Lamy of Santa Fe (66 page)

Again, then, travel to certain of his districts was impossible at such times for Lamy; and for all the causes of his troubles of a material nature, he was certain that the principal cure would be the completion of the railroads, transcontinental and local. The lines would immediately unite communities now separated by hazardous journeys made alone and in the open. Indians would be far less effective against iron locomotives and thickly ribbed wooden coaches and heavy speed. Goods and produce could be brought quickly to needy populations. A web of easy communication would appear. In the nation, railroads had followed the pioneer waggon trains; and settlement and prosperity and stability had followed railroads. The same must come—he knew it would come—to New Mexico, as it had come already to Colorado, and even, from the west, to Arizona. But how slow was the progress, and how great the obstacles, while he continued to make his exhausting trips by horseback, with his black leather sling bag, or in a buggy, which held his travelling trunk of slats of pale wood covered with horsehide to which the hair still clung, and which was lined with
printed wallpaper, which he had bought in Lyon from Mm Condamin Fils, in the Quai St Antoine, the
Fabrique de malle et articles de voyage en tous genres
.

It was no wonder, then, that he was one of the strongest workers in the promotion of the railroads for New Mexico. As he summed it up for Paris, trying as always to make them
see
: “Our territory, although in U.S. is separated from other provinces owing to its remote situation and being surrounded by Indian tribes with no railways, no navigation, scarcely a few bad roads. The nearest seaport is about 450 leagues away, and the railway 100 leagues.”

But in 1875, coming in what seemed like agonizing slowness to the New Mexicans, but like titanic speed to the railroad workers, the line which was to be the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe was advancing at a rate of a mile a day after passing Las Animas, Colorado—the river settlement which Lamy had come to so often on his horse. In Boston, President Nickerson of the railroad wired orders in 1878 to the railhead at Topeka, “Goon as rapidly as possible to Raton Pass. When that is sure we shall organize this end and go through. We mean … business.… There will be no looking back.” A day later he had a shrewd, impersonal thought: “See if we can not save something by employing Mexican labor.” The
New Mexican
kept a sharp eye on rail progress, and saw with approval “the speedy extension of the rails southward as far as Santa Fe” which would open up “the wealthy regions of Southern Colorado, New Mexico and the San Juan mines.”

It was all the more a stunning disappointment when instead of coming to Santa Fe, the railroad, reaching a natural turning point for the capital, merely established there a way station which they called Lamy after the bishop's former property there, and moved directly on to Albuquerque. It appeared that certain citizens of Santa Fe, knowing the usual “good thing” in business, had bought property along the old Santa Fe Trail by which the rails would most naturally have approached Santa Fe, and had demanded a price for it which the line refused to pay. The engineering difficulties for the line to the capital were also more expensive than anticipated. Santa Fe was dismayed. Of all times when a commercial lift was needed it was the worst in which to discourage the benefits which the rails would bring. There was depression in the country as a whole, and it was especially acute for New Mexicans. No native workers were used in the line construction after all. Herds and flocks were starving to death. Near-famine conditions prevailed in parts of the diocese. Somehow the railway must be brought to town.

A committee was formed, with Lamy as a member, and a bond issue was proposed to the people to finance a spur line from Lamy junction
to the capital—a distance of seventeen miles. The archbishop was the first to sign the petition circulated to the voters. The
New Mexican
strongly urged its approval. It would be expensive—the Topeka treasurer of the line estimated that it cost $12,000 to lay a mile of track. Santa Fe voted its bond issue of $150,000 by a vote of three to one. The future was coming after all.

Its immediate terms, necessarily, were all which Lamy and the others saw. When the rails were ready, he said, “the working of the mines, the raising of the flocks, the cultivation of vineyards, will change entirely the condition of things. We will be able to employ laborers at more reasonable wages, construct houses and churches as in the east. We may probably see factories established in this country, where wool is to be obtained in great abundance. In this general increase of resources, this mission will without doubt find extension and a way of sustaining the great, heavy loads, which are always found in new under takings.'

