell. After all, he said in practicality, as he put Lamy in the care of others, he had already reserved his coach seat. When he met Purcell at Dieppe, he could describe how affected the bishop was by the news of Lamy’s collapse.

  But there was much to do—the bishop had tasks in the neighborhood, and Dieppe was a port where Machebeuf had his first glimpse of the sea, and ships, and above all a steamship—a sort of amazing vessel which, in addition to sails, had a tall chimney to carry away smoke. It was a beautiful ship, he said, handsomely decorated with a green interior, and a chocolate-colored exterior with gilt-work. But Lamy was in his thought, and a week or so later hurrying back to Paris without the bishop, who was to proceed to Le Havre where they would all embark, he was relieved and amazed to find Lamy happily “promenading after supper,” talking about him, as it happened, with the remaining colleagues who had arrived from Auvergne to join the expedition—Fathers Rappe and De Goesbriand. With them, Lamy had spent recent days in seeing the sights of Paris. He was well enough now to make the Atlantic crossing.

  viii.

  America

  BY 7 JULY 1839 they were at Le Havre, waiting to sail on the following day. Purcell was there already. Sailing day, Monday the eighth, was stormy, and the boarding was postponed until eight o’clock the next morning. In the deeply land-locked harbor, masts and spars made a web of fine lines like bare trees against the sky. The sail packet Sylvie de Grasse was at her dock. Her captain, an affable master from Bordeaux, knew Purcell, who as a seminarian fifteen years earlier had crossed to France with him in the same ship.

  The captain now oversaw the boarding of his complement of passengers—the ship would be full—and at nine o’clock, as the deck-hands sang their capstan song under a fine sky, while a crowd watched from the quayside, and a blessing was given from the pier, the voyage began. The Sylvie de Grasse made her way down bay, past the great stone fortress, moving so slowly (the wind was set against her) that a steam tug was summoned to help her out of the narrow harbor entrance. Presently the wind changed, the tug cast off, and the wooden ship leaned and made for the open sea under her own sail, though still so slowly that not until night was falling did the voyagers lose sight of land “and then,” said one, as distance and darkness engulfed France, “we began to get acquainted with the other passengers.”

  There were about sixty, mostly Protestants, in that part of the ship where the bishop’s party were cabined. They included young men and women returning to the United States after studying in Paris, and solid businessmen emigrating to establish themselves in America. In the steerage were emigrant Germans—Catholic, Protestant, Jewish. They were all crowded into one open space separated from the crew’s quarters by a partition. There they slept, cooked, passed the time. Their fare—150 francs—did not include food. They brought their own. The ship provided only wood and water. The air was so foul in the steerage that a visitor was forced away in a hurry—though he noted that all the Germans seemed healthy enough.

  Comforts were greater for Purcell and his people. The captain seated them at his own table, to honor their calling and to spare them the company of ordinary passengers, most of whom appeared to be wanting in manners. The captain’s guests had “everything of the best which one might find at a Parisian hotel”—fresh mutton, fowl, imported wines, oranges in abundance, bread baked fresh daily, milk, butter; and potatoes with every meal, a serving which the missioners enjoyed most of all. The chef was a Negro, “very clever at his profession.” His supplies included enough fresh fruit and vegetables for the first eight days of the voyage, which was expected to take four or five weeks. Below decks, in addition to storerooms for provisions, were pens for sheep and cows.

  The Sylvie de Grasse presented unexpected style. Mahogany panelling, with pilasters whose bases and capitals were finished in gold leaf, lined the dining saloon, the ladies’ saloon, and the sleeping cabins. The staterooms were only six feet square, and though ordinarily they accommodated two passengers, the missioners were assigned six to a room, in three levels of two bunks each. With Lamy, Machebeuf, and their Auvergnat companions, a Bavarian Franciscan was quartered. The stateroom looked like a “fruitstand with its many shelves.” If she was typical of the ships of her time, she was under two hundred feet in length, and of about a thousand tons gross weight—a three-masted, full-rigged veteran of the North Atlantic run.

  Several of the party felt the sea at first and spent their days in their bunks. Lamy was among them—his seasickness lasted three weeks. Another missioner was resigned to die until Machebeuf took him up on deck, where he rapidly recovered. The marvel of the voyage was old Bishop Flaget, who kept everyone in spirits with his nimble gaiety and his edifying example of long daily devotions. He was always the first one every morning to say his orisons in the little deckhouse. Even when a heavy timber rolled loose across the deck and struck the old man in the leg he dismissed the pain with a word. Machebeuf, too, was in danger one day while studying English on deck—Lamy and the rest also worked on the new language they would need—when a piece of rigging broke aloft, a heavy iron-bound block fell nearby and a thick rope, falling forty feet, struck Machebeuf’s leg, which swelled and gave pain for two days. A passenger who saw the accident said, “a few feet closer, and Machebeuf’s mission would have ended.”

  On the Feast of the Assumption, 15 August, Low Masses were quietly said by the two bishops and the Bavarian friar—these in place of the traditional ten o’clock High Mass which Purcell decided not to sing out of recognition of the views of the surrounding Protestants, who did not hold with the cult of the Virgin Mary, and who would have thought the Catholics absurdly deranged in their practices. But that evening the travelling clergy privately sang the litany of the Virgin Mary and other holy canticles as the ship leaned her way on westward.

