Lamy of Santa Fe (33 page)

A native who defied the tithing rule outright was one of Lamy's tormentors—once again, Baca of Peña Blanca. In May the bishop wrote to him:

Dear Sir: having been informed by one of my collectors that you have as yet not completely paid up the different parts which correspond to tithing, it is now my duty and obligation to inform you that as long as you obstinately refuse to pay your just debts, I cannot then allow any priest whatsoever to celebrate Mass in your private chapel at Peña Blanca.

Baca's reply was extraordinarily insolent in tone, but it stated a view held by many:

Monsignor: I have before me your note of the 17th of the present month of May, and so in adequate response, let me say to Your Lordship: that it is now and will be my firm resolve not to pay any kind of tithing fee, as long as it is demanded of me as some sort of contract payable by me for spiritual administration, the present powers of which may well be within the powers of a Catholic bishop; and this being so I see no reason to worry about the same; since, for over a year now, we have been given bad administration; and so I now beseech and even advise you, first to consult what you owe to your own conscience, for I suspect there is some prejudice in Your Lordship against my own family. Therefore, let Your Most Illustrious Lordship quit your vengeful censures. Though you use such reprehensible means to force me to make your plans effective, first with your now usual threats, and then later with your denial of spiritual ministrations, such procedures, let me inform Your Illustrious Lordship, don't impress me in the very least; not only because of the notorious injustice which the Monsignor [Lamy] habitually uses in these serious matters, but also because the sheer mercy [to] and piety of all Christians do not depend on the blatant use of absolute power that your Lordship commands, as I've learned from others of the Faithful in New Mexico.

He signed himself in the full panache of his heritage, “Francisco Tomás Cabeza de Baca.”

But as summer deepened, Lamy thought he detected a lessening of hostility. Even if “serious difficulties” remained between him and the clergy, he thought the laymen's movement against him was losing vigor, and he told Purcell that “the vast majority in the territory is in our favor.” In early autumn he received the official word that Santa Fe had been raised to the rank of a bishop's seat, and he hoped this would “give the last blow to any opposition” when he should publish
the news. An incoming territorial governor, Meriwether of Kentucky, ho was received at Santa Fe with a Te Deum sung by the bishop in thanksgiving for his safe arrival—an “imposing ceremony” which he had never seen before—said that Lamy was “most deservedly popular in this town,” though the new governor saw also a great deal of hostility between certain factions of the American and Mexican populations.

Meriwether soon saw how things stood concerning Indians. There had been a United States Army battle against Apaches north of Santa Fe a few months before his arrival in which the soldiers had been defeated with heavy losses. Mexican shepherds were in constant danger from Indian raiders. Meriwether officially recommended to the Indian Office at Washington that the Indians should either be impartially fed and clothed to a certain extent or chastised decisively. Neither course was followed. The suspenseful combination of general Indian unrest broken by periodic outbreaks prevailed.

But the Indians soon had their own view of Lamy. He wrote to Paris about a recent event which touched him. “Our good Indians are of a primitive simplicity. Lately a few chiefs [presumably from various pueblos] came to visit me.” He showed them the chapel of the Loretto sisters—”a simple room with a few decorations”—liturgical objects—which he had brought from the recent Baltimore trip, and they were astonished. They knelt and asked if they might touch the sacred articles with their lips. The bishop gave each of them a medal and a rosary, “but then I saw on their faces that they were still expecting something, so I asked them to tell me what they wished for.” One of them said to him in Spanish,

“Grandfather, Father of prayer, we came from far to see you, we are hungry, and therefore you must give us bread to go back to our family.”

The bishop replied,

“I am poor, but I will try to give you some provisions.”

“You poor!” said the chief. “See the beautiful red robe you wear”—pointing to the bishop's cassock—”while we are scarcely covered with scraps of fur.…”

Long later, Lamy's nephew Hippolyte, reminiscing about his uncle, said that Indians regarded him highly—”for them, he was the Great Captain.”

As always, Santa Fe remained a city with its own special character; and when strangers were not noticing the Indians who came and went, they were making observations on the local morality, which offered enlivening differences—in public, certainly—from the customs of the Atlantic coast. Immigrants from that quarter were fluent in their descriptions and judgements of the Santa Fe society.

