Lamy of Santa Fe

by Paul Horgan

  Though Lamy’s birthplace of Lempdes also had the look of the earth on which it stood, it was thriftily neat, and its ways were adapted from those of the cathedral city of Clermont only a few miles distant over long-cultivated fields. He carried within him the medieval styles of central France, and of the fresh, young towns of the forest clearings in Ohio, so lately affected by the comforts increasingly brought by developing canals and railroads. Santa Fe, as he found it, showed no such effects of technical civilization. All was as alien to him as though he had been sent to a missionary station in remotest Africa. It must seem that he had only the primal materials of human society with which to work. In his vocation they were what counted most; but surely he must, when he could, work to bring them the bounties of such worlds as he had left.…

  If the people he saw had variety in their looks—Mexican residents, United States traders and trappers and prospectors, Indians who wandered in and out of town on obscure errands—there was still a prevailing look to the majority. This was the Latin-American look. Santa Fe, all New Mexico, were still vastly more Mexican than anything else in appearance, ways, beliefs, degrees of knowledge, and language. On the average, the people were smaller than those persons who came for varied reasons to live among them. Their complexions were swarthy, their hair dark, their eyes black and vivacious in captured light, their gestures by turn restrained—a lift of the chin to indicate a direction was enough to answer an inquiry—or extravagant, and generally polite. A soldier thought them “the most abject contemptible objects” he ever saw, but allowing for various levels of prosperity, their dress reflected lively vanity. The men wore a brightly striped shoulder blanket or serape over a short jacket and ruffled or pleated shirt. Their trousers, thigh-tight, were held about the waist by a wrapped silk band. Among the relatively prosperous, the trousers were studded all down the outside seams with silver buttons. Horsemen by need and tradition, they strode and rode in boots high-heeled to hold securely in broad wooden stirrups, and their spurs were often of silver, with spiked ornamental rowels twice as big as poker chips. Topping all were “those everlasting big hats,” as a trooper said—tall-crowned affairs, with very wide brims turned up at the edge, and traced with embroidery of gold or silver lace and little spots of mirror or bright metal. Their women went, by day, in blouses and skirts of varied color, and black shawls or rebozos which covered their hair and often their faces as a fold was flung about across a shoulder. Many of the poorer went barefoot. In the evening, at a fandango, where everyone danced and all smoked, men and women alike, the men wore long-tailed coats, pale full trousers, and small, pointed shoes, and the women then appeared in bright fabrics, and widely spread skirts, with heavy face powder which over their dark skins took on a pale violet hue; while half a dozen tunes by violins and guitars, repeated all night, set the steps, most often those of the vals despacio, or slow waltz.

  Cut off from most of the world, and from prepared education, these people were ignorant though quick-minded and passionate. What education they had came only up to a certain point, and this was received at home; though a very few of the more prosperous families sent sons to colleges in Mexico and the nearest United States metropolis, St Louis. When Lamy arrived there were already four Protestant ministers working to establish education where seven eighths of the population were illiterate, and to wean the Mexican Catholics away from their religion of ritual and ardent practice.

  And yet there had already been a long heritage of teaching the Indian people, from the time of the sixteenth-century Franciscans to the 1840s. Adolph Bandelier—a sort of southwestern Humboldt—wrote in his journal that a Cochiti Indian, Juan José, “told me about olden times. He says that, previous to the years 1845 and 1846, there were schools at the pueblos, under the direction of the Church.” A handful of Indians could read and write, though “paper, books, and ink were extremely scarce, so scarce that the writing material was mostly sheepskin or tablets of wood.” To write upon these, the pupils flattened a stylus out of a leaden bullet, and drew lines with it, and then using a quill wrote their exercises, with ink made from powdered charcoal, mixed with saliva, or water, held in deer-horn inkwells. But “after the American invasion, the schools were gradually cut off …”

  The society’s greatest concern was the constant yet unpredictable threat of raids by Indians of the roving tribes—Apaches, Navajos, Comanches, who were called by one observer in 1846 “the real masters of the country.” A year before Lamy’s arrival, a United States officer tallied losses to Indians of almost fifty thousand animals, valued at $114,050, and added that this, a conservative estimate, could be increased by fifty per cent. All too often inseparable from the incursions of raiding Indians after horses, mules, cattle, and sheep, were murders of their owners and destruction of property. A year later the territorial governor called by proclamation to able-bodied men for the establishment of a Volunteer Corps “to protect their families, property and homes.”

  The Territory was working to form itself politically—committees and conventions met, a New Mexico Legislature was formed, lobbyists were sent to Washington by groups of private citizens, the territorial spokesman R. H. Weightman, elected by the Legislature, struggled to bring before the Congress the outlandish realities of New Mexico, and in 1850 a citizens’ memorial was presented to the Congress declaring:

  We were promised at the time New Mexico was taken possession of by the American forces, in 1846, the extension of civil government over us, and protection against the savage foes, which on all sides surround us; and under the treaty with Mexico we were assured of our being speedily placed under the full protection of the constitution, with all the rights and privileges of citizens of the United States. We relied confidently on the promises held out to us; we relied still more on the treaty stipulations; but in all we have been disappointed. Twice have we appealed to Congress, and as often we failed to obtain its favorable consideration of our situation.