  Sunrise and sunset at sea were the great events of the day. Imaginations worked to find celestial mountains and castles in the clouds, and flocks of sheep, bands of great horses, parades of soldiers; and then the light would change and there would remain only sea and sky, day on day, for forty-three days.

  But on the forty-third day, they heard the captain cry out, “Land, land!” and all strained to see. Those without spy-glasses saw nothing at first, not having the eyes of mariners; but when at last they saw Long Island, in the evening of 20 August, they rejoiced in the sight of houses, farms, forts, woods, lighthouses, telegraph pylons, and knew that by the next morning they would disembark at the port of New York after a voyage of forty-four days.

  As they came up the bay, which was “magnificent,” they began to see the spires of the city. At the quarantine station in the Narrows, the Sylvie de Grasse anchored offshore. A steam lighter came to take passengers off—all but the steerage Germans, who must remain on board for two days to fulfill quarantine requirements—and brought them to the docks of South street, where the bowsprits of moored ships extended like a lattice roof above the clamorous traffic on the cobblestones below.

  Purcell and his party, all in good health, were conducted across town by two friends from Cincinnati to pay a call upon Bishop Dubois of New York. After more than six weeks of inaction at sea, the travellers felt animation and purpose. They would leave the very next day on their journey inland. Purcell was not one to waste time, and there were still three hundred leagues to go until they should come to Cincinnati, nineteen days later. Their first duty on the inland journey was to pay respects to Archbishop Eccleston at Baltimore.

  Going by canal, they found themselves in a cabined flatboat which resembled Noah’s ark in a child’s drawing. The barge was drawn by horse teams on the tow paths, the movement was at the pace of a horse’s walk, and the passengers from France had their first view of farther America as i
t went slowly past the narrow windows of the cabin. The barges of the day combined flourishes with discomforts. Some of them contained small musical organs on which itinerant “professors” played concerts. In 1842 Charles Dickens travelled in a barge in whose common cabin men and women were separated only by a drawn curtain. The sleeping bunks were let down from the wall, were sixteen inches wide “exactly,” and had to be vacated soon after daybreak to serve as seating benches. Dickens was obliged to wash in dirty canal water poured into a tin basin which was chained to the wall for the use of all passengers, and to dry himself must use the single roller towel provided for all. If the weather was mild, passengers rode on top of the cabin, and on moonlit nights, passing through hills or gorges—for the canal boats went along by day and night—saw how the wilderness scenery held every gleam and shadow of dreamlike strangeness, in the manner of romantic painting.

  At Baltimore, the party transferred to stage coaches pulled by four horses at a fast sustained trot. There were three ranks of seats within, the sides of the coach were open except in rain when leather curtains were buttoned to wooden window frames, and the coach rocked on unimpeded. The coach was slung on leather straps instead of springs, and many occupants found the motion distressing.

  Heading for Wheeling [West Virginia] the missioners crossed the Alleghenies and at a cost of one dollar for every sixteen miles followed the rude roads through continuous forests and woods, with only an occasional village to reassure them with the sight of boulder and log houses by day, and a lighted window or two by night. At Wheeling they took passage on the steam packet down-bound from Pittsburgh, which would carry them with many twists and turns of the Ohio River in a generally southwestward course to Cincinnati.

  As they voyaged downriver, Purcell prepared the newcomers for what they would see at the journey’s end. Cincinnati was a cathedral city—but like none they had ever seen at home. It was embraced by a great curve of the Ohio River, whose banks rose away to the north with only a few streets, and on those, only scattered buildings. The waterfront where the steamers tied up presented a row of shops, chandleries, and warehouses. Here and there the hillsides on which the city spread showed a few sizable houses, some of brick or masonry, but most of wood. There was much open land, with trees, within the town. The first church—a barn-like affair—had been built of logs outside the town limits because of a local ordinance prohibiting the erection of a Catholic church within the town proper. Bishop Flaget had built it, for Cincinnati had then belonged to his see of Bardstown, Kentucky. He had later managed to have the ordinance repealed and the log church brought into the town on rollers and resituated there.

  Cincinnati had grown in response to river traffic—people still believed in 1839 that it was destined to become the greatest inland city of America—though a skeptical early settler, according to a family legend, when offered the entire site of Cincinnati “in exchange for his whiskey and molasses,… turned it down on the grounds that it was a hog wallow, and went up the Licking River and raised strawberries.” In 1821 the outlandish riverside town was declared a bishopric. Its first bishop was the Dominican Edward Fenwick, whom Flaget consecrated in 1822. He was succeeded by Purcell eleven years later. Whatever was there now, all stemmed from Flaget, who said, “When I arrived I had absolutely nothing, except the benedictions with which the venerable Archbishop Carroll of Baltimore”—the first American bishop—“clothed me.” Even now, Purcell seemed to be saying to his recruits on their Ohio River steamboat as they wound their way toward the next stage of an undertaking begun in the heart of France with so much filial regret and inner uncertainty, there was not much to find.

