Lamy of Santa Fe (46 page)

As Don Ramón was the Durango official nearest to New Mexico, Lamy wrote to him to say that “I have received a decree from Rome, whereby
“Doñana”
(the quotation marks are significant as indicating more than the village of that name) and
Las Cruces
belong to the jurisdiction of Santa Fe. I am sending my Vicar General Sr. Don José P. Machebeuf to take possession of the said places. I hope that His Lordship of Durango will have received notice of this matter”—i.e., from Rome. “I shall be very grateful to you if you will be kind enough to inform the afore-mentioned Vicar of the present situation of these ecclesiastical affairs, and if you would help him, in case any difficulty should arise.”

But the atmosphere of difficulty between Mexico and the United States was more than local. President James Buchanan, in his recent annual message to Congress, had proposed that the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora be seized by the United States in lieu of ten million dollars in reparations left over from the 1846 war. Congress had tabled the proposal; but political suspicion and national pride may have emphasized attitudes along the border.

Machebeuf, with two Mexican riders, left Santa Fe on 3 November 1858 for the Rio Grande road, pausing for nostalgic visits at Albuquerque and other missions, and finally came to present himself to Don Ramón Ortiz in his oasis-like home south of El Paso. Don Ramón received him warmly “as a friend and colleague”; but when it came to surrendering “Doñana” and the rest, he made every sort of difficulty “under the pretext”—familiar enough since 1851—that he had never received from his bishop any order to yield the requested jurisdiction. He had not seen Lamy's letter to Zubiría's vicar general. Who knew if Zubiría had ever heard from Rome? Machebeuf showed Don Ramón the actual original of Cardinal Barnabo's decree which added to Santa Fe all of the Arizona parishes. Ortiz made a copy of it, promising to send it at once to Durango, and to act immediately upon receiving orders from his bishop.

For the moment, there was nothing further to be accomplished at El Paso, and Machebeuf, visiting Fort Bliss on the United States side of the Rio Grande to say Mass for the garrison, heard of an Army detachment which had left only recently for Arizona. It was providential, he thought; and after three days of hurrying after them across the flat desert he arrived at their bivouac at nine o'clock at night. Safely answering the challenge of the sentries, he went to the tent of the commanding officer, who chose not to leave his bed, but
for Machebeuf and his two men all they needed. His new mission was to find the bishop of Sonora, wherever he might be—whether in Culiacán itself or somewhere else in the 190,000 square miles of Sonora/Arizona—and obtain his obedience to the papal separation of his diocese according to the civil boundary between Mexico and the United States; for as New Mexico had been, in relation to Durango, so Arizona was to Sonora.

iii
.

Quest in Sonora

“D
O YOU REMEMBER
' Lamy once asked Machebeuf in Santa Fe, “that when we were in Ohio we used to long for the chance of getting beyond the lines of our narrow parishes to do missionary work on a grand scale? Well, our wishes have been so fully granted here in the West that there is nothing left to be desired in that way. There is nothing beyond us now but to leave civilization and travel with a band of roving Indians.…”

The two friends were by now masters of the grand scale in wilderness. If in their travels protection might be at hand—a band of soldiers or a caravan going their way—they would take advantage of it; but if not, they went on their way, in reasonable caution, alone. Machebeuf now learned that the way to Arizona was for the moment peaceful—the Apaches were quiet. The soldiers he had overtaken would move too slowly for him. With only his two young aides, he struck out for the next Army post, which was Fort Buchanan, southeast of the old settlement of Tucson. He had travelled by horse about six hundred miles from Santa Fe. When anyone asked him where he lived, he would reply, “In the saddle.… They call me
El Vicario Andando
(The Travelling Vicar) and I live on the
Camino Real
(the public highway).” He usually took along a spare saddle-horse, a mule loaded with blankets and other necessities, and a large valise stuffed with trifling religious articles to give away to Indians or Mexicans, by which he invited an initial welcome among isolated people.

