Lamy of Santa Fe (57 page)

“What are you building a fire for?” he asked.

This awoke the other priest, who replied,

“I am not making a fire”—and then realizing that there was a stranger in the room, he ran for the door. The stranger cried after him,

“If you don't give me something to eat, I will kill you!” and not waiting for an answer, fired his revolver at him, hitting him in the neck. Then, going to the bed where the sick man lay, he shot him twice, once in the head, once in the leg. The shots aroused others, they came, the man was arrested, and taken off to jail. Reporting the event—
ATTEMPTED MURDER
read the headline a week later—the
Gazette
said, “Both the wounded men are doing well and are in a fair way to recover.”

Lamy mentioned the affair to Purcell, though he supposed the sisters “will have written you what a narrow escape I had on Christmas Eve.… Gracias a Dios que nos ha libertado. Even our Deacon who had received two shots and who according to all appearances could not survive is getting quite well.… It is in great measure owing to the good care of the Sisters that he has got over.' With the letter he sent Purcell a cheque for a thousand dollars in repayment of the travel loan given to the Sisters of Charity, and added, “in this territory we are going slow as in the old fashion, whilst in the States you go at Full Speed on your railroads or steamboats, we can hardly raise here an ox team. But what can we do, we must try to put up with such order of things as Divine Providence is pleased to dispose. Our good Sisters of Charity are sometimes a little down hearted because everything with us goes so very slow …”

The end of the year did not pass without an impassive reminder to Rome: “I am taking this opportunity to observe to Your Eminence that I have not yet received the decision of the question of Mesilla and the places nearby which I have already mentioned to you.”

As the new year opened, a new start seemed possible for Arizona. Earlier, the parish priest of Mora, John Baptist Salpointe, had volunteered to go when he could be spared in New Mexico; and now Lamy, who had received him from Clermont in 1859, accepted his offer, and added three other volunteers: Fathers Francis Boucart and Patrick Birmingham, and a young Mr Vincent as schoolteacher. The dangers of the journey to Tucson had not abated—they were in everyone's thoughts. Hardly a week went by without reports of atrocities on travellers' paths everywhere in the diocese. Lamy asked General Carleton if he could provide military escort for the new mission party, and the general agreed to protect them as far as Camp Bowie—the limit of his military jurisdiction. From that point, Salpointe, the head of the mission with the title of vicar forane, or rural dean, must manage for whatever protection he could find.

Like his prelate, and others before him, Salpointe and his men set out downriver on their assignment. With a four-horse waggon driven by a Mexican, the three priests, mounted on horses, left Santa Fe on the afternoon of 6 January 1866. Along the Rio Grande, they often stayed overnight with ranchers or in the little river towns, for until they reached Fort Selden, where the westward turn would come, they did not feel in need of troop protection, though solicitous, if tactless, friends had assured them that in their general venture, “they were going to certain death.”

Again, the vast land had its surprises. Encamped for the night above Coronado's old region of Bernalillo, they met a strange electrical storm, during which “long aigrettes of electricity … shone without interruption on the ears of the horses.” Salpointe remarked that this, with the roar of the Rio Grande in flood nearby, and the dense darkness of the night, made all seem “weird and ominous.” The very landscape as they advanced was dotted with the old unpromising place names—Dead Man's March (where they barely avoided a skirmish with Indians), Dead Man's Spring, Soldier's Farewell. But the country was magnificent, and Salpointe took pleasure as an amateur botanist in seeing new flora and identifying them later with their Latin terminology.

From Selden to Bowie they were safely escorted by Carleton's troops. At Bowie, the commanding officer assumed their safety and brought them to Tucson on 7 February 1866, after they had been a month on the river and desert trails. Their reception was quiet—their arrival while expected had not been scheduled. Not much could have been done about it in any case. Tucson was as poor as ever, with its six hundred inhabitants, its unfinished church still unroofed, its lawless life, and the extremes of poverty and high prices in miserable contrast. Salpointe was happily received, however, and set to work forthwith in conditions far less promising even than those of Santa Fe in 1851 and Denver City in 1860. All his early efforts met discouraging results. An attempt to roof the church with timbers from mountains forty-six miles away failed because of heavy snows which blocked the transport of logs. A school promptly founded at San Xavier del Bac for the Papago Indians and Mexicans there was forced to close in two months for lack of money, and Vincent the teacher and the pastor Father Boucart returned to live at Tucson. The school was reestablished there. An effort to provide a mission at Yuma on the Colorado River under Birmingham and Boucart failed when the two priests, attacked by fever, had to abandon the place, and Salpointe for a time was the only priest left in Arizona.