  It was the rivers, in their great size and grand currents, which conveyed a sense of the vastness of the continent, in a scale of nature new to the Europeans, as they entered the last lap of the journey, beneath towering smokestacks, and to the rhythmic splash of steam-powered paddles which recalled the sound of village mill-wheels. Slowly, the strangeness, amplitude, and beauty of sparsely settled America began to make claims upon the newcomers.

  Lamy, like the others, could retain a sense of what lay behind him in his venture so far from his ancient home—the form of the organized, world-wide structure of the Church, in its administration, its resources, its experience in how the world ran, which would give him support when he should need it. Its purpose was not to be questioned, for it was at the center of his life, nor were its methods, for he was their minister. At home, in Roman France, or here, established however meagrely beyond the wilderness riverbanks going by, lay the same source of conviction and energy.

  II

  THE MIDDLE WEST

  1839–1850

  i.

  Cincinnati

  THE PADDLE-WHEEL RIVER PACKET warped its way to the waterfront of Cincinnati on 10 September 1839, to its berth amidst other moored riverboats, with their tall twin smoke pipes and wide decks, bearing such names as Car of Commerce, Ohio Belle, Belle Creole, Cincinnatus, Brooklyn, and New Orleans. The missioners saw the straggle of stores, shacks, and mansions rising away on the slope in the midst of open fields. Not yet a half century old, it was, with almost fifty thousand people, the greatest city of Ohio. It all looked raw. They left the ship and proceeded to the “little seminary” where Bishop Purcell was already training local youths for the priesthood. There the newcomers were to lodge, and, they hoped, there they would have a chance to advance their study of the language of America. How could they be at home until they could communicate, or preach, or feel like Americans?

  But the few faculty members of the seminary were so busy with their duties of teaching resident seminarians and also carrying on parish work that they had no time to give English lessons, and little for conversation. To their dismay, the young Frenchmen met with the community only for a short while after supper every evening.

  There were strangenesses to become used to. In America, it appeared, priests were addressed as Mister. When priests went into the city, they changed from cassock to the dress of laymen—a long frock coat, a high-buttoned waistcoat, and (the Frenchmen laid aside the black tricorne as worn at home by Monsieur l’Abbé) a tall hat of brushed silk nap or a shapeless felt headgear with a wide drooping brim. If they looked to Purcell for continued companionship like that of shipboard they found him endistanced by work—people even invaded his mealtimes to talk business, and only now and then was he able to join in the after-supper gatherings. Lamy and his friends were left “without anything special to do” The inaction of their days was far different from the visions they had made of America and the sanctifying sacrifices that would be demanded of them. Now it was Machebeuf’s turn to fall ill—he was ill for fifteen days and he wondered if he would ever become accustomed to America.

  But at last, after three weeks, the bishop had orders for them hardly less amazing than the disappointments of Cincinnati. He saw how weary they were of inaction, and how their first eagerness might be wasted. Despite their inexperience, their lack of the language, and the state of the country, he suddenly assigned all the new Frenchmen to certain mission parishes in Ohio which had no regular pastors. It would be their duty to bring scattered settlers together to form parish groups, and to build churches. Others at the seminary wondered at the assignments—young men in their twenties given pastoral charges?

  But Lamy and his fellow countrymen assumed the inland wilderness of the Middle West with restored spirits. Each was given a central location to develop—a little cluster which might one day be a town—from which other settlements could be served. Lamy was given Danville, in the wooded middle of the state; Machebeuf, Tiffin, which lay to the north, on the flat lands not far from Lake Erie. One thing which “astonished” them was that they had been sent so quickly to separate assignments. Each was to be on his own.

  ii.

  To the Forests

  OHIO LAND was generally flat, the horizons were almost level; the rivers unbridged, the woods and forest uncleared but for widely separated farms and smal
l communities; the roads cloudy with dust, or flowing with mud. When streams rose their woodland banks became marshes. The whole state—it was admitted to the Union in 1803 as the seventeenth state—was almost entirely covered with forest. Summer’s heat was sultry, the air glistening and humming with insects, the temperature often passing a hundred. In winter the cold was so great that trees cracked under ice, and lakes were crossed by sledge, and snow lay on the ground in layers of ice for weeks, making travel by wheeled vehicle or horse chancy and by river impossible. It was odd, to the stranger, to find a land subject to such extremes of weather, yet settlers sought it out in great numbers, cities were promised, the imagination looked westward, and by the 1830s, Ohio’s population numbered almost a million.

  But such a figure did not suggest the isolated farm or the forest-lost settlement, often named after a single family, which in time might become a village, then a town. One such was Sapp’s Settlement, later to be called Danville, to which Lamy went in the autumn of 1839. Purcell already knew it well.

  Before 1810 George Sapp and his wife, Catherine, emigrants from the Catholic Maryland of Lord Baltimore’s descendants, came to the Middle West, and “on a beautiful spot,” declared their grandson in a narrative which came down through the family in manuscript, “by one of the most beautiful springs God has caused its waters to flow,” they built a small log house. Catherine said, “George, right here we will build our cabin and live and die.”