Lamy of Santa Fe (23 page)

In his isolated world, he was famous. His birthday was celebrated by the people, the bishop of Durango had empowered him with the faculty of giving confirmation, and as a man of learning he was revered by the less enlightened. His library, for its time, was distinguished if unavoidably meagre—it included a Latin copy of Thomas Aquinas printed in 1750 and bound in vellum. Martínez had even served as Chaplain of Dragoons in the 1837 uprising, and before the brutal execution of the governor had heard his confession. He was a strong friend to Bishop Zubiría and in regretting Lamy's appointment and arrival in his letter to Durango on 28 August 1851, Martínez gave direct notice of his feeling against the new authority in New Mexico—a portent of exhausting struggles which would last through years to come.

In the
Paroissien romain
, published in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, Lamy could find in the epistle for the first Sunday of Advent (Romans 13) august support in all the troubles which lay ahead:
La nuit est déjà fort avancée, et le jour approche. Renonçons done aux oeuvres de ténèbres, et revêtons-nous des armes de lumière. (Already the night is almost done, the day is near. Then let us renounce the works of darkness, and vest ourselves in the armor of light.
) If the spirit against which Lamy must cast his powers was all too worldly, the means he must use were all too pathetically material. A historian of the conquest of New Mexico who had come with the colonists in 1598, and was soon afterward dean of a Spanish church in Rome, published a history of New Mexico in 1602. Referring to the ancient cosmographers and their proved errors, he said of the early Franciscans, “we are not to ridicule those learned men as ignorant, since it was their chief purpose to reveal to men not the secrets of the earth, but the path to heaven.” It could have been a motto for Lamy as he went about his immediate tasks.

One of these was to make a brief tour, with Machebeuf, of the villages and settlements scattered in the open country about Santa Fe—some of them at considerable distance. Coming up the river the first time, he had seen typical pueblos. Now he used back roads and trails,
across plains, into arroyos, and the foothills, which lay below mountains visible in mystery wherever he looked. The people living in such places had need of almost everything which was generally thought of as civilized. There were chapels, yes; but who served them? There was no school anywhere. If the people turned toward Santa Fe the capital, there was scarcely anything there, either, to make a fabric of society for them. Remote for centuries, ignored for decades since the loss of the Franciscans, the people of the removed ranches and haciendas and the citizens of Santa Fe alike made demands, merely by existing, which Lamy in conscience must meet.

In early September 1851, he wrote to Purcell, begging him to help in a search for commitment by teaching nuns who would be willing to come to Santa Fe—Sisters of Notre Dame, Sisters of Charity—with all their expenses paid and a good house with pleasant grounds provided near the principal church, as he called what would become his earthen cathedral. He must also have new priests. If only such persons could come to help, he was sure there would soon be a change for the better, “as the people seem so mild and docile,” and he had already seen “good dispositions.” He was confident that citizens of every kind in Santa Fe would give their support to the establishment of new schools. He had already written to Lyon for aid, but his report was evidently not sufficient—they asked for “a true statement of these missions.” He promptly sent more information in the hope of receiving help “next year.” Purcell had spoken up in his interest, he was as ever grateful. Surely Lyon would listen.

Nothing could come too soon for his purposes from either Europe or the eastern states; but the most pressing of matters could not wait. As no religious teachers were available, he engaged one E. Noel as a schoolmaster, set up a boys' school in his own residence, gave it in charge of Machebeuf, to whom he also assigned the repair of the
Castrense
until it should be ready for use again as a church; and, with his own vicar general left behind to continue to do what could be done in the face of the disobliging attitudes of the rural dean and the other native clergy, in the third week of September 1851, Lamy set out on horseback, with one lay attendant, down the Rio Grande to El Paso and across unknown mountains and deserts in Mexico, for Durango, fifteen hundred miles away, to confront Bishop Zubiría, from whom he had heard nothing.

iv
.

