Lamy of Santa Fe

by Paul Horgan

The social and spiritual precepts of Christ struck deep into the individual person, touched veins of spirit through which he found a new sort of identity with fellow beings in the worship of God.

The churches were self-images of their makers, combining aspiration with recognizable images in stone taken from daily experience—the humble realities of what was loved and what feared, ranging from the human person to grotesques out of the world of demons. The Romanesque style made its daily and lifelong impact less through the refined aesthetic than through expressions of power—durability, seemly strength, and impregnable shelter; and what was sheltered was man’s spirit against all threats the world could offer in every life until that life should end. The patience needed to do the work of the early medieval style seemed to prefigure a promised eternity,

Romanesque ornament celebrated all living things—animals, fish, men and women of the day at their work; plants of the earth in branch, leaf, fruit, as well as figures of the Passion and the personification of the demonic unseen which thus became as real as the rest. Anywhere, from the capital of a double column, or the base of a font, or the frontal of an altar, or the almost hidden groin of a twining stairway, suddenly one could recognize a common face in stone gazing forth as an angel, a fiend, a saint, one of the Holy Family, in constant reminder of how the world went, and how in his own essence one carried these, containing all: the capacity for the divine; for evil; for safety, either through imitation in prayer and act, or perdition through mortal caprice. The powers of piety were inescapable, whose ideal persisted in familiar expression from the times of the earliest religious pilgrimage until, eight centuries later, interpretations of the essential forces of life would take a new turn through the physical sciences.

in its abiding character, the Romanesque seemed rooted to the earth, while the Gothic sought to leave it.

Every age marked by a distinct historical style is an age of faith. The object of faith may change, but the impulse to define and live life in terms of a system of belief is constant. Great acts have been done in the name of many different beliefs. To understand any such act and the individual who gave it interest for us, it is necessary to take as a given element, regardless of our own relation to what we see as reality, the absolute and sometimes glorious significance of the faith which moved him. The Catholic form of this view in Lamy’s time lay at the foundation of the state, the town, the family, and the person. It was as naturally expressed by believers as life through the act of breathing. Believed in, its formalisms were not burdens but aids to a divine end, through a culture both intensely local and fervently strong because it was by definition universal.

Nothing long-lasting was done without religious conviction.

With the turn of the eighteenth century, the age of piety seemed for many to be ended, in the name of reason. But still, for vastly many more, the motive of Christian belief survived, and for them the offering of self in its behalf remained an act of unquestioned reasonableness.

It need not be further explained to the broadly skeptical taste of a later time why men and women in religious commitment thought it worthwhile to bring the works of faith, hope, and charity to strange lands and changing societies. Once they have recognized their gods, men have always served them.

Overall was a light so clear by day that prehistoric Indians named the place of Santa Fe “the dancing ground of the sun.”

rows of farolitos; or candle lights protected from the wind, and bundles of piñon faggots (luminarios) were lighted to outline the plaza,

Father Antonio José Martínez—

He bought a printing press—the first in New Mexico—from its owner at Santa Fe, moved it to Taos, and produced his own textbooks, catechisms, and missals.

What was known as the Santa Fe Trail, which began at Independence, Missouri, actually ended in Chihuahua, with Santa Fe as a midway point.

There was suitable native stone to be had near Santa Fe. Ochreous limestone for the exterior could be quarried in the Arroyo Sais, and the light volcanic stone for the vaults in the Cerro Mogino within a few miles of the city; and for the interior walls, a heavy granite could be taken from the low hills in the country where the bishop’s land lay seventeen miles away on the Santa Fe Trail [the site of the present railroad junction of Lamy, New Mexico]. Preliminary donations were solicited, and the response, though modest, was enough to encourage Lamy to proceed with his plans. The New Mexican announced that the cornerstone would be laid on Sunday, 10 October 1869.

There were few detailed architectural plans, or engineering drawings; all that was technically certain was that the new cathedral would be constructed around and over the old earthen church, and foundation footings were accordingly placed outside the walls of old St Francis’s. As the new stone walls would rise, they would gradually hide the adobe elevations; there would for years be a complete church within one on the outside, unfinished. With that much to go on, a cornerstone could be set down as a promise. The cornerstone contained gold, silver, and copper coins; newspapers of the day; official historical documents naming the public officers of the nation, state, and cathedral—President Grant, Governor Pile, and Bishop Lamy. Enclosed also was a list of the first donors to the building fund which gave the names of all those giving twenty-five dollars or more. Lamy led off with a donation of $3000. The sister of the late Rural Dean Ortiz gave $2500, and also presented to the cathedral many altar vessels and ornaments of great value, which brought to mind those missing ever since Vicar Ortiz had departed from his Santa Fe duties in 1852 taking with him certain religious articles of the parish church of St Francis, claiming them as his own. The list of first donors included the Mother Superior Mary Magdalen of the Lorettines ($500), the Spiegelberg brothers ($500) and many other non-Catholics, and members of the once-rebellious Armijo family of Albuquerque.

There was talk of a facade with two towers a hundred feet high, and a dome eighty-five feet high at the crossing of the transepts, and a nave two hundred feet long. The cornerstone was blessed after vespers on its Sunday, and on the following Saturday, the city awoke to learn that it had been stolen, and its contents rifled, never to be recovered. The act might have served as a forecast of the halting history of the cathedral church; but the fact was, Lamy had begun the construction, and all its later vicissitudes could seem only a repetition of the pattern of his whole life in the diocese where there was always trouble enough in the moment briefly to obscure the increase of his achievement over all the years. In dealing with stones as well as men, distance as well as hazard, his patience was still equal to his strength as the new decade of 1870 approached its turn.

