Lamy of Santa Fe Read online

  So they did, “but not until God had blessed them with a large family. I have said a noble family. I will say one of the most remarkable Familys that has ever been raised in this vicinity. They were kind and agreeable together, truly brothers and sisters.”

  Not far away a few other Marylanders came to stay. The presence of the settlement could be detected, from a little distance, only by the blue smoke of its cabin fires rising above the woods. In all things life must be sustained from what the wilderness alone could provide. There was a sense of contentment in the slowly gained knowledge of this. Bare necessities were mingled with sport—there was no other entertainment. A few books and spoken prayer met non-material needs.

  George Sapp told his grandson, then a boy, about hunting at night. His very language conveys the time.

  He has, while hunting, come across an old bear and her young cubs and he would run towards them and hallow and all the noise possible and by so doing the cubs would run up a tree and the mother bear would then run away for some distance and then Grand Father would shoot the cubs and they would have some good meat. At one particular time Grand Father and a friendly Indian went out to watch a deerlick on a bright moonlight night and on the way to the lick they made an agreement not to talk any after They arrived at the Lick. And also each one would climb separate trees on the west side of the lick so that They would have the lick between Them and the moon, when it came up, in order that They would have full view of the Lick and surroundings. They were up in the trees waiting patiently when to their surprise They heard something climbing a tree over the Lick and could not Tell what it was until the moon gave sufficient light for Them to Discover what it might be and it proved to be a panther perched upon a limb waiting for Mr. Deer. They all three kept quiet and it was not long until They Heard and seen the Deer, but as soon as the Deer came to the Lick the Panther leaped upon Him and killed him quickly and then the Indian shot the Panther and made the remark to Grand Father that was the way to watch a Deerlick.

  In the log house of George and Catherine there were not “any cradles for rocking Babys.” Consequently, their first son “had a bresh heap for his resting place.” The scattered settlers longed for community. It would come, and one of its chief tracks was the “Great National Road,” the highway which was conceived by General Washington. It was also known in various of its sections as “The National Pike,” the “Cumberland Road,” and finally, and prophetically for Lamy, as the “Santa Fe Trail.” Its Ohio portion was financed by Congress when the state was admitted to the union. Even as early as 1825 its extension to Santa Fe was authorized by Congress. Eventually the several states it crossed assumed responsibility for its local maintenance. It had a roadbed thirty feet in width and its earliest portions were surfaced with crushed stone and gravel. The rest of it was plain dirt. “Tree stumps eighteen inches high were left in the road but trimmed and rounded with an axe so that carriages could safely pass over them.” Along its tracks went “a steady stream of two-wheeled carts, Conestoga wagons, farm wagons, men on horseback, men on foot, men driving cattle, hogs, horses and mules.” Parts of the road were traversed by Purcell in his earliest visits, and when Lamy went north from Cincinnati, he too travelled upon it for a while. But on the straggling earthen tracks which were tributaries of the Great National Road, travel for anyone was precarious, with many creeks to cross which were often swollen in warm weather and treacherously frozen in cold. Some of these passed by curious low hills of symmetrical shape, which later proved to be Indian burial mounds holding the secrets of life in the wilderness as it was lived long before the Easterners came.

  George Sapp gave part of his homestead land for a church and burial ground in 1822. Though he himself was not baptized, others of his community were, and in any case, settlers gathered together on whatever possible occasion, and so it came to be that when first, Father Fenwick of Cincinnati, and later, Father O’Leary and Father Alleman of distant parishes, rode from their stations to hold services, they found a loosely organized parish at Sapp’s Settlement with a log church called St Luke’s. A town was growing a dozen miles to the west—this was Mt Vernon, and there, too, settlers had made their congregations, in the beginning largely Methodist.

