Lamy of Santa Fe (54 page)

Lamy's military escort had other duties than those of protecting him, for they had reconnoitering to do, and reports to investigate, which made their pace of travel slower than Lamy's needed to be. Coming to the Little Colorado River, he met a train of goods waggons belonging to one of the Armijos of Albuquerque; and bought from the party a waggon with mules and all its merchandise. The waggon drivers entered his service with their vehicle, and Lamy took leave of the
troops in order to travel faster. He now had his two saddle-horses, an ambulance with two mules, the waggon with its eight mules, two men with two mules, and a tent, and he led his party out on its own across a wild land in a state of uncontrolled Indian warfare. He kept everyone on the lookout at all times, for the Apache used the bare country itself for cover as no one else could, and might appear between one minute and the next out of nowhere. The party could go no faster than the fastest mule's walk; but they were not subject to delays of days at a time.

They suffered from cold, for they were in high altitudes and winter was drawing on. One night Lamy and Coudert were nearly killed by noxious air caused by live coals in a pan set inside their tent by a solicitous Mexican to keep them warm. They reached fresh air only just in time. Another night, Lamy had to walk about until daylight to keep his feet from freezing, for an icy storm was raging and no fire burned. One day they joined a party of Mexican raiders bound for Cañon del Diablo, which Coudert thought ill-named as it was so cold and far from hell.

For two hundred miles they had been gazing at San Francisco Peak and at last were on its foothill slopes. There they were met by Major Willis's command, who had arrived earlier by another route; and one night in the black silence they heard an unearthly scream. It was the hunting cry of a mountain lion who was only fifty feet from the camp and its animals.

Moving again, Lamy and his people met a Tonto Apache party who, being outnumbered, kept the peace, saying only, “How do you do, tobacco?”; and the caravan crept on to the great labor of crossing the Cañon de la Vivora. Its near side could be descended only with the utmost labor, for it was precipitous—the waggon wheels had to be lashed immovable and each vehicle held back in the descent by forty soldiers. Going the reverse way, this canon wall could never be ascended. It was a place of no returning. Lamy amiably said that they had crossed the Rubicon, and sold his ambulance forthwith to Major Willis, who was ordered to establish Whipple Barracks and remain. It was to be a new Army post erected to protect the gold and silver miners at nearby Walker (later Prescott) in the very center of Arizona, amidst formidably enclosing mountains.

Until 20 December Lamy remained there, exploring the neighboring mines, and fishing for trout, and then with his little caravan he set out for Granite Creek near the very crest of Granite Mountain. Coming through a heavy snowfall he arrived there on Christmas Eve. A miner offered him his own cabin, eight feet square, which was put up out of parts of wooden packing boxes. The snow blew in through
the cracks. It was where Lamy and his seven men would take shelter.

It was also where, on the next morning, Lamy offered the Mass for Christmas Day.

Deus firmavit
[he intoned in the Collect],
orbem terrae, qui non commovebitur:
parata sedes tua, Deus, ex tune,
a saeculo tu es
,

and praying to God on a wintry mountain of granite, the words told him of how the Lord founded the solid earth, and how it would abide immovable, and how firm was the throne of God even before the world began, and how God was from all eternity.…

For as he wrote to Paris, “On Christmas Day, we were able to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice, attended by twenty or twenty-five people kneeling on earth covered with the nighttime's snow. We were on the slope of a mountain, surrounded by forests of russet oaks, silver firs and cedars.” The altar was improvised from old planks and set up within his cabin, and was canopied by freshly cut evergreen boughs. Only a few men could kneel inside the cabin—the rest were outside in the cold. It was so cold that a fire was lit in the cabin, and several times Lamy had to bring the chalice with its wine and water to be thawed by the stove. Snow was falling, and so much came through the packing-box walls to fall on the altar that continually it had to be brushed away. Enacting the center of his belief and surrounded by the natural Gothic of the mountain heights—pointed firs and pinnacles of rock—he was a countryman at home.