Who was not excited by the news that “the monster engine to be used on the switchback over the Raton Pass, on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad, has arrived at Atchison on its way west”? Built at the Baldwin locomotive works in Philadelphia, it weighed 188,200 pounds, and would pull a train of seven loaded cars over the mountains. In Santa Fe, the people were topically and “justly proud of the elegant [new] establishment which is known to the admiring public as the Broad Gauge, and patronized by all who prefer the genuine article to a miserable compound.” The finest wines, liquors, and cigars were to be had there. “Hospitality is said to be part of a gentleman's religion,” mused the
New Mexican
. “If this be correct, Stimson, of the Broad Gauge, must be a very religious gentleman,” and evidently the public continued to make the Broad Gauge their headquarters, to enjoy “all the luxuries served in such a superb manner by Joe and Harry.”

On 9 February 1880, ex-Governor George T. Anthony of New Mexico telegraphed to President Nickerson at Boston: “Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe are united by an unbroken band of iron, and a continuous path of commerce.” The
New Mexican
trumpeted
“NEW MEXICO'S TRIUMPH,”
and added, “the Old Santa Fe Trail passes into oblivion.” The last spike was driven by General Edward Hatch, representing the Army establishment in the territory, by Chief Justice L. Bradford Prince, and by the territorial governor, General Lew Wallace, who was occupying the old palace in the plaza and working on the final chapters of
Ben Hur
. A parade with bands, flags, school children, citizens, and carriages celebrated the event, and all were told, in florid oratory, of the day's significance. A month later Governor
Wallace was able to write to the Secretary of the Interior, “It gives me pleasure to report New Mexico in a state of quiet. A large immigration is pouring in under inducement of rich mineral discoveries and increased railroad facilities.”

Lamy felt almost immediately an easing of material concerns. The railroad system granted all clergy free passage and half rates for the shipment of goods and supplies for church and school. In the continuing drought, famine was averted by the freighting of food. Prices of everything dropped. The towns to the south were connected to the main east-west line by New Mexico's internal railroad companies. Trains for the east left Santa Fe every morning at eight, with “sleeping car berths secured at station.” Trains for Albuquerque and the south departed daily at three in the afternoon.

Maintenance of the lines called for a large labor force, but as yet, few of the native New Mexicans were employed by the main railroad. Lamy wrote to the company asking that they be recruited for the well-paying work, saying “let them bring their wages to their families and let them secure the necessities of life and honest comforts to which a family have a right.” There could be blessings in material things. In 1880, on 17 March, the first train of the Southern Pacific went west to reach Tucson. As it connected with the long spur of the Santa Fe reaching from Belen to El Paso, travel to Arizona was now possible in great comfort. A year later Lamy and Machebeuf and a Father Phillips of the Denver diocese were carried in Pullman Palace coaches to Tucson, for the first time with dispatch and safety, there to pay a visit to their old confrere Salpointe.

iv
.

Styles

L
IKE ANYONE
moving from his own culture to an alien one, Lamy brought his with him, and when conditions allowed, he bestowed what he believed to be its best character upon an environment new to him. He had not been alone in viewing the adobe style of New Mexican construction as primitive, often barbaric, by its very nature subject to rapid deterioration. Even so, he could recognize the native appropriateness, in surroundings of poverty and social simplicity, of the New
Mexican style which was so directly derived from the hive-like enclosures seen in the terraced towns of the Pueblo Indians; and it was only natural that the Franciscan friars, the Spanish colonizers of the sixteenth century, coming into the strange land, with few engineering resources or imported building materials, should build their own churches and houses after the manner of the Indians. New Mexico's isolation for centuries embedded the style of these as a tradition, which served the Spanish and later Mexican settlements well. Harsh necessity caused even European Spaniards to do with what was to be had, even if they remembered the great shrines and palaces, the castles and
estancias
, of Spain, and would have had them again if they could.

