territorial legislature has relinquished all right to interfere. I hope I shall not have much trouble in its recovery.…”
But on a Sunday night soon afterward, while Lamy was still awaiting a reply from Zubiría, the presiding judge of the Supreme Court of New Mexico, Chief Justice Grafton Baker, ruminating drunkenly over Lamy’s campaign to take the Castrense from United States jurisdiction, declared that he would never yield the chapel to Lamy and Machebeuf; on the contrary, he would have them both hanged from the same gallows.
It was the wrong thing to say in the presence of a few Mexican Americans who with others were drinking with him that evening; for like their fellow Latins of the time, they held the Church and its priests in reverence. They repeated abroad what the chief justice had threatened to do. On Monday morning a petition was swiftly circulated which demanded the return of the chapel to the Church. Over a thousand citizens signed it—Catholic, Protestant, civilian, military; and a great crowd came together out of nowhere and marched on the profaned chapel where the chief justice had taken refuge. “Fearing for his life,” wrote Machebeuf to his sister much later (she had heard of the episode even in France, which astonished him), the judge demanded military protection from the American commandant at Fort Marcy, the United States fortification. His plea was disdainfully refused, and an officer came to the bishop to assure him that if he should need protection (presumably from the court) the entire garrison would be at his disposal. Feeling ran so high during the day that Machebeuf and a Catholic officer of Fort Marcy took up a position at the door of the church to protect Chief Justice Baker until he asked for safety and vowed to yield to the bishop. That Monday evening, “the poor judge, wholly humiliated and abashed, went to make reparation to the bishop, and proposed to return the church to him with all possible solemnity.”
So it was that on Tuesday morning, in the presence of the governor and all the military and civil authorities, “they surrendered the building,” declared Lamy, “according to all the formalities of the law; the court itself sitting in the church, myself being present, they gave me the keys. I said few words in Spanish and English, and right on the spot I got up a subscription to repair the church in a decent manner, the governor and the chief justice liberally subscribed the first ones and in a short time, we had upwards of thousand dollars our list is increasing every day … I hope to say mass in it in three month, when I come back from Durango…”
For there had been no word from Zubiría and Lamy began to see that he must go himself to show his documents of appointment to the old bishop and try to bring him to cede what had so far been denied in Santa Fe.
ii.
The Society
AT STAKE WAS HIS AUTHORITY over a diocese larger than France. New Mexico still loosely included all of present-day Arizona, and other areas imprecisely defined, which were part of the Mexican cession after the war. Lamy had already seen much of his new diocese, whose overall size was about two hundred and thirty-six thousand square miles, and if the desert seemed to predominate in its character, the country around Santa Fe had great variety. It lay at an altitude of seven thousand feet in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo range, which rose nearby in the east—wooded mountains which took the sunset light in such color that the early Spaniards named them for the Blood of Christ. To the south were rolling hills dotted with piñon and juniper trees. Sixty miles away across a vast plain rose the superb arc of the Sandia Mountains at Albuquerque, and on the northern horizon was the grand line of the Jemez Mountains, beyond great barrancas of sandstone and earth, the color of rosy flesh, through which ran the Rio Grande on its two-thousand-mile course from the Colorado Rockies to the Gulf of Mexico. Overall was a light so clear by day that prehistoric Indians named the place of Santa Fe “the dancing ground of the sun.” The air was pungent with the exhalations of mountain forest and desert bush; and every play of mountain sky, with light and cloud, and every gradation of blue in the mountains from near to far, and the rustling cool under cottonwood groves in summer, and the warm sunlight of even the coldest winter day, when the smoke from hearth fires of piñon wood gave a resinous perfume over the town, brought a sense of thoughtless well-being to most people, and an awareness of unique beauty. The bishop found some four thousand residents in Santa Fe, out of a total of 65,984 as reckoned in a census taken for New Mexico five months before his arrival.
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