At Fort Buchanan, he was made welcome as a priest, remained for several days, said Mass daily, and then moved on to Tucson, coming first to the decaying but spacious mission church of San Xavier
Bac, which had been built in the eighteenth century by Jesuits. It was now abandoned, though a scattering of Papago Indians lived in brush huts in its shadow. He first saw it across parched yellow flats, as it stood white against bluing foothills and far purple mountains. He inspected the empty church and was astonished at its considerable size, its high brick walls, the richness of its Churrigueresque facade, its general beauty. It was the only surviving mission of the seven which had once flourished in this northern part of Sonora.

The village of Tucson lay twelve miles to the north. There Machebeuf found about four hundred inhabitants. A few years earlier the United States boundary commissioner saw that “half the buildings in Tucson are tenantless and falling to ruin,” thanks to the indifference of the population, of whom he said, “A more lazy and idle set of people I never saw.” Since 1827, when the last Franciscans had been withdrawn by the Mexican Republic, the people had had no continuous religious life, and it was not known when a bishop of Sonora had ever visited Tucson. Machebeuf was warmly received, administered to the people, and announced that their province now belonged to the bishop of Santa Fe.

The town's life was primitive and turbulent, yet it was being increasingly settled by men who looked for fortune in silver mines a little way to the south. Their trials were great, for to work the mines they must bring huge and heavy machinery across the deserts all the way from Port Lavaca on the Gulf of Mexico, on roads mostly created by infrequent cloudburst run-off in rocky gullies. Apache attacks were frequent, many travellers were killed, and the garrisons at the far-flung Army posts could patrol only local areas. The one at Tucson was said to be of little help. According to an early observer, it “confined itself to its legitimate business of getting drunk or doing nothing.” Everyone went armed. Arizona, not yet under United States territorial law, was a haven for fugitives from justice. The immigration from Sonora consisted largely of murderers and robbers; and what the Apaches left undone in the way of pillage, the invaders finished. “Tucson,” wrote the observer—a man engaged in the mining business—“became the headquarters of vice, dissipation, and crime.”

Machebeuf paused only long enough to state his ecclesiastical claim over this “paradise of devils,” and set out on 20 December for the south to find Bishop Loza. The bishop, he had been told, was not at his city of Culiacán, because of the state of revolutionary troubles there, but was probably somewhere nearer Arizona, for he had reestablished his cathedral temporarily at the Spanish colonial silver-mining city of Alamos, far to the south of Guaymas, and inland from the Pacific.

Until he should reach that sea, Machebeuf would proceed at the pace of his pack animal, across deserts, and companioned by mountains, near or far, which had every sort of fantasy of light, distance, sky turbulence, or bearing stillness. Sonora had a character all its own, with few of the lyric enclaves of the New Mexican Rio Grande, and in color, more of the hue and temper of a volcanic land which seemed reflected even in the temperament of the people there. In their color, the mountains suggested dead fire—ashy blue or rose, with hills as scarred and golden as the pelts of mountain lions. He rode past the dead Mexican fort of Tubac, with its empty mission church, came to the ruins of Tumacácori a few miles farther on and saw its empty belfry and the earthen burial chapel and the white dome of the mission, and the “miserable population” which clung about each place. Farther south, beyond the border, he passed Imuris with its own mountain, and the ruins of the San Ignacio mission, and the famous canyon of San Ignacio, which was a rallying point for Indian raiders or Mexican bandits—”nature never designed a fitter location for the destruction of unwary travellers.” But as he went, he became part of every village and town through the exercise of his priestly powers and concerns. At Magdalena, amid tamarisks and palms, lying in a shallow cup of land, the pink bell tower and the blue tiled dome of the church rose against a high gravel hill, and there he sang midnight Mass in a private chapel on Christmas Eve, with the local pastor assisting.

A party of travellers were setting out from Magdalena, and Machebeuf with his men joined them, pausing to see Governor Gándara of Sonora at his “magnificent hacienda” and then moving on to Hermosillo, where at Epiphany the Christmas folk play of
The Shepherds (Los Pastores
) was being given by parishioners, and Machebeuf watched it—the history of faith preserved in the humble verse drama of the Holy Family's search for shelter, the denial of it to them, their refuge in a stable, the birth of their child, the visit of three kings, while shepherds saw and sang of portents in the stars, all as it had been acted through untold time by the forebears of that night's village actors.