  When Purcell became bishop of Cincinnati he went through the country where later he would send resident pastors. In some places, he encountered impassive hostility from those who were not Catholics, in others, all people of whatever confession gathered to see him, to hear him preach, and to take the sacraments from him if they were eligible—baptism, communion, confirmation. In the nation at the time there was lively animosity against Catholics, who kept arriving by immigration from abroad in swelling numbers—people mostly of the laboring class come to make their fortune and find new identity in republican America. Purcell, in his forest clearings, preached on the “vulgar prejudice against the Catholic Church,” refuting its “pretended [i.e., supposed] opposition to Scripture and civil and religious liberty” and defending “the much abused and calumniated convents.” Lurid rumors about the latter were feverishly enjoyed by Protestant extremists. Purcell was warmly greeted. On one journey to Sapp’s, he “preached twice from a rudely fashioned pulpit in Mr Sapp’s orchard,” and when he went to Mt Vernon, said Mass in private houses for the first time—in 1834. When the Methodist church there was refused him on one occasion, he used a private chapel built by a well-disposed Protestant. Crowds met him also in Newark, and Zanesville, sometimes so eager that he had to preach twice a day—once in the morning, and again in the evening “at early candle-light,” for two hours at a time. For many of his listeners he was the world coming to see them—they who lacked news, and theatres, and any music but their own half-remembered, half-invented songs and airs.

  iii.

  The Pattern

  AT DANVILLE, as the Sapp settlement was now called, Lamy found a fine country of great shady groves, set in a sequence of wooded valleys where morning mists lingered paler and paler at each farther ridge. To reach his village, he had to cross the Walhondling Creek, which took its slow course to the south. In autumn, when he arrived, the creek was mild; in winter it could be an icy obstacle, in spring a treacherous flood. He found St Luke’s log church, and not far away Grandfather Sapp’s cemetery, which sat on a fine hill looking to all directions. The village was laid out on streets which rose and fell on the folding hills.

  By what followed rapidly, it was clear that the people took him to themselves from the first. Since there was no place of his own in which to live, he stayed now with one, now another, of his new families. He was charged with mission settlements at varying distances from Danville, and he rode or walked to make himself known—he thought nothing, said someone, of walking from Danville to Mt Vernon and back in a single afternoon, a journey of twelve miles each way. In his halting English, of which he must have seen the humor even as he regretted its limitations, he held his meetings, and performed his routine duties, and brought his followers to join him in the matter of the church building.

  Walls and a roof had been put up by the settlers, but the church was far from finished. He led them in continuing the work, and considering his difficulties, it progressed rapidly. About a year after his arrival, he wrote from Danville to Bishop Purcell, by the uncertain mails:

  I am in the hope that you received the letter I wrote to you two months ago. I told you that I was most [?] uncertain whether we should go on or not, for our new church at Danville, because it’s so hard times this year; but we are going to finish it. we have many hands, and I hope it will be quite done perhaps before the last week of next month. You recollect that you promised me hundred dollars to help this congregation; and as I cannot have the least doubt about your word I have already engaged myself to pay the plaster, this will cost from 60 to 70 dollars; I am going also to get the altar made, be so good as to make me an answere, and let me know how you will do about that help for our church, when I came here for the first time, the building was under the roof, and since
, we have expended more than three hundred dollars, you know, it is a frame building fifty feet by thirty-eight.

  Furthermore, it had a choir gallery, and the altar was to be “handsome,” and there was to be an altar railing. The plastering was “remarkably well done by two good Irish Catholics,” The front centered on a sturdy, square tower, with a latticed belfry, topped by a cross, all in vastly simplified Gothic. Not much wider than the tower, with windows in pointed arches, the rest of the church reached back under a peaked roof. There was nothing like it thereabouts, and by 15 November—two weeks before Lamy had planned—it was, though not fully completed within, ready to be dedicated.

  The bishop came from Cincinnati to perform the ceremony. He saw that the church stood on “a beautiful eminence visible for a great distance,” and that it was established on a two-acre plot. It was touching that many Protestant neighbors had helped in one way or another toward the building of the church. Almost more than a monument to religion, St Luke’s was a mark of organized society such as had never before existed in Sapp’s Settlement. Bishop Purcell gave first communions, confirmations, baptisms, and preached on the Holy Eucharist, and celebrated a solemn Mass, and in the congregation pride was mingled with righteous fatigue after great effort. Lamy was at the center of it all. By now he was revered and loved by those whom he had led in the building of the temple and all it stood for in the way of civilization.

