Lamy of Santa Fe. Paul Horgan

Lamy saw on the boundary of his own domain.

      The military road—now abandoned—turned westward at the base of the Guadalupe foothills a hundred miles from El Paso del Norte in Mexico, which was sometimes referred to under its parish name of Santa Maria de Guadalupe. Presently the train went along near the Rio Grande toward the North Pass, with its cluster of villages downstream, and its road north which led upstream to the heart of New Mexico—and Santa Fe.

      As they drew on toward El Paso, Lamy and Machebeuf could reflect that in their six hundred miles of overland travel they had seen hardly a single sign of habitation. Soon they began to see the mountains of northern Mexico which continued across the Rio Grande in the distance.

      During the last week of June 1851, Lamy’s company arrived at the river towns of San Elizario, Socorro, and Isleta. The latter two had been founded in 1680 by refugees from towns of the same name in New Mexico during the great Pueblo revolt, and it was these three villages which had been confided to Lamy’s charge by Odin of Galveston in whose diocese they belonged by treaty.

      Word of Lamy’s approach had reached the settlements. People came out on the road for several miles to meet him. He passed through San Elizario, the first village, and on reaching Socorro, “a fine town,” he wrote later to Purcell, “they gave me a grand reception.” As he came to the first houses, he saw a newly erected “triumphal arch under which I had to pass.” The village mayor, the local pastor (a Mexican), a band of music, and the national guard came to meet him. The land was restful after the desert passage. “This little spot,” wrote Lamy, “and the vicinity for a few miles on the Rio Grande, is truly beautiful; particularly so to me, arriving from a journey of six weeks over barren plains, and mountains without a tree to conceal their rocky precipices.” He was “delighted to find a country covered with verdure, the fields waving with grain, and the trees loaded with fruit.”

      But these three towns in Texas, under the instructions from the Vatican which Bishop Zubiría of Durango had received in 1849, had been given by him into the charge of the local Mexican pastor, all unaware of Odin’s disposition of them. “The padre,” noted Lamy, was not “overwell liked by the people”—though he treated Lamy and his party with great kindness. And there, in those border settlements, Lamy saw the actual places which for years, in jurisdictional confusions established in good faith among Rome, Galveston, and Durango, would constitute an exasperating problem among the many others which awaited him.

      In Socorro on 24 June—the Feast of St John the Baptist, his own name day—the bishop said Mass for a great crowd in the village church. At the proper moment, he asked the Mexican pastor to speak for him in thanking the people for the great respect which they had shown for the episcopal office, refusing to take to himself the honors they had shown him. The padre complied—but went so far with personal compliments that Lamy felt obliged to interrupt him. “I then,” said Lamy, “made my first public essay in the ‘Lengua de Dios,’ ” preaching in Spanish.

      He moved on to El Paso, on the Mexican bank of the river, and was at once established under the famous hospitality of Father Ramón Ortiz, who was well known to a generation of traders and soldiers who had passed either way across the Rio Grande between Mexico and what had so lately become United States territory. Here Lamy and his people had several days’ respite. It was a particularly rewarding place to pause, after coming out of the wilderness. Lamy thought Father Ramόn “very intelligent” as well as most cordial. The El Paso pastor—a handsome and charming man—was full of advice and information about the journey to Santa Fe which still lay ahead, and generously reprovisioned the bishop’s party for the long way still to go. After years of never seeing a bishop, Father Ramόn now entertained his second within nine months, for in the preceding autumn Monsignor Zubiría had paused at El Paso on his way home to Durango from his last tour of New Mexico. By the time of Lamy’s arrival, the Mexican bishop’s vast northern lands had already been transferred by the Holy See to an ecclesiastical jurisdiction within the United States—but he did not know it then, and the pastor of El Paso, discussing Lamy’s credentials with his new visitor, could not say if Zubiría knew it even now.

      On the recommendation of Don Ramόn Ortiz, Lamy wrote of his coming and his new post to the pastor at the other Socorro, on the Rio Grande up north in New Mexico, and the letter was relayed to all parishes farther along on the road to Santa Fe. He wrote his official news also to the Very Reverend Monsignor Juan Felipe Ortiz, who was Bishop Zubiría’s vicario foráneo—rural dean—at Santa Fe, representing the Mexican episcopal authority there.

      Lamy saw El Paso in Mexico as “a scattered village, of at least eight thousand souls. Though it seldom rains (for they have had scarcely a drop of rain for three years), yet, by a system of irrigation, they have managed to make their country like a garden. Their wine is excellent, also their peaches, apples, apricots, and pears.… The houses are low and remarkably clean, and well arranged for commerce, and to suit the climate.” He noted that they were built of “mud.” The churches, he saw, were large—the largest was that in the plaza at El Paso (now Juarez). It was a great block-like construction of adobes, with a flat roof over the nave and a higher rise above the sanctuary. A free-standing bell tower—later demolished—with slender arches, cornice, pilasters, and a tile dome and lantern, rose at the left front corner of the church. The sacristy and priest’s house were attached to the rear of the building, and the whole was surrounded by a low adobe wall. The plaza was enclosed by other low, flat buildings with porticoes roofed with cut branches. Mexicans in wide hats, wearing serapes across one shoulder, and with their loose white cotton trousers bound with leggings, rode small ponies on the dusty square, and women in long voluminous dresses sat by their wares in the shade of the porticoes. The sky was open and hot, and Lamy observed that “it is so warm that many go half-naked.” Flocks of blackbirds turned in their sudden accord about the bell tower. Lamy thought the churches might have been better kept. So far as he could see, the people were well disposed, and showed a strong attachment to their religion, “especially to its exterior observances.” It would take him more time to know more of “their customs and practices,” of course.

      In the evening, when the air chilled, and the sun fell behind the great sierra west of the town, dust in the air made wonders of the sunset. The mountains became a mysterious violet, the skies were streaked with dusty gold under the high lingering daylight blue, and all was shadow on the streets, roads, and houses. It was then that the other character of El Paso and the lower villages came free; for the transcontinental migrations continued westward since 1849, and to the volatile temperament of the natives was added the lawlessness of the transients. Violence and vice of every description were met at any moment. Gamblers, thieves, even murderers were abroad; and the fandangos—dances held in private houses or public halls, to the rude music of scraped violins and violated guitars—were scenes of every ardor of romance among the swaying couples. Fury often broke out at the gaming tables, with sudden death as ready as a hand on a pistol or a knife. With little organized preservation of the law, posses of citizens were convened, trials were swift, and murderers were often hanged within an hour of their conviction. Was Santa Fe to be like this? “From what I have heard,” wrote Lamy to Blanc, “and the little I have seen here, no doubt I may expect to meet with serious difficulties and obstacles …”

      He had over three hundred miles yet to go, and he understood that after advancing one third of the way, he would reach the pueblo lands, and would see at least half of his district before reaching Santa Fe. It was soon time to march again. The military escort from San Antonio—presumably including the troops earlier assigned from Cincinnati—was now divided into two detachments. One was to remain at the military post near El Paso (later Fort Bliss) for eventual return to San Antonio. The other was destined for upstream New Mexico. Accompanied by the new increment for Santa Fe, Lamy and his personal party set forth in early July 1851 on the Rio Grande road—that stretch of the Camino Real reaching from Mexico up to Santa Fe over which the waggon trade had been moving since the seventeenth century.

      The north road took them at every five or ten leagues through New Mexican parishes for the first time. In all the towns, the reception was the same, as the bishop’s waggon and his horsemen appeared with him from the dusty road—a road as pleasant, said Machebeuf, as the other passage across Texas was tedious,