all stemmed from Flaget, who said, “When I arrived I had absolutely nothing, except the benedictions with which the venerable Archbishop Carroll of Baltimore”—the first American bishop—“clothed me.” Even now, Purcell seemed to be saying to his recruits on their Ohio River steamboat as they wound their way toward the next stage of an undertaking begun in the heart of France with so much filial regret and inner uncertainty, there was not much to find.
It was the rivers, in their great size and grand currents, which conveyed a sense of the vastness of the continent, in a scale of nature new to the Europeans, as they entered the last lap of the journey, beneath towering smokestacks, and to the rhythmic splash of steam-powered paddles which recalled the sound of village mill-wheels. Slowly, the strangeness, amplitude, and beauty of sparsely settled America began to make claims upon the newcomers.
Lamy, like the others, could retain a sense of what lay behind him in his venture so far from his ancient home—the form of the organized, world-wide structure of the Church, in its administration, its resources, its experience in how the world ran, which would give him support when he should need it. Its purpose was not to be questioned, for it was at the center of his life, nor were its methods, for he was their minister. At home, in Roman France, or here, established however meagrely beyond the wilderness riverbanks going by, lay the same source of conviction and energy.
II
THE MIDDLE WEST
1839–1850
i.
Cincinnati
THE PADDLE-WHEEL RIVER PACKET warped its way to the waterfront of Cincinnati on 10 September 1839, to its berth amidst other moored riverboats, with their tall twin smoke pipes and wide decks, bearing such names as Car of Commerce, Ohio Belle, Belle Creole, Cincinnatus, Brooklyn, and New Orleans. The missioners saw the straggle of stores, shacks, and mansions rising away on the slope in the midst of open fields. Not yet a half century old, it was, with almost fifty thousand people, the greatest city of Ohio. It all looked raw. They left the ship and proceeded to the “little seminary” where Bishop Purcell was already training local youths for the priesthood. There the newcomers were to lodge, and, they hoped, there they would have a chance to advance their study of the language of America. How could they be at home until they could communicate, or preach, or feel like Americans?
But the few faculty members of the seminary were so busy with their duties of teaching resident seminarians and also carrying on parish work that they had no time to give English lessons, and little for conversation. To their dismay, the young Frenchmen met with the community only for a short while after supper every evening.
There were strangenesses to become used to. In America, it appeared, priests were addressed as Mister. When priests went into the city, they changed from cassock to the dress of laymen—a long frock coat, a high-buttoned waistcoat, and (the Frenchmen laid aside the black tricorne as worn at home by Monsieur l’Abbé) a tall hat of brushed silk nap or a shapeless felt headgear with a wide drooping brim. If they looked to Purcell for continued companionship like that of shipboard they found him endistanced by work—people even invaded his mealtimes to talk business, and only now and then was he able to join in the after-supper gatherings. Lamy and his friends were left “without anything special to do” The inaction of their days was far different from the visions they had made of America and the sanctifying sacrifices that would be demanded of them. Now it was Machebeuf’s turn to fall ill—he was ill for fifteen days and he wondered if he would ever become accustomed to America.
But at last, after three weeks, the bishop had orders for them hardly less amazing than the disappointments of Cincinnati. He saw how weary they were of inaction, and how their first eagerness might be wasted. Despite their inexperience, their lack of the language, and the state of the country, he suddenly assigned all the new Frenchmen to certain mission parishes in Ohio which had no regular pastors. It would be their duty to bring scattered settlers together to form parish groups, and to build churches. Others at the seminary wondered at the assignments—young men in their twenties given pastoral charges?
But Lamy and his fellow countrymen assumed the inland wilderness of the Middle West with restored spirits. Each was given a central location to develop—a little cluster which might one day be a town—from which other settlements could be served. Lamy was given Danville, in the wooded middle of the state; Machebeuf, Tiffin, which lay to the north, on the flat lands not far from Lake Erie. One thing which “astonished” them was that they had been sent so quickly to separate assignments. Each was to be on his own.
ii.
To the Forests
OHIO LAND was generally flat, the horizons were almost level; the rivers unbridged, the woods and forest uncleared but for widely separated farms and small communities; the roads cloudy with dust, or flowing with mud. When streams rose their woodland banks became marshes. The whole state—it was admitted to the Union in 1803 as the seventeenth state—was almost entirely covered with forest. Summer’s heat was sultry, the air glistening and humming with insects, the temperature often passing a hundred. In winter the cold was so great that trees cracked under ice, and lakes were crossed by sledge, and snow lay on the ground in layers of ice for weeks, making travel by wheeled vehicle or horse chancy and by river impossible. It was odd, to the stranger, to find a land subject to such extremes of weather, yet settlers sought it out in great numbers, cities were promised, the imagination looked westward, and by the 1830s, Ohio’s population numbered almost a million.
But such a figure did not suggest the isolated farm or the forest-lost settlement, often named after a single family, which in time might become a village, then a town. One such was Sapp’s Settlement, later to be called Danville, to which Lamy went in the autumn of 1839. Purcell already knew it well.
Before 1810 George Sapp and his wife, Catherine, emigrants from the Catholic Maryland of Lord Baltimore’s descendants, came to the Middle West, and “on a beautiful spot,” declared their grandson in a narrative which came down through the family in manuscript, “by one of the most beautiful springs God has caused its waters to flow,” they built a small log house. Catherine said, “George, right here we will build our cabin and live and die.”
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,
