by Paul Horgan
The matter was directly related, too, to the behavior of the most prominent native priests. Since his return from Durango, where he had lost his case, the Very Reverend Dean Ortiz was visibly resentful, but so far no firm evidence against him had come to light of personal misbehavior. But Father Gallegos at Albuquerque, Father Lujan at Santa Fe, Father Salazar at Santa Clara, all deserved, and received, firm and direct but on the whole gentle admonitions from Lamy to mend their ways. They all knew what open scandal must lead to—the alcoholic old pastor of Pecos was a ready example. The bishop was reluctant to discipline any more priests—he had too few to spare, and moreover, it was not in his nature to impose punishment lightly. Clearly, his hope was that they would follow as strictly as he would lead, so that the notoriously loose customs of the society would gradually improve under seemly example.
But meanwhile, the February weather was “like spring”—it had been a mild winter. His new country was beginning to cast its spell on him. His vision of what he must do first was clear. Ignorance was the first enemy, even more than impiety, for the latter must recede before knowledge, he was certain. He must have teachers. He could think of none finer than Jesuits and nuns. On 1 February he wrote to Father Roothaan, General of the Jesuits at Rome, asking that certain Spanish-speaking priests—two of them—be sent to him, but neither was available. One was pursuing his studies at Georgetown, the other was fully occupied as president of St Louis University. But the bishop already knew the Loretto nuns in Kentucky.
The opportunity was soon coming for him to go in search of teachers, for the bishops of the nation were to convene again at Baltimore, and he planned to be with them. He would leave Santa Fe on 1 April. He hoped he would arrive in time for the sessions, but ahead of him lay his first journey over the plains, and he had no experience by which to judge the conditions and times of such travel. Matters at Santa Fe would temporarily have to be left to the native clergy, though he gave Machebeuf a certain task to perform.
This was to find and prepare a house in which to install whatever teaching nuns he could recruit, where they might live and hold school. Casting about, Lamy fixed upon a large house belonging to “a rich Frenchman” of St Louis which would be a suitable residence and convent school. It would be costly—sixty-five hundred piastres—and Lamy wanted to enter at once into negotiations for it, but before his departure for the East there would be no time for this or for his actual acquisition of the property. He gave the negotiations over to Machebeuf to accomplish during his absence. It was a notable house in the road immediately adjacent to and at right angles to the cathedral of St Francis (Cathedral Place). It measured two hundred feet along the front, with a patio within under a portico on all four sides, like a cloister, and it had twenty-six rooms of which five or six were “très vastes.” Most advantageous of all, the house was surrounded on three sides by streets, so that there was little chance of being hemmed in by neighbors. The Frenchman was so well off that he could allow time for extended payments on the purchase. Machebeuf had no notion of where the money would come from to buy the place, but he hoped Providence would see to it. The house was to be ready for Lamy on his return with his teachers. As Machebeuf put it, “since the source of evil is the profound ignorance of the people, undoubtedly the first remedy will be to teach and to establish Christian schools for both sexes … and religious houses staffed with devoted people filled with the spirit of sacrifice.…”
He looked forward to a flourishing religious community in Santa Fe, for there were already more than thirty young people of leading territorial families impatiently awaiting the opening of Catholic schools on the bishop’s return. Meanwhile, Machebeuf, with no fixed duties, took to the road down the Rio Grande where the landscape enchanted him with its valley greenery, and its mountains crowned with sempiternal snows lying far back on either side—so he wrote home from Peña Blanca. Everywhere he saw a romantic and picturesque vista which surely promised rich fields of wheat and corn and vineyards. He was already used to crossing mountains and fording rivers. The Rio Grande was “limpid,” but could not support the great steamships of the Ohio which he knew so well—no, now he went along on his beautiful little Mexican pony; all of which called for descriptions and demanded poetry. But his muse was a rebel, he said, which refused to ascend Parnassus. Raptures aside, he was content to go among the abandoned (he intended the pun) villages to preach and give the sacraments. For years, when new friends whom he travelled to serve asked where he lived, Machebeuf would reply, “in the saddle … they call me El Vicario Andando, The Travelling Vicar, and I live on the public highway,” Lamy could always say the same.
vii.
