Lamy of Santa Fe (53 page)

Perhaps the weekly mail from Colorado? But it was not always prompt, and Lamy was sharply concerned when in mid-summer he received a letter from Denver dated some time before, written in an unfamiliar hand, to say that Father Machebeuf had been the victim of a shocking accident in the mountains when his carriage had fallen from the narrow road to precipitous rocks below. The letter gave few details, but Machebeuf's condition was clearly dangerous, and Lamy concluded that he might not live. If he was to see him, Lamy must leave for Denver within the hour. He left so precipitately that he neglected to take a supply of rations. A servant rode with him. By noon the next day they appeared in Mora, where Father Salpointe was pastor. Lamy told him the news, and asked him to go along to Denver. The invitation became an order when Salpointe proposed taking a couple of hours to prepare food for the overland ride: Lamy said they would take the remains of lunch on the table and leave at once. It was enough for one meal.

Salpointe could only agree. He was a full-bodied man with large dark eyes and a thick thatch of dark hair which gave him a boyish look. He had an observant, original habit of mind, a keen practical sense, and a Frenchman's taste for a well-set table. Lamy's austere habits—exaggerated by his present haste—led Salpointe to remark that “the Bishop, who could do with one meal a day even at home, provided he had a cup of black coffee and a piece of bread morning and evening, always objected to making ample provision of victuals for
traveling,' As a result, hurrying to Denver, the little party had to live for the most part on game which they hunted and cooked (without salt) though when infrequently they came to a habitation they did supply themselves with rations. Water was scarce, and they had the plains traveller's familiar disappointment when a deep and beautiful catch basin turned out to contain brackish water; but a few miles further on, they found fresh water, and the next day they came to the Huerfano River and the ranch of a friend, who was able to tell them that Machebeuf was beginning to recover from his accident, though it seemed that he would be somewhat crippled for life.

The relief in this, tempered though it was, gave Lamy a sense of ease, and he pursued the rest of his way to Denver at a more leisurely pace, setting the next day's goal at the new town of Pueblo, only twenty-five miles farther on. When they reached there expecting from promoters' maps to see “a second New York, with splendid streets and blocks [read: business buildings], parks and public gardens,” they saw only “a few miserable huts of frame,” on one of which, scrawled in charcoal, was the primal word “Saloon.” They decided not to spend the night in Pueblo but moved two miles beyond on the banks of a little river, a place “indeed very beautiful.” They were at the foot of Pike's Peak, and now nothing lay between them and Denver but grand plains. They moved on, seeing the first habitations at Cherry Creek near Denver City, and after ten days, at last knocked at Machebeuf's door in Denver. In a few moments the door was opened by Machebeuf himself, on crutches.

His astonishment and joy were rewarding. He had had no word that Lamy was coming. The old friends made much of their reunion, and Lamy learned what had happened in the accident. Machebeuf, returning from Central City in his buggy on a precarious, narrow, rocky road chipped out of the mountainside, had met a train of supply waggons. When he drove close to the outside edge to let them pass, he miscalculated, the buggy slipped, and he was thrown down the slope to the rocks below. His right leg was broken at the hip. People took him to a house nearby on the ridge, a doctor was called, the leg was set, but for many months he would be unable to say Mass. Raverdy was still with him, active in the town parish and the mountain missions.

Lamy, writing to Purcell afterward, said, mistakenly, “No bones were fractured, the doctors say that he will get well.” But they were wrong. Machebeuf would be a cripple for life, could never ride again, and would have to go about all his work by carriage. With his characteristic habit of adding interest to events, he was inclined, in his letters thereafter, to say, “Pray always for the poor cripple.”

The bishop spent five davs with him, touring the area, visiting
Central City again, where there were more parishioners than at Denver, and if they as yet had no church, they had a “fine bell.” He blessed the neat brick church of Denver, with “quite a number of Protestants” present, and gave a homily at the end of the pontifical Mass. The choir deserved “great credit.” Everything had grown. “What a change from my first visit two years ago,” wrote Lamy. All of it required “all the energy of Father Machebeuf (and you know he is not lacking in that) to attend to all the wants … in Colorado Territory.”