It was a hundred miles from Hermosillo, with its bougainvillea, lime trees, and flowering bushes, to Guaymas. The mountain profiles far away grew ever more fantastic, showing through vast notches to others in succession which paled into the distance in every degree of blue. Harsh as it was, a prison of space and distance, the land was there to be conquered and finally loved. It was the land of the Yaqui Indians, where each village had its little church established in the previous century by Jesuits, whose order was expelled in 1767.
Yaquis subsisted on a sporadic stream or in a little canyon by farming, keeping rituals left over together from their ancient ways and their Catholic time; and in its recurring season, war took the men out upon the country in ancestral ferocity. Machebeuf made his way safely through their land, and after many days, the desert sky, its beating light, began to change, grew hazier, and he could see among the distant peaks immense canyons like far chambers, diminishing one past the other—a great range whose other side sloped down to the Pacific, and at last the mountain barriers were drawn aside slowly by his advance, and the sea scent came through the open channels of the canyons and gaps; and then finally, from a far height, he could observe the sea—a table of light. Coming to the edge, he rode along the empty shore of Bacochibampo Bay and after a curve of the land entered the seaport of Guaymas.

There, even in that “miserable Mexican sea-port town, containing at that time about 3500 inhabitants,” was a grand church whose twin spires and dome tiled in sky blue rose between noble mountain terraces of red rock and the squalid waterfront. Machebeuf, in his habitual conviviality, met up with a Californian surveyor. This was a Brigadier General Stone, who was in the employ of the Mexican government to lead a team of topographical engineers in exploring the west coast of Mexico. It was a lucky encounter; for when a steamer due to arrive from Mazatlán, and to return there, failed to appear, one of Machebeuf's ultimate plans was threatened with failure. He had intended to make the voyage to Mazatlán, and then ride across the Sierra Madre del Occidente to Durango, where he would show Zubiría the Vatican documents of assignment concerning “Doñana” and Arizona.

But here General Stone—a Catholic convert—showed his power. He lent Machebeuf one of his company's sailing vessels, commissioned him captain of it, provided him with a crew, and sent him south by sea. Once his own master, Machebeuf decided to halt at the River of May, which entered the Gulf of California at Navajoa, and ride inland to Alamos, to search for Bishop Loza, who might well be there at his interim cathedral. Leaving the seaside palms of the Gulf, and its sunsets of fire quenched by the sea and the immediate dense night, he crossed forty miles of a wide brushy plain toward the vast profile of the Sierra lying north to south. Where in such mountains could a city be? As always, on entering mountains, he had to follow their turning ways. At last they revealed a church tower in three tiers of masonry and plaster, and after passing Los Tres Frailes—a small mountain with three distinct humps named after three friars—he rode through close-walled streets into a large plaza at one side of which was the cathedral,
built of mottled rock, with its single tower and its bell, which in ringing the angelus and the Mass sounded cracked. At the cathedral there was no sign of Bishop Loza, and Machebeuf must decide to wait.

Alamos was a town of great beauty. In the tropical heat of midday, all was quiet. The sun beat down, but on two sides of the plaza arched colonnades, plastered in white, covered the deep walks with cool dark-blue shadow. It was a rich silver-mining town, the houses were miniature villas or palaces, and rising above the elegant blind fronts with their iron-grilled windows, were tall palms and tamarisks and other trees which spoke of garden patios within. Stray Yaqui Indians came and went by day. At night, an almost menacing stillness prevailed, except for the inquiring song of some distant dog.

But Machebeuf's immense passage was not for nothing. The day after his arrival—it was a Saturday—he heard that Bishop Loza was at a village three miles to the north of Alamos to administer confirmation. Going at once, he found Loza at the house of a Don Mateo Ortiz, and at last was able to lay forth his purpose, which he did with his usual wit and persuasiveness.

Loza was cordial as he heard the case, saw the briefs, and without argument agreed to write the necessary documents, adding that he would present Machebeuf with all faculties permitting him to exercise his priestly functions within Sonora. Machebeuf heard him preach on the following day and saw him confirm a large number of people who had gathered from everywhere about. Within a few days, the papers were ready.