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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, when it came up, in order that They would have full view of the Lick and surroundings. They were up in the trees waiting patiently when to their surprise They heard something climbing a tree over the Lick and could not Tell what it was until the moon gave sufficient light for Them to Discover what it might be and it proved to be a panther perched upon a limb waiting for Mr. Deer. They all three kept quiet and it was not long until They Heard and seen the Deer, but as soon as the Deer came to the Lick the Panther leaped upon Him and killed him quickly and then the Indian shot the Panther and made the remark to Grand Father that was the way to watch a Deerlick.

In the log house of George and Catherine there were not “any cradles for rocking Babys.” Consequently, their first son “had a bresh heap for his resting place.” The scattered settlers longed for community. It would come, and one of its chief tracks was the “Great National Road,” the highway which was conceived by General Washington. It was also known in various of its sections as “The National Pike,” the “Cumberland Road,” and finally, and prophetically for Lamy, as the “Santa Fe Trail.” Its Ohio portion was financed by Congress when the state was admitted to the union. Even as early as 1825 its extension to Santa Fe was authorized by Congress. Eventually the several states it crossed assumed responsibility for its local maintenance. It had a roadbed thirty feet in width and its earliest portions were surfaced with crushed stone and gravel. The rest of it was plain dirt. “Tree stumps eighteen inches high were left in the road but trimmed and rounded with an axe so that carriages could safely pass over them.” Along its tracks went “a steady stream of two-wheeled carts, Conestoga wagons, farm wagons, men on horseback, men on foot, men driving cattle, hogs, horses and mules.” Parts of the road were traversed by Purcell in his earliest visits, and when Lamy went north from Cincinnati, he too travelled upon it for a while. But on the straggling earthen tracks which were tributaries of the Great National Road, travel for anyone was precarious, with many creeks to cross which were often swollen in warm weather and treacherously frozen in cold. Some of these passed by curious low hills of symmetrical shape, which later proved to be Indian burial mounds holding the secrets of life in the wilderness as it was lived long before the Easterners came.

George Sapp gave part of his homestead land for a church and burial ground in 1822. Though he himself was not baptized, others of his community were, and in any case, settlers gathered together on whatever possible occasion, and so it came to be that when first, Father Fenwick of Cincinnati, and later, Father O’Leary and Father Alleman of distant parishes, rode from their stations to hold services, they found a loosely organized parish at Sapp’s Settlement with a log church called St Luke’s. A town was growing a dozen miles to the west—this was Mt Vernon, and there, too, settlers had made their congregations, in the beginning largely Methodist.

When Purcell became bishop of Cincinnati he went through the country where later he would send resident pastors. In some places, he encountered impassive hostility from those who were not Catholics, in others, all people of whatever confession gathered to see him, to hear him preach, and to take the sacraments from him if they were eligible—baptism, communion, confirmation. In the nation at the time there was lively animosity against Catholics, who kept arriving by immigration from abroad in swelling numbers—people mostly of the laboring class come to make their fortune and find new identity in republican America. Purcell, in his forest clearings, preached on the “vulgar prejudice against the Catholic Church,” refuting its “pretended [i.e., supposed] opposition to Scripture and civil and religious liberty” and defending “the much abused and calumniated convents.” Lurid rumors about the latter were feverishly enjoyed by Protestant extremists. Purcell was warmly greeted. On one journey to Sapp’s, he “preached twice from a rudely fashioned pulpit in Mr Sapp’s orchard,” and when he went to Mt Vernon, said Mass in private houses for the first time—in 1834. When the Methodist church there was refused him on one occasion, he used a private chapel built by a well-disposed Protestant. Crowds met him also in Newark, and Zanesville, sometimes so eager that he had to preach twice a day—once in the morning, and again in the evening “at early candle-light,” for two hours at a time. For many of his listeners he was the world coming to see them—they who lacked news, and theatres, and any music but their own half-remembered, half-invented songs and airs.