Lamy of Santa Fe (20 page)

Lamy, in his amazement, yet considered the matter from the dean's point of view and patiently concluded that the dean was technically justified in his position. Conferring with Machebeuf, he wrote to Zubiría in Durango asking for a swift confirmation by letter of Rome's new appointment.

The news of Lamy's presence and pretensions went to Zubiría from another source—the pastor of Taos, Father Antonio José Martínez. “Your illustrious lordship,” he wrote, “perhaps knows that New Mexico has been erected as a bishopric [actually vicariate apostolic], and Fr. Juan Lamy was appointed to be its bishop.… I have regretted a great deal the separation of New Mexico from the diocese of your Illustrious Lordship,” and he hinted that a “superior authority”—evidently referring to the territorial United States governor—was behind the move.

Durango lay five hundred leagues to the south in Mexico. A letter from there must take time to arrive. Meantime, Lamy could not remain idle. His documents made one matter binding—he had in them a legal claim to the Church properties of New Mexico; and even the dean must bow before this. The new bishop moved swiftly to take custody of Church buildings, chapels, and other properties, and succeeded in all but one case. This instance, before it was resolved, was a scandal, a farce, an occasion for the public passion for which the citizens of Santa Fe have always been famous. The case had to do with the Chapel of Our Lady of Light on the south side of the earthen plaza of the old city. This was popularly called the
“Castrense”
—a word signifying that which belonged to the military.

It had been the old military chapel of the Spanish/Mexican garrison of Santa Fe, and, in much disrepair, it had been appropriated by the United States territorial government after the 1846 war, evidently without protest by the rural dean. A United States lieutenant in 1846 noted it as “the richest church in Santa Fe,” though it was then in ruins, the roof fallen in, and bones of parishioners once interred below the earth floor lying about in random exposure. He saw the carved stone reredos, dated 1761, with its panels of saints and a central bas-relief of Our Lady of Light “rescuing a human being from the jaws of Satan whilst angels are crowning her.” He fancifully detected Egyptian influence in the ornamental carved columns which enclosed the central panels. By 1849, the roof had been repaired, and the building was in use as a storehouse by the United States authorities.

Within a few days of his arrival, Lamy had already taken steps to
bring the chapel into his possession. Writing to Purcell, he said, “It is not very large but admirably proportioned, and the sanctuary is enriched with a great deal of fine work in stone. The military authority seems to allege a claim to this property, though the territorial legislature has relinquished all right to interfere. I hope I shall not have much trouble in its recovery.…”

But on a Sunday night soon afterward, while Lamy was still awaiting a reply from Zubiría, the presiding judge of the Supreme Court of New Mexico, Chief Justice Grafton Baker, ruminating drunkenly over Lamy's campaign to take the
Castrense
from United States jurisdiction, declared that he would never yield the chapel to Lamy and Machebeuf; on the contrary, he would have them both hanged from the same gallows.

It was the wrong thing to say in the presence of a few Mexican Americans who with others were drinking with him that evening; for like their fellow Latins of the time, they held the Church and its priests in reverence. They repeated abroad what the chief justice had threatened to do. On Monday morning a petition was swiftly circulated which demanded the return of the chapel to the Church. Over a thousand citizens signed it—Catholic, Protestant, civilian, military; and a great crowd came together out of nowhere and marched on the profaned chapel where the chief justice had taken refuge. “Fearing for his life,” wrote Machebeuf to his sister much later (she had heard of the episode even in France, which astonished him), the judge demanded military protection from the American commandant at Fort Marcy, the United States fortification. His plea was disdainfully refused, and an officer came to the bishop to assure him that if he should need protection (presumably from the court) the entire garrison would be at his disposal. Feeling ran so high during the day that Machebeuf and a Catholic officer of Fort Marcy took up a position at the door of the church to protect Chief Justice Baker until he asked for safety and vowed to yield to the bishop. That Monday evening, “the poor judge, wholly humiliated and abashed, went to make reparation to the bishop, and proposed to return the church to him with all possible solemnity.”