  We are without protection from our savage foes. Barbarous invaders drive off our flocks and herds by thousands; our citizens, men, women, and children, are murdered or carried into captivity, and hundreds are now suffering a bondage worse than death; our communications from town to town and village have become dangerous; everywhere is met the lurking foe; all enterprise and industry is paralyzed, and many of our citizens are abandoning a country thus insecure and unprotected, feeling, notwithstanding all the promises held out to them, that, in regard to protection against our Indian enemies, New Mexico is now in a worse condition than it has been for the last fifty years.

  Our population is diminishing, our wealth is decreasing, and unless we are soon relieved by the favorable consideration of our condition by the government of the United States, ruin to New Mexico must inevitably follow.

  Feeling conscious that in this representation of our condition we do not exaggerate, we, as citizens of a common country, entitled to the same rights with all, claim your protection.

  Together with our appeal to you for the adoption of our [Territorial] constitution, and our admission into the Union, we earnestly claim from the government an adequate military force, to be properly stationed for the protection of our frontier, and to aid in the extension of settlements on the many fertile valleys of our valuable public domain, now utterly impassible on account of our barbarous enemies.

  Never having received donation or aid from the general government, we confidently rely upon the justice and liberality of Congress, upon our admission into the Union.…

  But sixty-four years were to pass before the Territory would become a state, and now in mid-nineteenth century, emotional turmoil still lingered following upon great and dislocating events—Mexico’s final separation from Spain in 1821, New Mexico’s separation by war from the mother country of Mexico in 1848, the fast-growing commerce from the states across the prairies: in short, the intrusion of the world upon a land which for so long had lived on hearsay, with all its irrealisms. Much of the Mexican population was hostile to t
he power of the United States and its representatives. When Lamy arrived, representing still another non-Mexican power, they must however unwillingly accommodate to it, and to the disciplines which soon enough began to come clear.

  Still, in the meantime, there were immediate events exciting enough to make a day or a week festive and memorable. When a trading caravan neared the city after its long trudging journey over the plains, the waggoners whipped up their oxen to make a grand entrance into the plaza, circling the park, while a crowd of citizens, among whom local merchants were the most concerned, cheered and thronged. The arrival of a stage coach was even more spectacular, for its horses could gallop where oxen lumbered, and the stage drivers yelled, the escorting horsemen fired pistols, and the plaza became a circus ring. Goods and mail came with drivers and passengers—and with them, the world. Think of steamboats on water, declared a leading Santa Fe citizen (a Senor Baca) who had been as far away as Matamoros and New Orleans in the 1840s, and of “little steamboats on land!” The American officer he was talking to recorded that he turned around and said, “What is there in the whole world that shows more beautifully the wonderful genius of man than steamboats and steam cars?” Visionaries of progress were already (1846) placing “a high value” on New Mexico as “affording a highway from the United States … to California,” but a skeptical observer, not even dreaming of the steam cars, believed that a roadway was “the last purpose to which this country will ever be applied.”

  What struck such a person as primitive seemed so also to Lamy, even as he felt the warm temperament of the people, and the improvised graces and precautions of their way of life. They feared robbers, quizzed those who knocked at the street door, but those who were admitted knew entire hospitality, however small the means at hand. The Mexican rooms were plastered with the native earth, which was whitewashed. The whitewash would rub off on anybody leaning against it on the beds which during the day were rolled up to provide banks to sit upon, in the manner of Moorish ancestors of centuries ago. To keep the whitewash off, the walls were covered with calico reaching well above the height of backs and shoulders. Above hung mirrors and pictures. Bleached muslin was tacked to the overhead beams to keep the earthen roof from powdering down. A small, hive-shaped fireplace was located in a corner of the room, and, burning the pungent and light, lovely piñon wood, threw an intense heat.

  In a large house or a public hall, a room so furnished would be the scene of the society’s favorite diversion—the fandango, or dancing party. Here officers and men of the American garrison joined with the citizenry to dance the slow waltz, the “Italiano,” the jarabe, the cuna (or imitative “cradle” dance), while the women in their brilliant shawls turned the air blue with the smoke of their corn-husk cigarettes and “gazed around the room with great complaisance.” In 1850 a letter to the St Louis Republican described the fandangos as “low,” and linked them to “troops drunken and reeling in the streets,” for El Paso wines and brandy were served at the parties, and leaving them, the soldiers went “winding their tortuous way from one den of iniquity to another,” and murders were “common,” and gambling establishments flourished, and the dispatch added that the native Santa Feans were “all heartily tired of the presence of troops” among them. Others saw how the native dancers often went direct from the fandango to early Mass, followed by the same musicians who had played for the party, and who accompanied the Mass with the same tunes, which served also as funeral music when a burial procession went marching briskly through the streets. There were other amenities at the United States garrison, when at evening parties in the Governor’s Palace, “all the luxuries of an eastern table were spread before us. At the sutler’s one can get oysters, fresh shad, preserves and fine champagne.”