It was soon time to move on again. He had distributed mail entrusted to him at Santa Fe to bring to some of the miners. He doubted—and so did Major Willis—that gold in great quantities would be taken at Walker, because of a scarcity of water. The miners put much hope on spring freshets to bring them what they needed to wash out the gold. Lamy left his vestments and Mass vessels and two horses with a local resident, Don Manuel Irrizarri, provisioned his small party for six days, bought fresh horses from miners, and set out for the Mojave Indian country. This lap of his journey would take him across the great Mojave Desert, and before he reached the Indian village he had gone along for thirteen days.

One night an Indian tried to steal the horses of Lamy and Coudert. If he had succeeded, the bishop and his people would surely have died trying to cross the desert on foot. They came safely to Fort Mojave and rested for a few days; then with new mounts and supplies were taken across the Colorado River by ferry to continue the journey to
California. They had expected natural forage on the way, but no grass grew, and meeting by chance a Californian on his way eastward to Fort Mojave were able to buy fifty pounds of corn from him for twenty-five dollars. They passed across great mountain rises, thinking each might be the last; but another always loomed ahead. They saw a curious desert tree—the palm of St Peter—which grew as high as fifty feet; and they found on one of the plateaus so many hares and rabbits that they could catch them with their hands. But at last they reached the last plateau, and looking down the abrupt slope to the west, saw at its base a fair-sized California city. It was San Bernardino, a town built by the Mormons, which they reached by way of a well-made road down the mountain.

There Lamy found an old parishioner of his from Ohio who had gone to settle in California, an Irishman called Quinn. In his happiness at the reunion, Quinn gave every hospitality to Lamy and Coudert, and when they had to leave by stage coach for Los Angeles, he assumed the care of Lamy's men until he should return. The trip to Los Angeles was luxurious after weeks in the saddle.

In Los Angeles, Bishop Amat was glad to see Lamy, but when asked about the business of obtaining priests for Arizona, for which Lamy had made his extended journey, replied that two Jesuits had already gone to Tucson—one of them Father Bosco, who had written to Lamy, the other Father Messea. It was gratifying news, and there was now no reason for Lamy to go up the coast to San Francisco on the same mission. The travellers remained eight days with Amat, who showed them the whole vicinity, took them to see the Pacific at San Pedro, and to visit the mission of San Gabriel, with its great groves of orange and lemon trees, which showed together scented flowers, unripe fruit and ripened. It was a place of ease, the air then pure, the light clear, the land beguiling.

But now Tucson awaited. Returning to San Bernardino, Lamy and Coudert found Mr Quinn again, and with his help stocked all equipment for a hard entry into another wilderness, now to the southeast. Once again it was the familiar succession of desert and mountain, repeated through weeks. They noted that one lone passage was across a desert below the level of the seacoast they had left—Death Valley. They proceeded by way of minuscule settlements no longer on the map—La Paz, White Water, Aguas Calientes, Indian Wells, Weaver. Their route lay in a great diagonal across lower Arizona from the Colorado River toward Tucson. They met almost no one, saw few settlements, once came to a cluster of only two families to whom Lamy brought the Mass.

In the Weaver Mountains southwest of Walker he halted while
Coudert, with a companion, went fifty miles to the north to retrieve the vestments, vessels, and horses left at Walker with Don Manuel Irrizarri. On his route north Coudert and his companion went with particular caution, for there was news of Indians about. On reaching Granite Creek safely, they were asked immediately by Don Manuel,

“Where do you come from?”

“From Weaver.”

“What news have you of the massacre on the road?”

“We heard of no massacre.”

But word had come to the Creek the night before of how three Americans and five Mexicans, who had left Walker to go to Weaver, had been killed, scalped, and mutilated by a band of Tonto Apaches.

At a certain point, the road between Weaver and Walker divided, one part passing to the east, the other to the west, of a great hill. Which route had Coudert taken? The eastern side, said Coudert, which explained the survival of himself and his companion; for the massacre had occurred on the western side, where they would have met the Tontos. At Weaver, Lamy heard of the massacre and mourned Coudert and his rider as surely lost. But after a week they were safe again in Weaver, having passed on the way—this time they chose the western road of the hill—the graves of the victims, buried there by a large party of men from Walker who were out on the land now to avenge their dead friends. Coudert brought the sacred objects with him—but not the horses, for these, and all the livestock belonging to Don Manuel, had been stolen by Indians on a raid.

