Lamy of Santa Fe (29 page)

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.

He made a good stroke of business in St Louis by arranging for Father De Smet to act as his agent for all purchases and payments. He still hoped De Smet would presently come to New Mexico, but meantime, since Santa Fe was so far removed from financial or marketing centers, it was an advantage to have someone so able as De Smet to receive drafts from France, make payments, and place orders for supplies.

Before going westward, Lamy wrote out a legal instrument: “By these I authorize P. J. De Smet to sign for me, and negotiate any draft that comes from France. The house or bank which sends them is aware that I have appointed the same father as my agent, and that he can act in this respect as myself. John Lamy, Vic. Ap. of N. Mexico, St. Louis this 10th day of July 1852.”

He had already run up an account in orders and purchases, part of them incurred on his way eastward to the council in April. De Smet kept a careful reckoning for such items as a pair of slippers ($1.25), a box of water paint ($3.00), a gold watch ($5.00), clothes ($3.00), board and room at a St Louis hotel ($19.00), telegrams (75¢ to $1.10), a draft payable to Mgr Pur cell $500 [evidently a repayment], a horse at livery stable (85¢), books ($21.75), freight for a trunk of Mgr
Machebeuf ($50.25), and more, the whole coming to $2103.00, which when paid left in his account “a balance in favor of Monseigneur Lamy, $849.84.”

He and Father De Smet hit it off agreeably, and it was an added advantage to have as his agent one who knew the frontier as well as anyone in America, and yet who could manage financial affairs, including international drafts, which could not be handled in Santa Fe. If Paris drafts should arrive in the absence of De Smet, they were to be processed by Lamy's old teacher Father Murphy, who described his former pupil now as “an amiable and holy prelate.” The bishop now drew two hundred dollars to cover contingencies of his westward party, which consisted of twenty-one persons, and in addition, bought two carriages from Edgar's of St Louis for five hundred and ten dollars.

His plans were careful in the face of the unknown, for he was the commander of the expedition, and though he had come East over the plains, he had travelled by stage, had had no experience of the long slow travel which a waggon train would take, and fast-rolling stages had given little of the real nature of prairie life. He would go West now with a heavy heart on one particular account—one who was to have gone with him, an old friend from the days in the Middle West, Father Pendeprat, died of cholera at the Jesuit College in St Louis. Sad, the event was also ominous, for the disease was everywhere and fear of it was as prevalent.

viii
.

Westward Prairies

O
N
10 J
ULY
1852 Lamy took his party on board the steamer
Kansas
at St Louis for the long, meandering voyage on the Missouri River to Independence, where the overland trail began. The river passage would take eight or ten days, through generally flat country. Lamy lost no time in beginning to teach Spanish to his nuns as the steamer went upstream on the winding river. There were hazards which had to be planned for, on a scheduled basis. The river steamers travelled only by daylight. Lacking navigational aids of a mechanical nature, they must keep watch for sand bars, “boils,” timber snags, or changes in the channel, which could not be seen by night. Further, anchoring
for the night, the steamers hove to in midstream for safety, not so much from Indians as from bandits who roved the shallow banks expecting to rob passengers and cargo.

But a greater danger was at once upon the
Kansas
and her company. Cholera was aboard in epidemic proportions. Lamy's little party of teachers fell victim to it. Two days short of arriving at Independence, after six days on the river, Sister Matilda, the superior of Lamy's “little colony,” died and three other sisters “were attacked by the same epidemic.” Fear of contagion took hold. Lamy and all his party were ordered to leave the ship at Todd's Landing, six miles east of Independence. There, he declared, they were obliged to “lodge in an old store”—a warehouse—”stripped of its merchandise.” It was the only shelter in the neighborhood, and there, “during a dark night,” he told Paris, “with the mortal remains of the sister superior, and another dying, a magistrate of the nearby town [of Independence] was sent to me to forbid us from passing through town, even to bury the dead.” Expenses, he said, were enormous—it was next to impossible to find draymen and others for service jobs because of their fear of the sick.

The caravan soon moved out of the warehouse and camped with tents in the woods near Independence, and there they were beaten by torrents of rain which destroyed many of their supplies and damaged some of their cargo. Lamy “lost nine of his best animals”—his two waggons were pulled by mules. The other nuns attacked by the cholera slowly recovered, but one was too weak to go on later to Santa Fe and had to be returned to St Louis, to Lamy's “great regret.” He must look forward to nine hundred miles of prairie travel with his reduced party, and with two of his six teachers lost to him and the future. He was himself “very much fatigued,” but his “strong constitution” had withstood the “labor and care” of his concerns. He could not help remembering that two years ago, when he had asked Bishop Odin in Galveston to visit him one day in New Mexico, Odin had replied that this would be impossible “unless he had 30,000 francs to cover travelling expenses,” and now Lamy—for the benefit of the Paris Society—had to declare that from his own experience he could agree with Odin's estimate.

