Lamy of Santa Fe (47 page)

The instrument of cession let further light in upon the territorial confusion; for Bishop Loza, naming not only the missions of Tubac, Tucson, San Xavier del Bac, and Arizona at large by name, also specified “La Mesilla within the
condado
of Doñana,” and “any other settlements … pertaining to this our Diocese.” At one stroke, he made clear that he considered the entire Gadsden Purchase, under the name of “Doñana” from California to the eastern portion of New Mexico, as his own territory to dispose of in ecclesiastical authority. He thus included more than merely the Arizona portion.

On 16 January 1859, “in this parish of Alamos,” he signed the paper:

Firmado
Pedro
Obispo de Sonora
(flourish
)

and Machebeuf, with his aim achieved, was ready to return to his sloop at Navajoa, sail on to Mazatlán, descend upon Zubiría at Durango,
and lay to rest, with the paper he now held, the exhausting issue of territorial jurisdiction.

But Loza advised against this journey. Mazatlán, and the state of Sinaloa, which fell within his diocese, were in a state of civil war, and indeed, he himself had been forced to depart for the north as a “half-fugitive” because of “differences” with the governor of the state of Sonora. Machebeuf would do far better to return to Arizona rather than risk travel to Durango across the warring southern lands, where Catholic priests were particularly in danger.

How should he go then? He was informed that the strong current in the Gulf flowed southward, and this with the prevailing winds would make a return to Guaymas as captain of his own ship arduous if not perilous. He would do well to vacate his captaincy, dismiss the sloop, and return northward by the coastal road.

This he did, proceeding overland to Hermosillo. He met ardent welcomes wherever there was a chapel with a little population, or a tribe of religious Yaquis, to whom he ministered. He arrived without memorable troubles at Tucson, sent word of his achievement to Lamy by the Butterfield stage, and set about the business of a missioner in a wild town which must have order if it were to recover from the decline which had set in after the original Mexican presidio, founded in 1781 as the nucleus of the settlement, was abandoned.

Machebeuf was given a little house of two rooms by a leading Mexican citizen, and volunteers soon added to it a sizable wooden porch which became the first church to be established there under Lamy's diocese. It was soon too small to hold all who came to Mass, and one Sunday, when only a fourth of those attending could find room within, he preached in English from the doorway on the unity of the Church, appealing to all denominations represented in the throng. He called upon the Mexicans to build a larger church, promising them a regular pastor in return. In short order, men quarried rock in a hillside a mile and a half away, women of zeal dragged the blocks to the church site, Protestants gave money and materials.

Machebeuf moved regularly between Tucson, San Xavier, and Tubac. If there were no bells to summon the worshippers for Mass, guns were fired off to signal them. San Xavier was the center of his interest. Though badly in need of repair, it was still a noble building, with its heavy towers, fine dome, walled churchyard, large sacristy and rectory, and a sanctuary dimly rich in gilt-work, statuary, and carving, reminiscent of the great churches of southern Mexico. The Papago Indians living close to the mission had kept alive by tradition the prayers and even some melodies of the liturgy; and one of the tribal elders revealed to Machebeuf a treasure of four silver chalices, a gold-plated
monstrance, two gold cruets and lavabo, a pair of silver candlesticks, two silver incensers, and the old sanctuary carpet, which he had kept to protect them against theft. It was a moving sign of belief in tradition.

In one of his sermons, given with even more than his usual vividness, Machebeuf thought it well to denounce the crime of murder, which was common enough in the scarcely governed town. The homily was more appropriate than he knew, for in the church that day was a man who had committed murder the very night before. He was at once convinced that the sermon was directed against him, which he felt to be unjust, since he considered that he had killed in self-defense. Later the same day he waylaid Machebeuf in a wood, raved against his supposed accuser, and began to draw his pistol. Machebeuf leaped on his horse and galloped away, which gave him the advantage, since his enemy, following in a buggy, could not keep up with him. In his sensible flight, Machebeuf spurred his mount so hard that he knocked off the heels of his boots. Ever after, so long as he was in town, as he went about his duties, by day or night, to the church or elsewhere, he was guarded, without his knowledge, by men of his parish.