Yet he held on, aided by new colleagues, and with a barely tenable gain here, another there, Lamy's pattern of colonization slowly took root: missions first, schools next, amenities of charity next, and in due time, as a result of the combination of these, a slow emergence of civilized life, to match both the needs and contributions of an always increasing population of prospectors, traders, and finally, town-makers.

In Colorado, where he went on a pastoral visit in May, Lamy could see how a colony made its way, even through troubles. Denver had been swept by fire two years before, but in destroying the wooden shacks of the city's first life the disaster resulted in new, more sightly
and permanent buildings of brick and stone. Mountain flood had done its work, too, for soon after the fire, Cherry Creek, usually dry, had risen with a sudden crest of twenty feet which had swept away houses, tents, bridges, in the lower parts of the city. Rebuilding was rapid, and Lamy found Machebeuf busier than ever, though lame, and carrying out his long day's work by buggy, and rarely able to dispose of his paperwork at night before eleven.

He took Lamy everywhere, principally to Central City, to lay a cornerstone of the new church, to administer confirmations (he found the children “well prepared”), and there, also, to dismiss an Irish priest who was making trouble. The old friends gave a pontifical High Mass together, with Machebeuf as deacon and Raverdy as subdeacon, on Trinity Sunday, the bishop preached, and Lamy admired Machebeuf's new bell—it weighed two thousand pounds, “very fine,” which had been cast for him in St Louis. Lamy could inform Machebeuf that he had an answer to his restrained inquiry of last December about Durango: the Vatican said it had “repeatedly” asked explanations of Durango for its delay in obeying orders issued earlier to transfer the disputed lands to Santa Fe. But—this after fifteen years—the Secretary of the Propaganda added, “I'll wait for a while for his reply, and after having received it, I shall present immediately the explanations of both sides to the final judgement of the Sacred Congregation.”

Matters proceeded more swiftly in the New World. Colorado was growing fast in population and capital. The mines “inspired such confidence in the capitalists of New York and Boston that two railroad companies were rivalling each other in activity and energy to reach the foot of the Rocky Mountains.” Machebeuf reported that he was certain it would take only a year or eighteen months until it would be possible to ride to New York by rail in five or six days in the new palace sleeping cars.
Days
: how many ox and mule trains had they known which took as many weeks simply to cross the plains between the diocese and the Missouri River?

It was plain to see how Colorado was swiftly taking on a character in contrast to that of its parent see. New Mexico remained largely Mexican; Colorado was flooded with an Anglo-American population of wholly different style, energy, and values. Already Denver was richer than its cathedral city of Santa Fe. A change must soon come. Lamy foresaw Colorado as independently a vicariate apostolic; and there would hardly be any doubt that Machebeuf must be its first bishop. The friends discussed the matter frankly; though nothing could be considered settled until after a number of official acts had been promulgated. Nevertheless, in his impetuous way, Machebeuf could not resist writing home to mention the prospect.

On his way home overland to New Mexico after a stimulating Denver visit, Lamy paused halfway to Santa Fe on the River of Las Animas—the Souls, or as French trappers called it, the Purgatoire, and the Americans, corrupting this, the Picketwire. There he inspected a large new church going up, of adobes, and now saw this humble material as durable and suitable, as well as inexpensive. After a brief pause at Santa Fe, he went down the eastern plains of his lands. They were sparsely settled. But there were still Navajos and troops at Fort Sumner, in the Bosque Redondo, and he went there to visit them. He had to travel two hundred and fifty miles without seeing a house, “camping
à la belle étoile
and exposed to be scalped at every step.” At a water hole, he and his small party came upon “some clothes, camping articles etc with fresh human blood on them,” and were told that four men had been killed there on the night before by Navajos. “This happened,” he said, “within 12 miles of Fort Sumner where there are 5 companies of soldiers.”