The Durango Journey

W
HAT HAD HE WRITTEN
in Ohio four years before to Purcell? “Providence seems to have fitted me for a barbarious [
sic
] and extensive mission,” Perhaps these words crossed his mind now, as he rode forth across Santa Fe plain with his attendant, who must surely have been a man who could serve as guide with knowledge of the long road to Durango. By necessity they travelled light. The bishop's travelling bag was probably much like that which he used on later overland journeys. It was fashioned of black leather, about fourteen inches long, with a fastener and lock at the top, and a shoulder strap. It was wide enough to contain the simplest of Mass vessels and a set of thin vestments, among other objects.

Leaving the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and Santa Fe behind, the riders passed by La Cienega, with its farms and low red bluffs and scrub piñon, and passed down the escarpment of La Bajada on the Albuquerque road. Sixty miles to the south rose the Sandia range. Lamy was never to be out of the sight of mountains on the entire passage. He was fortunate in the season of his journey. New Mexico in autumn was a time of special comfort for the senses. Lamy, if he had any capacity to express exalted feeling, left no record of it; but even the most stolid of travellers there had been known to respond to the particular beauties of that landscape; and it would be strange if a man such as he who so much loved the open country—one who “could not bear the idea … to be confined”—did not respond to the wonderful vistas, by day and night, of his new land. His present journey would reveal to him every aspect but that of extreme summer, which he already knew, with its great dome of white light and parching heat; and now of the autumnal desert, river course, and mountain wilderness, where scattered so widely lived the human creatures he had been sent to serve.

Riding down to Albuquerque, he passed black-crested mesas rising above pink earth, and came into river groves along the Rio Grande at Algodones and later at Bernalillo and Albuquerque itself where the cottonwoods and willows made islands of cool shadow, and the fields
by the shallow river gave off a damp rich air; and always at the end of vision were the blue mountains, and the rolling silver clouds which they brought into being through the interaction of earth and sky. Storm often rode over valley and plain from such heights, and then every fantasy of light and distance, obscurity and brilliance, changed the vast vision of what was to be seen, and, in private thought, what was to be felt. Riding his horse at a sustained walk, alone but for his guide, it might be that Lamy, halting to say Mass in the desert, felt how the exaltation of the
Gloria
would be made manifest by the splendor of the earth and sky in their immense changing aspects. The liturgy would speak to him in French as well as Latin:

Les cieux et la terre sont remplis de Votre gloire:
Hosanna au plus haut des cieux
,

and before the blessing at the end of Mass,

…
Si Vous êtes un abime de majesté,
soyez aussi un abime de miséricorde
.…

Always plain spoken, and in writing simple and direct, Lamy might not express himself so grandly; his eloquence was that of act, not word.

His first one hundred thirty miles took him down the old Royal Highway along the east side of the Rio Grande—the same which had brought him north six weeks before. In central New Mexico there were villages—Placeres, Peralta, Valencia, Tomé, and a few more, some scarcely more than ranches of one or two families—-where he might find hospitality for the night and a tortilla and a mug of hot chocolate the next morning. But such places were not spaced out for the convenience of travellers, and more often than not, all the way to Durango, he would spend the night in a blanket, on the ground, under
“la belle étoile”
like any plainsman. There might be occasional trains of traders, or a mail rider—though the latter was a rarity, for there was no regular system of mails, and the carrier was willing, for “a slight
douceur”
to open his bag to let his tipper examine the letters within, and do with them as he liked. The road in New Mexico was merely a trail, so limited was the travel on it. Yet it had its attraction for raiding Indians, who watched for the waggons of traders or the drives of cattlemen. More than one person at Santa Fe thought the bishop “heroic” for setting out with only a single companion through country which had been terrorized for generations—even before the arrival of the American invaders—by Apaches who preyed not only on travellers but on Indians of the pueblos.