Toward the end of July the saddened little caravan began to organize again for the westward advance. From the camp near Todd's Landing, Lamy once again appealed for Jesuits to join him in New Mexico—again directly to the General of the order, at Rome. He spoke of De Smet, and the “generous hospitality” of the St Louis Jesuits, and he made a strong if veiled suggestion when he said that De Smet “has a particular grace for the conversion of the Indians.… And so I entreat you for God's glory and the salvation of souls, do all
in your power to send some of your Fathers to a field where the harvest is already so ripe, but is being lost for lack of workers.…” In the event, Jesuits were not able to come to New Mexico for many years.

Before moving on with the westward journey, Lamy called one of the nuns, Sister Mary Magdalen, to join him for a little talk. They sat together on the bank of the Missouri River, and there he asked her to succeed Mother Matilda in the post of mother superior of the establishment he planned for Santa Fe. She agreed, subject to the approval of her motherhouse in Kentucky, and he forthwith invested her with the pectoral cross of her office, and in due course she was confirmed by Nerinckx.

Once more organized, the bishop's party moved westward again on l August 1852. One of the party—a Mexican priest—was still so weak that he must be carried in one of the ten waggons. They bypassed Independence, but within a few miles, an axle broke on one of the waggons, and a day was lost in making repairs. That night the open country was swept by such a storm of thunder, lightning, and wind that the party was unable to pitch tents. The women stayed all night in the waggons, which were buffeted like boats at sea by the gale, and the limitless prairie darkness was repeatedly shattered by the lightning. By dawn all was quiet if drenched, the axle was repaired, and the little train moved on. When Sunday came—8 August—they halted during the morning while the bishop said Mass and preached on charity, and the nuns renewed their vows before receiving communion. It was an act which gave them strength for the unknown which lay ahead, after all they had heard of the hazards of the prairie voyage.

Yet they were all now part of that great adventure of the time, which had its beauties and exhilarations, its curiosities and its rewards, as well as its dangers. Many a person found health itself in the open life of the trails West. The new lay everywhere about them. Where before, except upon the ocean, was such a vista to be seen? The endless grass rolled like waves under the wide movements of the air. Many chroniclers of the prairie experience used metaphors of the sea to describe their travel. Landmarks were few, and after the third day out from Independence, when they passed the one called the Lone Elm—a great solitary tree visible for miles—first voyagers had nothing ahead to measure distance by except their daily reckoning. It was those whose work took them back and forth on the trails, soldiers and traders, who came to know the lay of the land—its creeks and rivers hidden until the traveller was almost upon them, the deceptive gradual rises low enough to be lost against the level horizon yet deep enough to conceal an Indian band, the illusory watering places caused by mirages, the actual water catches so few and far between. It was an
ocean of extremes, between the blasts of winter and the beating heat of summer; the splendors of the sun at rise and set, and the vacant sky by day; the simple breezes of clear weather and the searing dust storms and the electric tempests wildly playing between all horizons.

The vast land had its intimacies, too, in plant and creature life. There were creeks where thick grass grew whose edges were lined with sharp teeth which could cut when grasped. Insects abounded. Worst were the mosquitoes which came to sing and sting all night. Mosquito nets were needed, and often in the morning were heavy with dew. Horseflies tormented the hauling animals, and myriads of grasshoppers cracked underfoot and flicked through the air. Crickets came to the camp. They were uncommonly large—a soldier once measured one an inch and a half long. The travellers saw a wonderful quantity and variety of birds. There was an abundance of quail—the little birds whirred up through the steps of the mules and horses, which shied. By day meadowlarks sang, and owls hooted by night, and the bishop's party could see and hear in the wide country a marvellous variety of other birds—crows, doves, bluebirds, flickers, buntings, cowbirds which rode on the backs of the waggon mules, screaming catbirds, robins, bluebirds, high-diving hawks, plovers, thrushes, the kingbird, grouse, and even parrakeets. Of animals, the most curious were the little prairie dogs who watched passers-by from the tiny hillocks of their sandy towns. The coyote, the rabbit, the famous rattlesnake, the antelope, the deer, were all to be seen, and wild horses; though if anyone in the party sighted the solitary white stallion which roamed the plains, appearing and disappearing like someone's thought—which is all it may have been, yet one so powerful as to become a well-loved legend—no one recorded the vision. Of all animal creation, it was “those numberless ferocious animals,” wrote the new Mother Superior to her sisters back home in Kentucky, “called cibolos or buffaloes” which “told us of the power and greatness of the Creator.” Hunting parties returned to camp with buffalo meat. She wrote also of how for the most of one day the bishop's caravan was watched by over three hundred Indians who rode along a little distance away; never came nearer; and finally, after giving the travellers a day of uncertainty and some fear, vanished. Thereafter, the bishop ordered that they would rest in the daytime and travel by night, “as the Indians did not usually attack after dark.”