The Plains Eastward
ON I APRIL 1852, Lamy set out eastward from Santa Fe across the plains which he would see for the first time. He had written to the Jesuit provincial at St Louis, Father Murphy, his old teacher from Clermont-Ferrand, that he hoped to see him on 1 May at St Louis. The dates imply a journey of four weeks, and seem to indicate that he would be travelling by stage coach, as a waggon train on the traders’ trail would take longer. It is possible that he may have gone, mounted, with a small escort—there was no record of his mode of travel on that eastward journey. The weather was usually opening up by that time of year, after the heavy snows and high winds which forced the waggons of the Independence-Santa Fe-Chihuahua trade to suspend most of its operations during the winter months.
The plains crossing was the national adventure of the time. A “pleasure trip on the plains,” for a view of the great prairies attracted many in addition to those who toiled across the vast level inlands in search of new life, new settlement, independence, and wealth. The stage service, which had been started in 1849, took two weeks to go from Santa Fe to the Missouri River at Independence, Missouri, and cost two hundred dollars per passenger, meals included. Armed outriders kept watch for Indians. It was a needed precaution. Without it, and general safeguards on a wide scale, New Mexico, wrote its governor that winter, “instead of becoming settled with an industrious and thriving population, will be left in a howling wilderness, with no other inhabitants than the wolf, and the birds of prey, hovering over the mangled remains of our murdered countrymen.…”
The old Santa Fe Trail led eastward by a circuitous route as it left town, and then made its way through the far-scattered Sangre de Cristo foothills dotted with piñon and juniper. Lamy saw some of his ranchos and villages lost among the mesas, until he came to Las Vegas, where high meadows gave the first sign of the great open lands ahead. Reckoned as space, the plains seemed flat, and in general they were; but western Kansas was not flat as a table—there were low rolls, dips and gullies, any one of which could afford concealment to Indian watchers or attackers. The travellers, though they could see, it seemed, to infinity, were often limited in their foreground vision to the low ridge just ahead. It was country about six hundred miles in extent, reaching to Council Grove, and in its spaces lived the immense herds of bison which if they were still or grazed slowly, often, from a great distance, resembled groves of trees; and there too lived in their roving way tribes of the Comanches, Apaches, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Pawnees, and Kiowas, from whom the traveller had most to fear. The distance from Council Grove to the end of the trail at Independence was a hundred and fifty miles. In that span, the Indians—Shawnees, Kaws—were more friendly, and Lamy could see an occasional cabin where a settler had planted himself far beyond the connected frontier. Such a house was likely to be a dugout, rising with sod walls a little above the ground.
From Independence, stage travel would continue to St Louis, or, if he had time, the traveller could board a Missouri River steamboat for the continued journey of several days to the Mississippi.
Lamy had already established relations with an imaginative and adventurous member of the university. The Jesuit father P. J. De Smet (known all over the West, among whose Indians he had travelled as far as the Pacific) had written to Lamy from the university in November 1851 of plans to come to
New Mexico, and to visit the Comanches on the way, and finally to obtain the bishop’s blessing at Santa Fe. The visit never took place, but contact by letter would soon be followed by valuable meetings as Lamy passed through St Louis on his later east-west travels.
There was no continuous rail travel eastward from the Mississippi to the Atlantic coast until 1857. Lamy therefore proceeded by stage to Louisville, then by river to Cincinnati, from there to Pittsburgh by river, and finally by rail to Baltimore. There the bishops of the United States were to hold their first plenary council, and Lamy for the first time would sit with them as their peer.
