Lamy of Santa Fe. Paul Horgan

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