Reassured about his confrere, Lamy left again for Santa Fe, going now by way of Ute Pass, the Fountain Valley, and the Garden of the Gods. Once again at the Huerfano, he saw settlers from the south, all of whom were learning English. Again the overland travel was the same—unremitting alertness on the road, not only for Indians, but for outlaws, who, taking advantage of the state of war, were on the increase; spare rations and hunter's luck, now good, now poor. Salpointe said he thought “this mode of life exceedingly hard, because I was still young in the missions.” But looking at Lamy, he saw that all of it “seemed of familiar occurrence to my Bishop.” In the end, the younger priest spoke for them both when he said, thinking gratefully of unseasoned rabbit meat cooked on a stick in the open air after a day's ride in distance that seemed hardly to diminish by nightfall, “so good a cook is hunger.”

As Lamy returned home in late summer, the authorities in New Mexico were putting into action a strong, often pitiless program of defense against the Navajos and Apaches which included plans to gather them on reservations where their constantly mounting warfare against the Mexican and Anglo-American citizens and the peaceful Pueblo Indians would be impossible; or if that should fail, then—but the words of the territorial governor, himself a long-time New Mexican resident, and of General Carleton, in command of the military department, stated the case flatly. Governor Connelly declared that the aim of the government “should be so directed as to keep these sons of the forest within proper limits and either maintain them as paupers, teach them the arts of civilized life and oblige them to sustain themselves, or, on the other hand, exterminate them.” The general said, “It may be set down as a rule that the Navajo Indians have long since passed that point when talking would be of any avail. They must be whipped and fear us before they will cease killing and robbing the people.”

Colonel Kit Carson was called from Taos to active service and given troops to wage a war of attrition and spoliation against the Navajo. He burned their wheat and corn fields, chopped down their peach and other bearing trees, systematically working to starve the Indians. Indians inclined to be peaceful had been given until 20 July of that
summer to surrender. Through the summer and winter many gave up and trudged in great misery to Fort Canby in eastern Arizona, later to be moved, along with thousands more, to the newly established fort named for General Sumner, in southeastern New Mexico, at a site called the Bosque Redondo (or “circular grove”). Carleton defined his purpose in this move: “to send all captured Navajos and Apaches to” the reservation “and there to feed and take care of them until they have opened farms and become able to support themselves, as the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico are doing.” It was to be an experiment in changing a whole culture. For the rest—resistant Apaches—Carleton issued orders that: “All Indian men of the Mescalero tribe are to be killed whenever and wherever you can find them … If the Indians send in a flag and desire to treat for peace, say to the bearer that … you have no power to make peace; that you are there to kill them wherever you find them … The Indians are to be soundly whipped, without parleys or councils, except as I have told you.”

Lamy was among those who most deplored the savageries which made the diocese, and its territories, almost ungovernable in both civil and religious affairs. A year earlier one of his young French priests, the Abbé Martin, as he called him, was murdered by Navajos who attacked a caravan in whose vanguard he rode. He had been wearing a cloak over his cassock, and if they had seen him as a priest, said Lamy, they would not have harmed him. As it was, instead of robbing his body in their usual way, they “respected him and left.” Lamy had known Indian warfare for twelve years, and yet he felt for the marauders, and he prayed that the death of young Martin might “deserve the conversion of his murderers and of the whole tribe.”

In the field it was often an unequal struggle. A young officer wrote from Fort Craig on the Rio Grande to his wife in California on 24 August 1863:

My Dear Wife

On Saturday last, the 22nd inst, I returned from my Indian Expedition, having been absent since July 23rd, just 31 days. It was a very tedious march, travelling all the time through mountains and valleys, having no other roads than Indian trails to follow—and nearly the whole country which my command passed over had never been seen by white men before. My expedition did not accomplish much, as I saw the Indians but once—they were driving about 8,000 sheep which they had stolen. I chased them for 31 miles, when I overtook them, and fought them for half an hour. I only had with me five soldiers, two Mexicans, and myself—eight in all, whilst they numbered between sixty and eighty. When I overtook them it was almost dark, and I was nearly a hundred miles from the rest of my command; so after fighting them for half an hour, I could do nothing more than let them go without getting
the sheep. The only casualty on my side was a horse shot, while we killed two probably three of the Indians.… So you see I have smelt gunpowder, and come out of it safe. The[y] are the Navajo tribe.…

Across such country, amidst such hazards, Lamy, a few weeks afterward, was on his way for a journey of half a year which would give him his first sight of Arizona, and beyond.