With much to describe to his superior, he left for Santa Fe in early March, though suffering from malaria which had infected him in Mexico. Again he had to cross the Apache lands where only a few days earlier several soldiers had been killed by the Indians. He and his little party came to Apache Canyon (later the site of Fort Bowie). Machebeuf left his waggon and mounted his saddle-horse to ride ahead of his companions to the top of Mount Chiricasca, where a stage station had been established. It was raining hard. As he came alone to the stage house he saw that it was surrounded by belligerent Apaches. The chief rode to meet him and asked,

“Tu capitán?”

“No capitán”
replied Machebeuf, holding out his crucifix.

“Tu padre?”

“Si, yo padre.”

“Bueno! Como le va?”
said the chief, sealing his how-do-you-do with a handshake, and sent for his warriors, all of whom shook hands in turn with the visitor. The chief then wanted to know if Machebeuf had seen any troops along the way.

“Certainly,” said Machebeuf, and reported that even now, a detachment was on its way up the mountains.

The Indians held a conference and thought it expedient to depart, calling out,
“Adiós, padre”
From the stage house three Americans emerged whose lives they said Machebeuf surely had saved. They took him in out of the rain, fed him, put him up for the night, and
him off next morning for New Mexico, which lay twenty-five miles eastward.

At the village of Doñana the malaria gave him a troublesome spell of fever, but he was soon ready to travel, and he arrived at Santa Fe on 24 March, where Lamy “congratulated him heartily” upon his successful undertaking. For two months the malaria and, probably, the accumulated fatigue of his hard journey, kept him resting in Santa Fe. Now both he and Lamy, on similar missions, had travelled to what must have seemed like the ends of the earth, and, having achieved their aims, had come home with enough travellers' tales to last a lifetime.

iv
.

Again to Auvergne

T
HOUGH BY NOW
, in 1859, Lamy had firmly established eighteen parishes with the young clergy he had successively brought from Europe, he knew this was only a beginning for the design he had in mind, which, however ample, would have to be thinly spread over the endless and wonderful spaces of his land. He had not only the land to conquer, but the future.

While Machebeuf was in Arizona and Sonora, Lamy had written to the Society at Paris to say that he was sending Father Peter Eguillon, his present vicar general, to France to find still more priests, and to enlist a group of members of the order of Christian Brothers for the purpose of establishing a permanent school for boys. It was true that from the beginning he had had a boys' school, “more or less flourishing,” but the faculty consisted of priests who had other pressing duties than those of the teacher. He had seventeen possible candidates for seminary training, and there were a few elementary schools with sixty small scholars. But not all of this was stable, and he needed to have new teachers. He already had a house ready for them if they should come, and he hoped the Society would come to his aid to help pay for their expenses on the long voyage to Santa Fe, if they could be found. He capped his plea with an argument certainly calculated to stir response in Paris—with an educated body of youth in the province, the future would be protected against the “incredible efforts” of Protestant
proselytizers who unless opposed would render the young Catholics indifferent, or even turn them into non-Catholics. Luckily, so far, “little damage” had been done; but meanwhile, the young people of the territory really were exposed to “grave dangers.” Sending Eguillon was a sacrifice, as he wrote to Purcell, for he would be left with only one young priest to attend to nine thousand Catholics, half of whom were “scattered through the county,” with “some villages forty miles distant … we will be pretty busy.” It was still evident that he was “very much in need of priests.”

Like Lamy and Machebeuf before him, and Flaget and Purcell before them, Peter Eguillon went direct to Clermont, where he had been educated, and began making his own vivid appeals to the new generation of seminarians at Mont-Ferrand. Irresistible attraction seemed always to lie in eloquent accounts of the worst conditions of hardship, peril, and every obstacle of poverty and isolation. Imagine—and then would come challenging accounts of experience which lost nothing in the telling: the searing travels over endless lands with Indians behind every rock, hunger in the desert, thousands of souls starved for the means of salvation, primitive peoples and their alien ways, a vicious society waiting to be cleansed, the test inherent in the vision of one hardy young man serving God alone in the wilderness.… Hard as they worked, said Eguillon, the few priests of New Mexico were incapable of meeting more than a fraction of the great need which existed.