But by his acts, he seemed to say that every journey could only add to his immediate knowledge of his desert diocese, as he went on his way. His road on the east bank crossed to Socorro on the west, and then back again, on high ground above the Rio Grande. He passed Fort Conrad, which was a United States Army post established only a fortnight before on the opposite bank of the river, and soon came parallel to the mountain called Fray Cristobal, which was named after an early Franciscan who had died near the place; for the mountain's outline curiously seemed to show in rock the profile of a man's face, which his companions thought looked like Fray Cristobal himself. This was the northernmost end of the mountain system which, rising close upon the east bank of the Rio Grande, made travel by road impossible along the river; so that travellers had to turn eastward at that point, and for the next seventy miles, follow a course separated from the river by the mountain range. Lamy had come north by that path—it was the
Jornada del Muerto
, or Dead Man's March, and it was the dread of all who passed that way from the time of Juan de Oñate, the colonizer of New Mexico in 1598, to the bishop's time. The character of such country was expressed in the names put upon it in various places—Dead Man's Lake, Dead Man's Spring. Water was so scarce that parties often had to leave their direct route north or south and go west to the mountains which separated them from the river to find a spring or a little natural reservoir. Finally, the mountain chain dwindled southward, and at the southern tip, allowed Lamy to come to the river again at a place variously called San Diego or Robledo, approximately sixty miles north of El Paso in Mexico.

Here near Robledo ran, east and west, the old boundary between New Mexico and the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Within a few miles of each other, the villages of Doñana and the
ranchos
of Mesilla and Las Cruces bordered on the river. Sparsely occupied, these adobe settlements would finally assume, for Lamy, a grave importance for many years to come, when additional problems of his jurisdiction in territory led to wrangles and intrigues reaching from Santa Fe to Rome, Rome to Durango, Durango to Sonora, and Sonora to Santa Fe.

But as he rode past these settlements Lamy had as yet no reason to consider their site as significant. He saw that it was a barren land with two small villages removed from the world. Durango, which had long held them ecclesiastically, was still more than a thousand miles away to the south; Santa Fe, to which they belonged by political treaty, was over three hundred miles away to the north. Both villages lay in a vast district also referred to as Doñana, like the hamlet of the same name, and out of this confusion of names, a persistent problem would result—especially after the third village, La Mesilla, would be established
two years later, whose name would also be popularly and even officially used to designate the district, or
Condado
, or county, of Doñana. But for the moment, Lamy could only wonder how such little clusters in such remote territory could ever be given the comforts of church and pastor.

The United States Army, though, viewed the area as strategically important: Lamy could see across the Rio Grande, as he went by, the construction of Fort Fillmore in its early stages. The ford at Mesilla was logically the place to extend the road from California and the West across the Rio Grande at that point. One day, California—a third of a continent away—would be joined by commerce to Arizona and New Mexico. The whole immense Southwest must come into Lamy's vision.

Entering the state of Chihuahua as he went south from Robledo, the bishop saw abandoned and ruined villages in the desert between the Rio Grande and the Organ Mountains to the east. They had been destroyed by Apache raiders who had swept down from their heights and canyons in the Sierra Blanca and who still must be watched for by anyone travelling that way—especially anyone almost alone. He crossed the river, taking the ford six miles above El Paso, and came again into that pastoral valley where he had been so well received before. Now he came without a powerful escort and he knew nothing of the country from there to the south. Here, for the moment, was refreshment in shade, with his journey to Durango almost one third done. El Paso del Norte was the source of the famous “Pass wine” and “Pass brandy,” which went up the trail to Santa Fe and Taos in the trading waggons. Lamy, always an agriculturist, may well have thought of cuttings from the vines for his use when there was time for such pleasant refinements.

At the nodding pace of his horse's walk, he took the Chihuahua road and after a day or two came to the formidable passage of sand hills called Los Medános which reached as far as the eye could see. The sand so fine, the dunes so endlessly wave-like, were entirely without, vegetation. A trail wound through the shifting valleys of the dunes. It was the sort of country which led a traveller to wonder if it would ever end; but when it did, he found a road which a trader described as “firm and beautiful.” Yet it was the sort of land which was either parched or flooded by the desert sky. Sudden cloudbursts would send the arroyos running, and would mire the road for miles. It was said of the state of Chihuahua that in its hundred thousand square miles there were no more than two inhabitants for each square mile, and fewer than twenty square miles were under cultivation.