VIII

THE PAINTED LAND

1863–1867

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Across Arizona

H
E RESOLVED TO GO AS FAR
as San Francisco, where he would respond in person to the Jesuit inquiries about Arizona and New Mexico, and ask for men. With Father Coudert, the pastor of Albuquerque, as his secretary and companion, he set on his longest overland journey since Durango. On 20 February 1863, Arizona had been separated from New Mexico as a territory when Lincoln signed the act of establishment voted by Congress. This creation did not affect Arizona as a part of the diocese of Santa Fe. Now Lamy, who knew the western lands only by hearsay, would see for himself this great new third of his spiritual domain.

Leaving Santa Fe on 27 October with Coudert, he went down the river to Albuquerque, stayed a day or two, and then, from Isleta, turned west across the tawny desert. He came to Inscription Rock, also called El Morro, and found carved in its sandstone face many names of other travellers, including that of Juan de Oñate, the colonizer of New Mexico, who recorded that he had “passed by here (
pasó por aquí).”
If, as once stated, another name was scratched into the rock—“Bishop J. B. Lamy, 1863”—no trace of it remains.

The two riders turned north to Fort El Gallo, where the garrison was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Don Francisco Chaves. The bishop spent a few days there while three companies of dragoons, Major Willis commanding, made ready to march westward. Lamy and Coudert were to join the troop movement. They went by way of the pueblo of Zuñi, where Lamy spent a week. He was joyfully received, administered the sacraments, including confirmation, and slept on the flagstone floor of the pueblo governor, Juan Séptimo. The stone floor, intended as the ultimate in hospitality, resulted in an attack of rheumatism for the visitors. They saw the Zuñi scalp dance, which went on continuously during their visit, to celebrate the recent killing of Navajo
marauders. The Zuñis called the bishop “Tata,” and watched him leave with the troops for a long open crossing to the next known watering place, which was thirty-six miles away. But in the flat desert, unseen from even a little distance, with no sign of a watercourse, they came upon a fresh natural well rising from a spring deep down within almost perpendicular walls, and so ample that even the horses could pick their way to the water. They called it Jacob's Well, and stayed by it for two days, to rest men and horses. On the third morning they woke under a quiet fall of four inches of snow, which was melted by the great sun during the day as they moved on.

Lamy was a good rider, erect in the saddle. Patient in travel as in other things, he still pressed forward as well as he could, to make the hard country yield up to him its blind ways. He was now in Arizona, somewhere in the northern third of the territory. It did not look like the New Mexico he knew, with its pale grass plains, its long green thread of the Great River valley, its wooded mountains. Here in Arizona the immense distances showed other colors—blue far away, but nearer to, the mountains often looked like frozen fire, under bare colors of rose and ochre and char, and the desert was more barren, and its earth too recalled dead fire in its hues. It looked like a painted land. The valleys showed walls striped like agate. One mountain range after another seemed to deny future escape. Those colossal earth wrinkles from afar made grand statements of beauty in form and atmosphere; but once entered, presented endlessly tortuous ways, caprices of weather, and repeated barriers to progress, all inducing a sense of captivity on a dishuman scale. How was progress measured in such lands? In the open desert, how slowly the mountains ahead seemed to change and come closer—day after day the rider would seem always to be within sight of the same mountains. Often the way ahead vanished through heat waves into the very sky. The pace of travel was so slow as to compel contemplation in anyone given to thought in any degree, and, in some, could serve as an awesome entry into the religious spirit in a time when the work of God was admittedly divine and, on that account alone, wonderful to behold. How ten-fold desirable then, to conquer, or at least survive, hardships in the midst of wonders in honor of a purpose believed in beyond one's own life.