His eloquence was effective. Almost at once two young priests, Jean Baptiste Salpointe and François Juvenceau, agreed to join him if their bishop would release them; and soon three seminarians also joined up. In addition, and directly in response to Lamy's most urgent appeal, Eguillon was able to enlist four members of the Clermont establishment of the Brothers of the Christian Schools—Hilarien, Gondulph, Geramius, and Galmier Joseph—who were picked by their superior as the best teachers of his local group. Brother Hilarien already knew Spanish, a great advantage. With four more pre-seminary youths, and Father John B. Raverdy from Reims, Father Eguillon had a party totalling fourteen persons—one of them was to become the first vicar apostolic of Arizona, and, later, second archbishop of Santa Fe. They all embarked with him at Le Havre on 17 August in an American steamer, the
Ariel
, so old she was considered barely sea-worthy, and was soon afterwards scrapped. But the voyage, which took fourteen days, was without notable incident.

They travelled by rail to St Louis, then to “a small village” called Kansas City, and set out from there for the plains adventure. Salpointe saw “the green prairie undulated by the accidents of the ground,
representing well enough a sea becoming swollen by a rising wind.” As usual, Lamy had sent waggoners and equipment to meet them, and the party now had seventeen men. The report was that Comanches were making war, so the newcomers waited for a caravan, found one to join, and were surprised to meet with cold wet weather, and even more so, to discover that Lamy had sent them heavy overcoats and thick boots in anticipation of just such a condition. After the usual marvels, observed in peace, the party came to Santa Fe on 27 October 1858, seventy-one days out of Le Havre, and were received by Lamy.

They were all amazed at his “affable simplicity,” for of a lord bishop they expected the grand manner. He gave them their first supper at his own table. Excited over their arrival, and eager to work, and, as one of them said, feeling at home, they “commenced to speak like Frenchmen, and, of course, exclusively in French.” The bishop sternly interrupted them.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “you do not know, it seems, that two languages only are necessary here—the Spanish, which is spoken generally by the people of this territory, and the English, which is the language of the government. Make your choice between the two, for the present, but leave your French parley for the country you have come from.”

The young men were abashed and fell silent, eating “with as little noise as possible, and with a kind of lost appetite.” The bishop watched them for a moment as chastened they bent their heads over his table to take his fare. Remembering what it was to be young, without experience, in a strange land, he felt a pang of compunction, and breaking into laughter, he reopened the conversation—in French.

Even so, he admonished them to study Spanish and English, and sent them to bed in a large dormitory room where they spread mattresses on the floor, though they would have preferred despite the late hour to visit the town. Reporting on their arrival, Lamy told the Society at Lyon what the young men had been spared—that all unknowing they had passed through a summer of terror, when many a massacre by Indians had occurred among the caravans, and that Providence had protected them “in an altogether special manner.” His new school was assured, and work began immediately to organize it.

Since May, Machebeuf was again in Arizona, with plans to visit all the western portions of New Mexico and even to push on to California. New silver mines were discovered over the area, and immigration began to increase. Once recovered from his malaria, he had wanted to set out for the West again without delay, but Lamy kept him in Santa Fe. When Machebeuf asked him why, Lamy replied,

“Oh, there was nothing in particular, and you were so long away that I was lonesome for your return. Just stay here with me for
a while and rest. It will be pleasant to talk over old times. We have not had too much consolation of this intimate sort and I feel that we need some now. In a short time you can go again.”

There it was again—patience tempering impulse; but Lamy knew when to judge his friend ready for the road, and let him go. Machebeuf was off to the West again travelling now along the Gila Valley, in its long course from its source country in the Mogollon Mountains to central Arizona. He visited even the most isolated of settlements along the way until he came again to Tucson, having left the Gila, which ran itself to its confluence with the Colorado River. He stayed in the Tucson country for two months, and during that time began the repairs which would eventually bring much of its original state back to the mission of San Xavier, where he said Mass often, ministering to the Indians whose little
jacales
clustered about its heavy walls. He was arranging to go farther west when word came from Lamy calling him back to Santa Fe once again. Dutifully he returned—but not before he heard of remarkable discoveries of gold in Colorado, far north of Pike's Peak. It was information which would bear upon the rest of his life.