At mid-nineteenth century, “the people of New Mexico,” noted the United States territorial secretary, “have never received moral training, in the American sense of the word.” They had been allowed to grow up from infancy to manhood without being taught that it was wrong to indulge in vicious habits, and he particularized: the standard of female chastity was “deplorably low”; prostitution was carried to a fearful extent; it was quite common for parents to “sell their daughters for money to gratify the lust of the purchaser.” The catalogue, as evidence, supported Lamy's findings, and his ameliorative efforts. Gambling flourished, and its presiding professional in Santa Fe was Señora Gertrudes Barcelo, a native of Taos. She made such a success of her work that she became a member of the city's best society. When she died during Lamy's early days in New Mexico, mortuary honors were heaped upon her and the high style of her funeral scandalized an Anglican bishop who later happened to be in Santa Fe and heard about it. He told his diary that the funeral of this “notorious prostitute and gambler [was] utterly disgraceful to Bishop Lamy,” for “she was buried with great pomp. Streets swept clean, grand procession. Bishop's bill on record in court … amounting to $1597.” Though done in Lamy's name, the obsequies, according to later evidence, seemed to have been the work of Ortiz, the rural dean.

Other spectacles also interested newcomers. The daily market in the plaza was lively. Country ranchers and Indians from the pueblos brought their produce to sell in town, displayed it under the porticoes of the plaza, and sat all day by their wares. They strung their meat on lines attached to the pillars of the
portales
, put their vegetables in rows on the ground, in season offered daily bundles of fresh-cut hay weighing twelve pounds at twelve and a half cents per sheaf. The shoppers could find mutton, a pig, “red peppers, beans, onions … enormous … milk, bread, cheese, and in the proper season, grapes, wild plums, and wild berries.” Winter brought fresh game shot in the mountains above town—venison, turkeys, even bear. At the Exchange Hotel the family-style table was spread with such provisions, and even, at times, “luxuries.” On Sundays crowds gathered to watch cock fights, with the glaring birds cheered on by everyone from beggar to priest.

Amidst all this local style, New Mexicans, like Americans everywhere in their time, hoped for the coming of the great quickener of the national life—the railroad. Even in the early 1850s the New Mexico territorial assembly asked that a memorial be laid before the House of Representatives in Congress “in favor of the establishing of a national railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean.” The memorial “very briefly gave the reasons why the road in question should
be located so as to pass through New Mexico.” First, New Mexico was centrally positioned and would be a connecting point with several western lines; second, construction would be cheap as the track need not cross “a single elevation”; third, the New Mexico route would never be “impeded by snow”; and finally, the region had an abundance of “stone coal” for locomotives. The memorial hoped also that the electric telegraph could be constructed across New Mexico. The petition was referred to the Committee on Printing. Lamy himself said in June 1853, “There is great talk of the Pacific railroad, and some hopes that it will run through New Mexico. Then”—he was writing to Purcell—”you might come and see our beautiful mountains, and breathe purest kind of air.…” (Almost three decades were to pass before the tracks would come that way.)

Meanwhile, Santa Fe was animated by other than mechanical means. All people took pleasure to one or another degree from ceremony; but the Mexicans of Santa Fe, in their world-remoteness, poverty, and innate public style, responded perhaps more than others to the delights of spectacle. The ancient rituals of the Church had been locally enfeebled for generations. Lamy now gave demonstrations in the streets of the city of the veneration owed by Catholics to the very heart of their faith. Spectacle alone may have moved some of the populace, but for the great majority, what was within outward form began to be reawakened in meaning. Writing to Purcell, Lamy gave a simple account of how all responded.

Sunday within the octave of Corpus Christi [1853] we had a solemn procession of the Blessed Sacrament, the weather was beautiful, the streets had been well cleaned, and before every house and store where the Blessed Sacrament was to pass, they had put ornaments of every kind, the Americans who have fine stores most all round
la plaza
were not behind the Mexicans, they showed a fine spirit. Seven beautiful repositorys had been made in different places, and at each one I had to stop with the Blessed Sacrament. I had deacon and subdeacon with a master of ceremony for the procession, the choir composed of ten small Mexican boys and their two teachers performed well, accompanied by the harmonium, we had eighteen enfants de choeur, four censor-bearers, and some to throw flowers, a great number of banners were carried in the procession, the commanding officer was kind enough to lend us some cannons, and from the evening before until after the procession was over they fired several rounds, the people seemed to be delighted with the ceremony, a good lady from one of the best families of this place said in the evening:
ahora tengo gusto para rezar
, now I feel a pleasure to say my prayers. All passed off with good order, at high mass which is said every day during the octave, after which benediction is given, we have a great number of people and of communicants.

