The weather for the most part was fine, with “some days rather too warm, but the nights were delightful.” And then they would sleep in the open air, using their saddles for pillows, under the stars—”sous la belle étoile” in the phrase which Lamy and Machebeuf used often, then and for years after. At first Lamy felt stiff from sleeping on a blanket over the rough ground, but when he got used to it, he said, “I never enjoyed my rest better.” He was briefly ill with a mild cholera, like many others of the party who had drunk impure water along the way; but Machebeuf “never had the least indisposition.” In any case, one or the other said Mass every day in the tent which General Harney had provided for them, and which they rarely used for any other purpose. They were under “many obligations to the officers,” who were “invariably kind.” They enjoyed the officers’ mess, where they had fresh beef three times a week, and milk every day, and their own waggoner was at times able to offer them venison, rabbit, duck, and partridge. The country, as a scientific observer saw in 1849, was “exceedingly rich in reptiles.” The most famous of these was the great diamond-back rattlesnake (genus Crotalus terrificus terrificus). Another creature less dangerous, but one which the Mexican muleteers seemed to dread particularly was the vinagrón (Telephonis giganteus), a large black scorpion which when squashed gave off the penetrating odor of acetic acid.
After more than a month’s slow travel to the northwest, the cara-vaners saw far off a great range of mountains. Clearly at last they saw fifty miles to the north the Guadalupe Range with its highest point, Signal Peak, at its eastern end. It was on the crest of this peak that the Comanches built their signal fires on their autumnal strikes across the Rio Grande to steal Mexican horses, and it was that range which Indians used as sanctuary from which to raid passing caravans. The Guadalupes made a long rocky barrier lying north and south. They were the first considerable mountains which 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