So it was that on Tuesday morning, in the presence of the governor and all the military and civil authorities, “they surrendered the building,” declared Lamy, “according to all the formalities of the law; the court itself sitting in the church, myself being present, they gave me the keys. I said few words in Spanish and English, and right on the spot I got up a subscription to repair the church in a decent manner, the governor and the chief justice liberally subscribed the first ones and
in a short time, we had upwards of thousand dollars our list is increasing every day … I hope to say mass in it in three month, when I come back from Durango…”

For there had been no word from Zubiría and Lamy began to see that he must go himself to show his documents of appointment to the old bishop and try to bring him to cede what had so far been denied in Santa Fe.

ii
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The Society

A
T STAKE WAS HIS AUTHORITY
over a diocese larger than France. New Mexico still loosely included all of present-day Arizona, and other areas imprecisely defined, which were part of the Mexican cession after the war. Lamy had already seen much of his new diocese, whose overall size was about two hundred and thirty-six thousand square miles, and if the desert seemed to predominate in its character, the country around Santa Fe had great variety. It lay at an altitude of seven thousand feet in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo range, which rose nearby in the east—wooded mountains which took the sunset light in such color that the early Spaniards named them for the Blood of Christ. To the south were rolling hills dotted with piñon and juniper trees. Sixty miles away across a vast plain rose the superb arc of the Sandia Mountains at Albuquerque, and on the northern horizon was the grand line of the Jemez Mountains, beyond great barrancas of sandstone and earth, the color of rosy flesh, through which ran the Rio Grande on its two-thousand-mile course from the Colorado Rockies to the Gulf of Mexico. Overall was a light so clear by day that prehistoric Indians named the place of Santa Fe “the dancing ground of the sun.” The air was pungent with the exhalations of mountain forest and desert bush; and every play of mountain sky, with light and cloud, and every gradation of blue in the mountains from near to far, and the rustling cool under cottonwood groves in summer, and the warm sunlight of even the coldest winter day, when the smoke from hearth fires of piñon wood gave a resinous perfume over the town, brought a sense of thoughtless well-being to most people, and an awareness of unique beauty. The bishop found some four thousand residents in Santa Fe,
out of a total of 65,984 as reckoned in a census taken for New Mexico five months before his arrival.

The city seemed humbly like a very element of its natural surroundings. From a little distance, its houses merged into a likeness of some eroded earth outcropping, for they were all made of earth itself, in the form of adobes, or large shallow bricks moulded from a mixture of mud and straw which when dried were strong and durable. To soldiers and traders from the East, the buildings seemed like wretched hovels, and Lamy himself said that his Mexicans had no other architecture but that of their mud houses, which used no boarding, and had almost no windows, and as for the churches, of which Santa Fe had five, they reminded him of nothing so much as “the stable of Bethlehem,” (There was only one house in town with a peaked roof and shingles; it was put up during the war and was known as
“la casa Americana.”
) Streets and houses both were of earth material, and met the weather in the same way, wet or dry, muddy or dusty.

Yet there were graces and strengths in the local building style, for once off the street and through a blind door, which might be richly panelled and weathered to a silvery gray, the visitor saw a patio within, with trees rising above the flat-topped one-storey rooms, and covered walks leading outdoors from one room to the others, for the rooms rarely opened into each other; and in the plaza of the town, the whole square was lined with such covered walks, or
portales
, for protection from sun, rain, or snow.

The plaza, a rectangular park in the center of the city, was once the parade ground, or
plaza de armas
, of the Spanish garrison. In 1610 the government palace was built along its north side, and remained the official residence of governors for over three centuries, under three regimes. As Lamy arrived, it housed also the chambers of legislation, the post office, the territorial library, and the ruins of a jail. The palace was a greatly enlarged version of the typical Santa Fe house. Its outer
portal
measured over three hundred feet in length, along one whole side of the plaza. It was the most impressive structure in the capital, and history had made it oddly beautiful. Always called the Governor's Palace, or the Old Palace, it would become in later times the historical branch of the Museum of New Mexico. High cottonwood trees towered within the patio gardens to shade the flat, low rooms. The whole town looked like those through which the bishop had come after reaching the Rio Grande at El Paso del Norte. If there was a prevailing character to those places, it was the appearance of untended poverty—the color of dust over all, the crumble of dried mud between the annual seasons of replastering with new, wet earth, the straggle of animals loose in the earthen alleys, the meagre and flyblown markets.