  Two days after the dedication, Purcell moved on to Mt Vernon, where, at the request of Protestants and Catholics alike, he preached and held services. There was not yet a church there—to build this would be Lamy’s next task. Meantime, he set about making a rectory for himself on donated land opposite the Danville church.

  The whole pattern of his work there established the terms of his labors over the next years. He had looked no farther than Ohio—except for one occasion which seemed to threaten the continuation of work so faithfully begun.

  It had to do with an impulsive notion which Machebeuf, in his parish of Tiffin in northern Ohio, seemed ready to carry out. He had been visited by the celebrated Jesuit missioner P. J. De Smet, who was already celebrated as “the Apostle to the Indians” (their name for a Jesuit was “Blackrobe”) and who brought, from his expeditions into the Far West, much of the earliest knowledge of the upper plains and Rocky Mountain regions to the established public east of the Mississippi. Machebeuf, he urged in Tiffin, should join him in his vast western missionary travels, with all its dazzling hardships and holy dangers. But what would become of Tiffin, where a little parish church of native stone was being erected? Bishop Purcell heard of the plan to go West, and knowing of the close friendship of Lamy and Machebeuf, sent Lamy to Tiffin to dissuade Machebeuf “from a project which afflicted the heart of the bishop and father.”

  After hearing Lamy set forth the views of his bishop against abandoning Tiffin and going West, Machebeuf “contented himself with asking his friend,”

  “ ‘Eh bien! mon cher, what would you do in my place?’ ”

  Lamy—whether placing an even graver responsibility on Machebeuf or simply expressing his innermost feeling—replied,

  “What would I do? All right. If you go, I will follow you.”

  It was a deterrent which Machebeuf was unable to ignore. Yet the episode held a prophetic note for them both, even as they remained with their own present duties—building churches, visiting their dependent missions. Purcell knew upon whom he could depend, and how to use friendship as an instrument.

  iv.

  Those Waiting

  IN 1840 LAMY SET ABOUT the building of a small brick church in Mt Vernon. Its substance began with his creation of a sense of community among the people there. Someone gave land, another was to take the lead in bringing timber, others worked to use the roads and canals of Ohio to gather other materials. As resident pastor of Danville, Lamy could not give all his time to Mt Vernon—or even to Danville itself—for he was charged with mission duties also in Mansfield, Ashland, Loudonville, Wooster, Canal Dover, Newark, and Massillon, in addition to even less coherent communities by the waysides.

  In the hot, white, diffused mists of summer, and the cracking and often howling winters alike, he and Machebeuf both had to forward their home parishes and attend to their missions. As Lamy wrote to Purcell, “I have bought a horse, and I am now a great ‘traveller’; for I have many places to attend, and I don’t stay more than two Sundays a month in Danville.”

  Machebeuf, too, had acquired a horse—”beau et excellent”—from a German priest at the exorbitant rate of one hundred dollars. His letters home were full of lively details about the life of the missioner—typical of what Lamy, too, was experiencing, and all the other young Auvergnats who had come away with them.

  In their own parishes they wore their cassocks, but travelling they put on their oldest clothes, and when they came to towns they dressed more neatly in order not to invite scornful comments from entrenched Protestants. They used a long leather bag in which to carry vestments, Mass vessels, and other supplies, and the bag was thrown over the saddle. Where roads permitted, a four-wheeled wagon served the missioners and then they could carry a travelling trunk. In the very beginning, they had to “preach by their silence” but it was not long before they were able to get along in English, to the delight of their listeners. Sometimes it was so cold that the ink froze in its bottle as they wrote at night by firelight. The visitor often had to sleep next to his horse to keep warm. Coming to a house where he would spend the night, the missioner was given a bed, “sometimes very good, sometimes only passable.” In the morning, children would be sent in every direction to tell other remote homesteaders that the priest had come, and, so soon that it was amazing, the people came gathering, settlers from Germany, Ireland, France, and the eastern states, and it was time for the sacraments and the Mass and the sermon. The listeners were “not savages, but Europeans who are coming in crowds to clear off the forests of America.” And then on again to the next cluster of those waiting for what the visitor alone could bring them. It was a matter of literally keeping the faith, at whatever cost to the traveller—on one occasion Machebeuf used the frozen Toussaint River as his highway, until the ice broke and he went through into water five feet deep.