But Lamy came with a time of growing communication and transport, with a fixed vision of what was seemly. The Romanesque, the Gothic, the mansard styles of France were what had always enclosed the religious activities of his early life; and at Santa Fe, when it was time to build, it was the manner of these that he brought to his low-storied earthen city—the reminders of France which affected the whole material character of a place as his French clergy were affecting its spiritual life. That a remote imitation was all that could be managed he would have been willing to agree. But even so, in his view, what he wrought seemed more suitable, more beautiful, than what he had found.

Twentieth-century immigrants from the Anglo-American East and elsewhere found the old New Mexican atmosphere appealing for its very difference from the commonplace sophistication of their brick and wooden cities, with all their mechanical uses; and some held Lamy to blame for the changes in character he had put upon the cities of New Mexico in his time. But what such new settlers saw were not the Santa Fe, the Albuquerque, the Taos, of his time, in all the dusty, desiccated poverty they then showed, where every street was like a section of barnyard, and walls and roofs cracked and shed their substance under long drought and infrequent but violent downpour. Any photograph of Santa Fe in the previous century bore the likeness of a run-down collection of sheds and byres, corrals and poor open fields, irregular paths and alleys and stretches of wall, all in the same color of dried earth mixed with straw; and with only the church building rising higher than the hand of a man reaching to touch the ceiling.

It was this view of the place which had moved the soldiers, traders, and immigrants of the time to their descriptions of the city as a prairie-dog town, a random collection of flatboats grounded on a dusty plain, an enlarged scatter of dusty bricks lying about. If he had been an artist Lamy might have seen what later comers saw in the harmony between the landscape and the human dwellings made from its clay
and the undemanding life of the native people. He might have felt the passionate devoutness of the Mexicans as they expressed this in their natively carved and painted devotional pieces, with all the blood and suffering and fear of God which honestly primitive crafts could simulate. These were appropriate for the Spaniard and Indian to venerate, for to them, holy tortures found some luxurious echo in their temperaments. Later collectors loved them less for religious than for aesthetic reasons.

But Lamy knew also the European religious art of his time, which was already turning bland in the spirit of
bondieuserie
reproduced in commercial plaster and print. Machine processes banished aesthetic awe which was the inheritance of sixteen centuries of Christian conviction. So it was that in his labors to reach both economy, utility, and dignity in his monuments to piety and decorum, Lamy drew upon his own native tradition with its inheritance of masterpieces of style in daily use since the thirteenth century—and also on the growing industry which produced plaster saints and lithographed Stations of the Cross. In doing so he wrought results which were admired in their time, when progress meant change, especially in matters of style and taste. It was left to a later age to find beauty inherent in the Spanish colonial and Pueblo traditions of building, and to mingle with these the convenient niceties of plumbing and other technical construction so that prosperous modern settlers were able to have their native culture both ways.

It was the poverty of the environment which prevented high aesthetic achievement of the Old World sort in the bishop's buildings. Falling between two traditions—the grand European and the uncultivated but fervent native—Lamy's style reached only a gesture and a function of devout memory.

Now, as the cathedral began to take shape, the Moorish arches of Spain, as repeated in the French Romanesque in many places such as Vezelay and—closer to the old home—Notre-Dame de Port, and even Lempdes, began to show. “The front.' wrote the archbishop too confidently at the start, “is of a variety of stones, yellow and red, representing a mosaic.… The front has columns ornamented with capitals on which large figures
en relief
are nicely worked.” He was speaking of the ideal, not the real, but what was real enough was that the cathedral had no roof as yet—would not have for years—but he said it would be a “stone arch roof.” He estimated that the church would measure two hundred by sixty-six, “all cut stone in the Roman Byzantine style.” One of the southwest entrances, observed the
New Mexican
, was beginning “to indicate the fine and massive style of the architecture
[and] makes us impatient to see the whole imposing plan completed.”