With Francis Patrick Kenrick, archbishop of Baltimore presiding, the council convened on 9 May 1852, in the beautiful cathedral of Latrobe. Those of its deliberations which concerned Lamy began with an all too familiar issue. The young bishop set forth a review of the conditions of his immense vicariate, and went on to describe the difficulties which he had discussed with Zubiría in Durango seven months before. These included the matter of the confusion surrounding his final achievement of his proper authority, and also the curious matter of the uncertain ecclesiastical boundary between Durango and New Mexico. The treaty was recalled, and Lamy’s bulls of appointment, which gave him all of New Mexico, including the southern villages. Yet Zubiría had held out for his own continued control of those remote places, and Lamy, wearied by his journey to Mexico, and perhaps relieved to have the episcopate, at least, resolved, had informally agreed to a status quo.
But now—now the problem of a defined area for New Mexico arose under a new motive; for the assembled bishops “decided humbly to ask” Pius IX “to elevate the above mentioned Vicariate to [an] Episcopal See of the City of Santa Fe, which would be subject to the Metropolitan church of St. Louis, and that as the Bishop of this new diocese the present Vicar Apostolic of this territory, the Most Reverend Johannes Lamy, be appointed.” But more: the bishops asked that “all the territory of New Mexico, which by established boundaries belongs to the Federal Government of the Federated States of America, be subject to” such a new diocese, “including in it also that part of the Territory which, although it belongs to the Federated States of America, remains subject to the diocese of Durango.” The geographical matter had now passed beyond an informal agreement between two bishops, and was thrown into the great machinery of policy at Rome. The consequences would be achingly protracted.
But behind the council’s move was surely a sense that religious authority, save that of the Papacy, could not expediently cross national political boundaries; and the assembled bishops had another similar case in the disputed authority over those villages southeast of El Paso with which Odin had charged Lamy on his way west. This, too, was referred to Rome, with Odin’s eloquent statement of the case, in which the ancient habits of the desert Rio Grande played the decisive part. The “three small parishes, San Elizario, Socorro, and Isleta (del Sur),” had formerly been in Mexico. But “the Rio Grande, having changed its bed, these three parishes, instead of lying to the west, are now found to be east of the river and consequently”—again the treaty provision which denned the middle of the Rio Grande’s river bed as the boundary line—”belong to Texas [and are] civilly governed by the laws of that state. [But] the Bishop of Durango seems to want to conserve jurisdiction on them because they were formerly part of his diocese,” But as Lamy had been given all of New Mexico, so had Odin been given all of Texas. Only Rome, so far away, with no information but that offered by contending prelates, could pronounce a decision. The lost hamlets, their bishops, former and later, must await it, in both cases.
The plenary council, having had other work to do, concluded all its affairs on 20 May 1852. The final resolutions of those attending were signed by thirty-two bishops, of whom the twenty-ninth was “John, Vicar Apostolic of New Mexico, tit[ular] bishop of Agathonica,” who, when his work was done at Baltimore, hurried to New York on business, before he must depart for the South in his search for teaching nuns.
From New York he wrote to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, with its dual offices in Paris and Lyon, saying that he would recruit Loretto nuns in Kentucky; and to bring home the lesson of his general needs in the desert, he went on to cite the state of his properties. “My poor churches or chapels to the number of 65 are neither plastered nor floored, and are almost all without windows.” With great trouble he had found a few vestments and chalices with which to celebrate Mass, but there was not a candlestick deserving of the name—in fact, destitution was everywhere. The Society’s Paris office would have some idea of the condition he faced when he told them that in New York he had had to obtain, “on credit,” imperatively needed supplies to the amount of “at least ten thousand francs.” These included chasubles, dalmatics, candelabra, altar vessels, and the like. His lifeline from the desert diocese reached all the way to Paris and Lyon. “I hope that you will not forget me,” he pleaded, and gave his next address as the University of St Louis, in care of the president; for his homeward journey would once again take him by that way.