  Danville and Tiffin were eighty to ninety miles apart and there were few occasions when Lamy and Machebeuf could see each other. Sometimes they would converge at Cincinnati on visits to the bishop. Now and then they were prevented by illness from visiting each other—Lamy was ill several times, once “dangerously for several days,” but when he was well enough he joined Machebeuf for a visit to the Irish canal workers on the Maumee River, and exclaimed over American enterprise which was constructing a canal forty feet wide. One day Lamy heard that Machebeuf was dead of cholera, and “heartbroken” went to bury his oldest friend. When he arrived, he found instead that Machebeuf was simply recovering from a fever. There was joy all around, and another of the French missioners referred to the invalid who had deceived death as “Monsieur Trompe-la-Mort.”

  Loving all which they were overcoming in the name of what they believed, they were content. Machebeuf wrote to Riom, “I declare to you that for all the gold in the world I would not return to live in Europe,” and Lamy in one of his letters written from abroad some years later, said he was preparing himself “to return to my Beloved Ohio.” Still, the call of their early home was strong in their early days in the Middle West. They had fine plans for a visit to Auvergne. They knew how they would go—the Lake Erie steamboat from Sandusky to Buffalo, the great canal to the Hudson River and down to New York, and from there, no such antiquated an affair as a ship under canvas but a steamer, which would reach Liverpool in fourteen days. “From Liverpool to Paris by railroad and the Straits of Dover, two days would be enough,” wrote Machebeuf to his father. “Then from Paris to Riom is but a hop-step-and-a-jump for an American. This is the way Father Lamy and I have fixed up our plan.” Yet there was a condition which had to be met first. “But it
cannot be carried out until we have each built two churches, [Lamy] at Mt Vernon and Newark, I, at my two Sanduskys [then known as Upper and Lower Sandusky]. So, if you can find some generous Catholic who can send us at least eighty thousand francs for each church, we can leave within a year. Merci.…”

  v.

  Self-Searchings

  AND THERE IT WAS—the material struggle from which neither would ever be free. Lamy knew moments of self-doubt—there was “grade deal to be done”; he wrote the bishop in 1841; “if I had only that sacerdotal zeal.” He need not have worried—the bishop referred to him as a “fervent pastor.”

  Yet the obstacles were not merely local. The nation was undergoing a great financial depression, and despite all the good will, strong arms, and community work in the remote countrysides, materials still cost money, labor must be paid; the pressing needs of a growing population always increased the goal to be achieved. Machebeuf wrote to his brother, his sister, and his father in turn, describing the national condition. “Since the declaration of independence,” he declared, “no one ever saw here such stagnation in business affairs. Not only is this true of Ohio, but in all the States of the Union.” There was not a tenth of the money in circulation in 1842 which had been known in earlier years. Most of the banks failed; those which survived would not lend money; paper money, much mistrusted as issued by banks which later failed, destroyed confidence; employers defaulted on wages to workmen. Through the months, work was discontinued on all large enterprises. It hardly paid to raise grain crops. Food prices were depressed, but those who raised their own could not starve. Immigrants kept pouring in, not to take jobs, but to claim land and cultivate their own produce. It was obvious that support of existing churches and the construction of new ones was almost impossible. Machebeuf—and the same must have been true for Lamy—had the greatest trouble keeping up his own dwelling, and said, “I have had to sell my dear little buggy which was so useful.”