One of Lamy’s most important charges upon Salpointe, now the vicar apostolic of Arizona with the title of Bishop of Dorylla in partibus infidelium, was to find and engage for Santa Fe an architect and some skilled stonemasons who would undertake to proceed with the building of the new cathedral, for the earlier contractor-architect—an American—had proved inefficient in the laying of the foundations, which were already shifting. Salpointe found his men. They were Antoine Mouly and his son Projectus, who in turn found stonecutters. All would go to Santa Fe to work on the new shell of the stone cathedral.

Tesuque Cañon about three or four miles from town, he had acquired in 1853 the small country property where he could retire for rest, meditation, concentrated work. There he had built a small lodge, consisting of two rooms—one a tiny chapel with its altar for his daily Mass, the other his combined sitting room and bedroom. He called it the Villa Pintoresca.

The little estancia was his delight.

“Good work has been done on the Bishop’s ranch road.’ said the newspaper. “It forms one of the best rides out of the city. This is the work, we presume, of Bishop Lamy.” Though other people rode, Lamy often walked the whole way to the lodge.

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,

General Lew Wallace, who was occupying the old palace in the plaza and working on the final chapters of Ben Hur.

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.”

In 1880, on 17 March, the first train of the Southern Pacific went west to reach Tucson.

From many a plains voyage Lamy had brought cuttings of fruit and shade trees and grape vines all the way in buckets of water, scarce as it was, to be planted on his arrival home. The garden was walled with adobes by his first French architects, who had crafted its main entrance out of native granite. There was a sparkling fountain, and a sundial stood on a pedestal of polished Santa Fe marble. Aisles of trees, plants, and arbors led to it from all quarters of the enclosure. Formal walks reached from one end of the garden to the other, with little bypaths turning aside among the flower beds and leading to benches cunningly placed in the shade from which Lamy and his visitors could see, on the high ground to the north and east, the old earthen battlements of Fort Marcy, and “the only brick and modern residence in the city, and a windmill, probably the only one in the territory.” To the west through the branches of his trees he could make out the long blue sweep of the Jemez Mountains. At the south end of the garden on its highest ground was a spring which fed a pond covering

half an acre. From the pond flowed little graded waterways to all parts of the garden. In the pond were two small islands on one of which stood a miniature chalet with a thatched roof. Little bridges led to the islands. Flowers edged the shores, and water lilies floated on the still surface, and trout lived in the pond and came to take crumbs which the archbishop threw to them. Now and then he would send a mess of trout over to St Michael’s College to be cooked for the scholars. There was always color in the garden through the warm season, for he chose varieties of plants which would in turn keep new blooms coming. He loved to bring wildflowers in from the country—someone said he “tamed” them in his cultivated beds. There was a plot for vegetables. Many of the trees bore fruit, and he worked season by season to improve their size and flavor. From cuttings of California vines he grew Malaga grapes whose bunches finally measured fifteen inches long. His cabbages and beets were huge, and he once showed three turnips which together weighed twenty-five pounds. His strawberries were so spectacular that he was able to sell them for a dollar a box, giving the proceeds to charity. When he came to live in New Mexico there were almost no fruit trees, for the fruit culture of the Spanish and Mexican colonists had vanished. Bringing in new orchard stocks, he encouraged others to do the same. For each tree he spent ten or fifteen dollars; and for freight—when the trees came by stage—ten...

of it all was to demonstrate what could be done to bring the graces and comforts of the earth to a land largely barren, rocky, and dry. To help his fellow citizens follow his example, he made them many gifts. On one of his westward journeys over the plains he brought horse-chestnut seeds in a pail of water all the way from Ohio, and a hundred sapling elms besides. He gave these to be planted in Santa Fe, and one day his old friend Mrs Flora Spiegelberg glanced out of her front window in Palace avenue and saw the archbishop planting with his own hands a pair of willow saplings at her front gate. When he was done with his spading, he blessed the young trees. In another year he saw English walnut trees planted in the city from his seeds. In another, a thousand fruit trees were set out in Santa Fe where there were so few. If the garden was his principal joy, he did not see it as his exclusively. The pleasure it gave to visitors rewarded him, and what it had to offer in other ways was at the disposal of those who needed it. One day Sister Blandina, from the hospital nearby, looked over the wall. She saw beds of cabbages, turnips, carrots. In the hospital there were seventy-two patien...

An orator once said on an occasion of compliments that Lamy was “the greatest pacifier he had ever known.”

He liked to share what he had—perhaps most of all the freeing outlook and closeness to nature of his little ranch in the Tesuque Cañon. Now and then he would go to St Michael’s College in the piercing early morning air of Santa Fe and collect a straggle of boys and walk them out to the Villa Pintoresca, where they could hear his Mass, and a couple could serve it for him. He had made a fish pond there too, and they could fish for German carp which he had had shipped to him; and when he brought the nuns and other friends to the country for a picnic, they were told to pick at will among the peach trees—but to exhaust one place before they raided another. He once called one of the nuns to come to look at a certain flower with him. She thought he might be about to pick it; but instead, he knelt, inhaled its fragrance, and brought her to her knees to do the same. The scattered families who lived in the cañon saw Lamy as he went on foot from the villa to the chancery in the mornings. When he was alone in his lodge, he spent much time reading, and he used his old caravan telescope to sweep the sky, and the unchanging fantasies of the earth forms, near and far, and the constantly changing marvels of light and color at sunrise, in daytime storm and cloud passage and in the fiery fall of evening before the starry dark.