  It was, then, a society of contrasts, with its graces, luxuries, scarcities, and disgraces. The stores on the plaza and the open markets in the square sold melons, peaches, grapes, onions, piñons, red peppers, cheese, light bread, dark bread from Taos, wood, and fodder. Dry goods brought by the prairie waggons filled the shelves of shops established by enterprising German Jews who came with the early traders and who brought cultural styles and educated ways from Europe. In the clear late afternoons the daily promenade was staged, when young men walked together in a circle one way while young women walked in the other way, that they might face each other as they passed, and take to each other in word or glance. Mounted on tiny burros, which in the daytime carried every sort of burden from bundles of firewood from the mountains to goods to be delivered for the shops, men and women trotted about during the social evenings.

  The American conquerors had need of a hotel, and one—the Exchange—was built and later called La Fonda. “If you wanted an American visitor, you went there.” It was, like the other local buildings, a one-storey adobe affair, with long windows and wooden posts under its portal. Loungers sat there in their black American broadcloth, rakish hats, and full whiskers, tilting their chairs back with their feet up on the portal posts in native American manner, picking their teeth after a family-style meal. The local newspaper, the Santa Fe Republican, edited by a soldier who had come with General Kearny in 1846, advertised other accommodations including the “best of liquors, oysters, and sardines,” and carried a notice to say that “Mrs. G. de Habile, recently arrived from New Orleans, La., will be pleased to receive a few more gentlemen as boarders and flatters herself that her efforts to please will, as heretofore, succeed.” Lamy could see about twenty-five stores, a printing shop, many saloons, two tailor shops, two shoemaker’s stalls, one apothecary, a bakery, and two blacksmithies. On a hill to the northeast, only a few hundred yards from the plaza, and so commanding the heart of the city, stood the artillery emplacements and riflemen’s traverses of Fort Marcy, built in 1846. The United States garrison did not live there—their quarters were below, in the town, behind the Governor’s Palace, where troops had always been housed since the early Spanish settlement.

  The Third United States Infantry now occupied the garrison, and the local department commander, Colonel E. V. Sumner, who had arrived about a month before Lamy, was in open conflict with the civil territorial governor, J. S. Calhoun. The governor asked for arms from the military to distribute to the volunteer company of United States citizens he had raised by proclamation for their own protection against the Indians, particularly the Apaches and Navajos. Sumner refused; but the governor was persistent, and the problem of Indian terrors was too real to be ignored on behalf of bureaucratic wrangling.

  “The Navajos are a terror to all the people around,” wrote an American soldier, “they descend from the mountains and sweep away the caballadas [horse herds] of the Pueblos and Mexicans, who look on unresistingly.” Another saw in 1850 that “the hillsides and the plains that were in days past covered with sheep and cattle are now bare in many parts of the state, yet the work of plunder still goes on! The predatory operations of [the Navajos and Apaches] are even now carried on in the close vicinity of our military posts; the shepherds are pounced upon and shot with arrows to prevent their carrying information, and with their spoil the Indians dash with speed to the mountains and are beyond reach before the loss is known. In this way (I mean now the Apaches only) they run the flocks from seventy to one hundred miles in twenty-four hours. And, consequently, out of ten thousand sheep that may be started, probably not more than one thousand will reach their destination. As the overdriven animals falter from exhaustion those that do not fall dead by the wayside are lanced as the Indians pass to prevent their falling again into the hands of the Mexicans.… The more provident Navajoe [sic] is more careful, because his principal object is to increase his stock at home.… They were on several occasions pursued by the troops, but without success.” For several decades, there had even been traffic in the sale of Mexican children abducted by Indians.

  Governor Calhoun wrote to President Fillmore, “Until the Apaches and Navajos are completely subdued, we can neither have quiet or prosperity in this territory. You are
aware that our treasury is empty, and that we are without munitions of war.” Calhoun believed that if given munitions and other means he could, “in a few months, secure a lasting peace with the Indians in this territory, and locate them within fixed limits.” He had been an Indian agent before being designated territorial governor, and he believed he understood the problem—from which he exempted the Pueblo Indians. These people were peaceable in their “archaic city-republics which line the Rio Grande,” and were “intelligent, moral, sober, and industrious”—this by a soldier in 1850—”and, generally speaking, better off than the lower class of Mexicans.”

  Pressing for his volunteer company, and a supply of armaments from the military, the governor was able to persuade Sumner to agree in the end—but with conditions: the colonel stipulated that whatever arms he supplied must be given only as a loan, that they be returned to the military authority on demand, and that no expeditions of protection or reprisal be made against Indian raiders unless volunteers should be “acting in conjunction with the regular troops.” The conditions attached by the colonel were unacceptable to the governor; not only for practical reasons, but because in 1849 responsibility for disciplining Indians had been transferred by law from the military establishment to the Department of the Interior, to which territorial governors reported. It was a live issue at the time of Lamy’s arrival at Santa Fe.