So in the midst of his stern attention to disciplinary needs, he had the reassurance of “a good lady” that his deepest purpose was taking effect. With the bishop in mitre and cope bringing up the rear, the procession would sway down the well-swept earth of San Francisco street. Fringed and tasselled banners took the breeze, spectators crowded the rooftops and streetsides, and at the head of the street, the old
parroquia
loomed with its fortress-like towers; and far beyond, the green-blue air of the mountains glistened in the sun. As Lamy was then using the old
Castrense
as his church, the procession would return to it in the plaza after winding past the improvised shrines in the principal streets.

But if this was a first fruitful demonstration, life could not be sustained by processions; and Lamy was making plans to go to Europe in January 1854 “to obtain missionaries and also some help”—the latter in finances. Other help he was powerless to administer—that which was needed to meet the perils of the open country. On 1 August he wrote: “the Indian neighbors … only few days ago they killed four or five Mexican shepherds who were herding their animals at some distance from the settlements, and took away, according to the report, about ten thousand sheep. I don't know if some measures will be taken to chastise them; I hope, the people will raise en masse to recover their property, if the government suffers passively these murders and depredations, as it has done for some years past.”

For his own work, he summoned Machebeuf to join him at his small ranch in the country a few miles out in Tesuque Canyon. There he gave his orders to Machebeuf for the administration of the church during his absence. The place enraptured Machebeuf—not the house, it was no palace, he wrote to his sister at Riom. What almost defied description was the romantic and picturesque beauty of the site—”the accidents of the terrain,” as he put it. There Lamy would often go for private study, meditation, rest after long journeys, and renewal of his countryman's spirit.

The elevation of Santa Fe to diocesan status was a matter of open news when the Cincinnati
Catholic Telegraph
published it, but with a curious error. It announced the new bishop of Santa Fe to be Don Juan Felipe Ortiz, who had for so long been vicar there. A highly necessary correction was published, in Spanish, for all to read, in the Santa Fe
New Mexican
for 3 December 1853, making it clear that the matter was a simple confusion of the titles
vicar forane
(Ortiz) and
vicar apostolic
(Lamy), and that the most reverend bishop of Santa Fe was of course Lamy. On the Feast of the Epiphany, 6 January 1854, the bishop published a pastoral letter which announced the new status of the diocese and himself. The change from that of vicariate apostolic
was taken to be a great honor to come to Santa Fe and its spiritual leader; and “the dullness of Santa Fe was somewhat broken in upon by an entertainment given in the vestry-rooms of the parish church to Bishop Lamy, on the eve of his departure for Rome.”

It was a formal party, with cards of invitation for five in the afternoon. The governor attended, along with the top military command, leading citizens and merchants, and members of the two houses of the legislative assembly. At the proper moment, a committee went to fetch the bishop and escorted him to the vestry, where all rose at his appearance “with the respect due to his personal and official character.” An hour of genteel conversation and seasonal compliments followed until supper was announced at seven o'clock, to be served across the patio in another building. The guests were met with “an abundance of the necessaries and the luxuries of life,” including various kinds of wines. The bishop said grace, the guests fell to, a group of students made music, and at the end of the banquet, while the wine still went round, a deputation of schoolboys read a farewell address to the bishop in English, French, and Spanish. Words, they said, were but the faint echo of their heartfelt feelings; but in looking upon the present concourse, His Excellency could perceive what their lips were unable to express. A grand motive carried him to Europe. The speakers were convinced that he would defend their interests with dignity, and they were certain that the smallest shade of an eclipse would never darken the brightness of his character. Their fervent prayers would ascend for his happiness and success in his journey, surrounded as he would be by numerous cares and troubles at every step in the discharge of his high duties. They begged him to remember that he would be leaving there, in his true country, souls innumerable who sought his personal happiness, and who prayed God that the same hand of Omnipotence which would conduct the bark which would carry him over the boundless ocean seas would, in his return to these shores, cause to shine on his noble brow the rays of a new star on its appearance in the heavens.