But first to Kentucky: he went by coach to the Allegheny station in Pennsylvania, then by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to Cincinnati, and on by steamer to Louisville, and again by road to Bardstown, Bishop Flaget’s old city. Flaget was long since dead, but with his second successor, Bishop Martin John Spalding, Lamy opened the matter of sending teaching nuns from the Loretto motherhouse at Nerinckx, Kentucky. He would ask Spalding to arrange for the sisters to leave their community, which had been founded in 1812 by Charles Nerinckx, a Belgian priest who had left home because of religious intolerance to serve under Flaget. Like Flaget’s first cathedral, the first convent of the Lorettines in America had been built of logs. Lamy was promised his teachers.
He did not linger long in Bardstown, where Flaget’s later cathedral, with its classic portico and arched apse, and the town’s eighteenth-century stone tavern, and the hilltop mansions, were so unlike anything at Santa Fe. Returning to Louisville, he took steamer for New Orleans, where he came to see again his niece Marie at her convent school. She was now two years older than when he had left her—a sweet-faced and lively girl. He must have given her many tales of his life in the old earthen town where much—“everything”—needed to be done. Marie thought her uncle worth the service of anyone’s lifetime. There was more than a family’s bond between them—Marie already had a sense of vocation. He left her, when he must, to proceed to St Louis, where he expected his party of Lorettines to meet him for the westward crossing of the plains.
For their part, the Loretto sisters set out on 26 June 1852, on their way west. They went to Bardstown along roads winding through dark pine and oak woods, and in their turn took the steamer Lady Franklin down the Ohio, and up the Mississippi to St Louis. They were received by the archbishop, Peter Richard Kenrick (brother of the prelate at Baltimore), and lodged at the Loretto convent of Florissant, at the edge of the city.
St Louis was the center of the inner continental river network. As Anthony Trollope observed a few years later, it boasted of commanding “46,000 miles of navigable river water, counting the great rivers up and down from that place … chiefly the Mississippi, the Missouri, and Ohio … the Platte and Kansas rivers.” It was, in the report of an earlier Englishman, the novelist Captain Frederick Marryat, “a well-built town,” and its levees were “crowded with steamboats, lying two or three tiered.” By moonlight, said the captain, the Mississippi had “a candle-like beauty.” A remarkable city, St Louis was a place where an alligator committed suicide by throwing itself out of a third-storey window of a “museum,” leaving four other alligators who “fought each other to death eventually.” One was preserved, and, “to make him look more poetical,” he had “a stuffed Negro in his mouth.” The city was a frontier crossroads for the outlandish, the optimistic, the vicious, and the visionary nature of the American character on the frontier. William Makepeace Thackeray, on his profitable lecture tour, arrived in 1856 in a steamboat which had caught
fire twice and also offered as entertainment the presence of Mrs Julia Hayne, who was billed as “the American giantess.” Thackeray (who was reading Marryat’s books—”a vulgar dog but he makes me laugh”) declared that the giantess was eight feet high and that to make her a dress required “one hundred and fifty-four yards and three quarters of ordinary dry goods.” He underlined the quarters as the ultimate monstrosity. Marryat’s candlelight river he saw as that “great dreary melancholy stream,” and somehow found in her a matronly character, for he spelled her as the “Mrs. Sippi.”
But St Louis was also a commercial and ecclesiastical crossroads, and Lamy had much business there when he arrived from New Orleans. His first concern was to let Paris know that six sisters of Loretto were indeed with him now at St Louis, and he was sure they would be of inestimable value to New Mexico—they represented the first establishment of their calling there. He had high admiration for them, for by their commitment, they undertook to meet with courage the rough and dangerous plains journey ahead of them. He thought two months would do for the crossing of what was called in the States “les plaines et les prairies,” They would go by river for six hundred miles on the Missouri, and then would come the open land. They would go slowly, because of the great heat of summer on the plains—he was writing in July. As he must, he cited the great expenses he would have to meet, and as always he put his trust, “after God,” in the Society at Paris, for aside from other expenses, to cover the cost of transporting only the nuns, with their luggage, provisions, and the two “strong waggons” for them and the people who must take care of them, he had to say that he would need thirteen thousand francs.