Tucson was still two hundred and fifty miles away. The monotony of danger—danger from the desert nature, with its sky heat doubled by its reflection from the hard barren crust of the earth; the scarcity of water; and, as attested by abandoned ranches seen now and then, and the remains of mine machinery and overland waggons left to rust and rot, danger from the always travelling Apaches—was unremitting. Campers often travelled during much of the night when the temperature dropped; and with the return of the sun, which heated the air so that it scorched the mouth and throat, the travellers would pause to rest during the hottest part of the day. As a mountain drew clouds together out of its vast exhalations of transpiration, so the desert called forth violent hot winds which rose and carried choking dust over whole provinces.

But if progress was unimaginably slow, there was something stronger than what tried to impede it. A lone dweller in the Arizona wilderness wrote of Lamy: “He stopped a day with us as he was returning from California, a frank agreeable fascinating gentleman with the bonhomie of the Frenchman and the earnestness of the typical Christian.” He
saw Lamy clearly. “A man of works rather than words, whose field of work is an empire, his diocese stretching from Denver to Mexico, from the Rio Grande to the Colorado.”

At last, on 19 March 1864, Lamy and his party drew into El Charco del Yuma, thirteen miles from Tucson, and were met by Father Messea, one of the two who had come from Santa Clara. A mounted squad fired rifle salutes, and they all proceeded to Tucson to be met two miles from the village by Father Bosco, “with as much pomp as the city could afford.” They proceeded to the unfinished church, whose sanctuary Bosco had roofed with canvas, while the rest was open to the sky. The bishop's blessing came upon the little crowd assembled to receive him.

Though he thought that one day there would be a large population there, the town was then meagre in numbers and comforts. A survey and mining expeditioner in the same year saw it as “a city of mud boxes, dingy and dilapidated, cracked and baked into a composite of dust and filth; littered about with broken corrals, sheds, bake-ovens, carcasses of dead animals, and broken pottery; barren of verdure, parched, naked, and grimly desolate in the glare of a southern sun. Adobe walls without whitewash inside or out, hard earth floors, baked and dried Mexicans, sore-backed burros, coyote dogs, and terra cotta children; soldiers, teamsters, and honest miners lounging about the mescal-shops, soaked with the fiery poison; a noisy band of Sonoran buffoons dressed in theatrical costume, cutting their antics in the public places to the most diabolical din of fiddles and guitars ever heard.” The best accommodations one could possibly expect, he said, were the “dried mud walls of some unoccupied outhouse, with a mud floor for his bed; his own food to eat and his own cook to prepare it; and lucky is he to possess such luxuries as these.… The Apaches range within three miles of this place,” but the presence of troops, and the counter-raids by the usually peaceful Papago Indians of the region, kept a semblance of security over the village. But its general state, and the ruined remnants of happier times a century ago when it had been “a good-sized town” under Mexican rule, spoke plainly of how it had been reduced by the Sonora/Arizona Indians of the recent past. The days were so hot that a soldier reported how “from 11 o'clock in the morning until 3 or 4 in the afternoon everybody closes their windows and door and sleep, because it is too hot to move about. It is the sleepiest place I ever saw.…”

Lamy remained there almost a month, administering baptisms and confirmations to hundreds both at Tucson and at San Xavier del Bac, south of town, where Messea was pastor to its Indians, to the number of four thousand, as Lamy estimated. He thought the church with its
adjacent convent “scarcely damaged,” and he found the church interior embellished with frescoes and well-executed sculpture. Machebeuf had begun its repair two years earlier. The wonder was that it survived so well as it did after its abandonment in the eighteenth century. In the 1740s a visiting Franciscan saw how that had to be, for reasons both practical and mysterious. “There are many and powerful medicine men here and they slay one another. The missionaries who have resided here have become bewitched and it was necessary to withdraw them before they should die.”

The mining engineer was “surprised to see such a splendid monument of civilization in the wilds of Arizona,” and he described the rich Churrigueresque façade, the two high bell towers, one of which was domed, and the high dome over the crossing. He saw the two Jesuits from California, who entertained him well, and gave him an “enthusiastic account” of all they planned to achieve in a lifetime of work there. He heard the Indian women “sing in the church with a degree of sweetness and harmony that quite surprised” him.