Presently he moved on southwestward travelling on a military road which connected Fort Sumner with Fort Stanton in the Capitan Mountains. It was a stretch of a hundred and twenty miles farther. From far away he could see the Capitan range lying east and west, and at its west end, through a great notch in the mountain profile, called Capitan Gap, where the road ran, the distant crown of the Sierra Blanca showed pale blue against the light. He gave his duties to the garrison at Fort Stanton and then made his way to the old royal road along the Rio Grande. In all, on this great circle trip he travelled over nine hundred miles, gave confirmations in twenty-four settlements, most of them new places, and found seven new churches, on one of which, it having just been completed, he bestowed the episcopal blessing. The open mystery of a handful of human lives working to survive and grow into community in a land so bare, hazardous, and beautiful, held him fast; and he gave back to it the mystery of faith.

IX

ROME AND BATTLE

1867

i
.

Rome—An Accounting

F
IVE MONTHS AFTERWARD
the bishop was in Rome to make his postponed visit
ad limina
to Pius IX, and to carry out a commission given to him by the hierarchy of the United States assembled in their second plenary council at Baltimore. Travelling toward the council, which convened on 7 October 1866, and bringing Coudert with him again as his secretary, Lamy paused at Mt St Vincent in Ohio to ask for additional Sisters of Charity. His little hospital staff were “doing well” but the need would grow; and, further, he wanted to found an “industrial home” in which native girls could learn proper trades by which to support themselves.

At the sessions in Baltimore, the bishops surveyed the state of the Church in the United States. Among the matters discussed were new dioceses in the rapidly developing lands of the West. Proposals for creating apostolic vicariates for Colorado and Arizona came up. Lamy spoke several times on these and other subjects. His hard-gained experience, his weathered dignity, came strongly through his simple discourses; and his fellow bishops, much impressed by him, voted to name him as the courier who would carry to the Pope the record of their meetings. Though it was not specified, the expenses of his journey must have been paid by the council, even though he was already planning on going to Rome in his own duty. Such aid was welcome to an administrator who had to count every dollar.

While the conciliar documents were being given proper form to submit to the Pope, Lamy was in New York; and at last, when they were ready, he sailed, with Coudert, in a French steamer on 17 November, and was given his passage without charge. Crossing to Brest in nine days, he found the voyage pleasant, and proceeded at once to Paris, where he stayed three days in preliminary talks with the Society concerning his needs for the return journey homeward. His next stop
was in Auvergne, where he spent a few days in old familiar places. When he told of his experiences, he seemed in a somber mood because of the weight of his debts.

Meantime, at Rome, his arrival was anxiously awaited by Cardinal Barnabo, who, said the American Father McCloskey, who was Rector of the North American College in the Via dell'Umiltà, “doubtless has nightly visions of the Venerable Bishop of Santa Fe wending his way too slowly to Rome with Baltimore's ‘big book' and its interpretation under his arm. Woe be to him if he has lost the precious documents for if he has, he need never again show his face in Baltimore.” But before this letter went off to Purcell in America, a postscript was crowded in—Lamy had arrived on 16 December.

Rome, as ever, was a city of grand contradictions of circumstance. In the intricate struggles of the Italian kingdoms to be united under Victor Emmanuel, Rome and the papal dominions were still under the threat of the King's armies and Garibaldi's genius. Until a few weeks before, the troops of Napoleon III had been in Rome to protect the papal position; but they had been withdrawn in early December, and Pius was left with only his own mercenaries—largely Frenchmen. But uncertainty reigned, an invasion was possibly imminent, and if it came, the Pope was calmly resolved to escape; though some hoped he would resort to defiance and artillery, even as the people rejoiced that the French emperor's army had gone, and that their liberty was restored, as they believed. A great majority were in favor of the revolutionary movement of the King and his supporters; but meanwhile, as Lamy saw, everyone proceeded with preparations for the great Christmas festivals quite as though “all Italy was humbly submissive at the Feet of the Holy Father.”