Though Lamy's birthplace of Lempdes also had the look of the earth on which it stood, it was thriftily neat, and its ways were adapted from those of the cathedral city of Clermont only a few miles distant over long-cultivated fields. He carried within him the medieval styles of central France, and of the fresh, young towns of the forest clearings in Ohio, so lately affected by the comforts increasingly brought by developing canals and railroads. Santa Fe, as he found it, showed no such effects of technical civilization. All was as alien to him as though he had been sent to a missionary station in remotest Africa. It must seem that he had only the primal materials of human society with which to work. In his vocation they were what counted most; but surely he must, when he could, work to bring them the bounties of such worlds as he had left.…

If the people he saw had variety in their looks—Mexican residents, United States traders and trappers and prospectors, Indians who wandered in and out of town on obscure errands—there was still a prevailing look to the majority. This was the Latin-American look. Santa Fe, all New Mexico, were still vastly more Mexican than anything else in appearance, ways, beliefs, degrees of knowledge, and language. On the average, the people were smaller than those persons who came for varied reasons to live among them. Their complexions were swarthy, their hair dark, their eyes black and vivacious in captured light, their gestures by turn restrained—a lift of the chin to indicate a direction was enough to answer an inquiry—or extravagant, and generally polite. A soldier thought them “the most abject contemptible objects” he ever saw, but allowing for various levels of prosperity, their dress reflected lively vanity. The men wore a brightly striped shoulder blanket or serape over a short jacket and ruffled or pleated shirt. Their trousers, thigh-tight, were held about the waist by a wrapped silk band. Among the relatively prosperous, the trousers were studded all down the outside seams with silver buttons. Horsemen by need and tradition, they strode and rode in boots high-heeled to hold securely in broad wooden stirrups, and their spurs were often of silver, with spiked ornamental rowels twice as big as poker chips. Topping all were “those everlasting big hats,” as a trooper said—tall-crowned affairs, with very wide brims turned up at the edge, and traced with embroidery of gold or silver lace and little spots of mirror or bright metal. Their women went, by day, in blouses and skirts of varied color, and black shawls or
rebozos
which covered their hair and often their faces as a fold was flung about across a shoulder. Many of the poorer went barefoot. In the evening, at a fandango, where everyone danced and all smoked, men and women alike, the men wore long-tailed coats, pale full trousers, and
small, pointed shoes, and the women then appeared in bright fabrics, and widely spread skirts, with heavy face powder which over their dark skins took on a pale violet hue; while half a dozen tunes by violins and guitars, repeated all night, set the steps, most often those of the
vals despacio
, or slow waltz.

Cut off from most of the world, and from prepared education, these people were ignorant though quick-minded and passionate. What education they had came only up to a certain point, and this was received at home; though a very few of the more prosperous families sent sons to colleges in Mexico and the nearest United States metropolis, St Louis. When Lamy arrived there were already four Protestant ministers working to establish education where seven eighths of the population were illiterate, and to wean the Mexican Catholics away from their religion of ritual and ardent practice.

And yet there had already been a long heritage of teaching the Indian people, from the time of the sixteenth-century Franciscans to the 1840s. Adolph Bandelier—a sort of southwestern Humboldt—wrote in his journal that a Cochiti Indian, Juan José, “told me about olden times. He says that, previous to the years 1845 and 1846, there were schools at the pueblos, under the direction of the Church.” A handful of Indians could read and write, though “paper, books, and ink were extremely scarce, so scarce that the writing material was mostly sheepskin or tablets of wood.” To write upon these, the pupils flattened a stylus out of a leaden bullet, and drew lines with it, and then using a quill wrote their exercises, with ink made from powdered charcoal, mixed with saliva, or water, held in deer-horn inkwells. But “after the American invasion, the schools were gradually cut off …”