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San Antonio

MERCHANT TRAINS OF WAGGONS went from Indianola to San Antonio. Two-wheeled, covered carts were available for hire, pulled by three-mule teams. Lamy arranged for a “German or Mexican” cart to carry him inland. The old “Cart Road” was well established via Victoria, Goliad, and Floresville. All the way to San Antonio, crossing gentle land swells and little rivers, it rose in shallow ascent on the ancient sea bed whose character changed from the Gulf-side barrenness. Bladed marsh grass gave way to live oaks and scattered prickly-pear cactus. Mistletoe and Spanish moss clung to the gray trees, and cardinal birds whistled and streaked among them. The gray-green hills, where the earth was exposed, showed pale coral pink and beige color. The air grew warmer. After many days on the commercial road, Lamy and his fellow travellers forded the Salado River and came into a broad shallow valley and saw San Antonio with its low church domes and blunt towers, and the flat roofs of the one-storey town, among green groves which cooled the earthen streets.

San Antonio was the largest United States military outpost in Texas, with a population, mostly Mexican, of thirty-five hundred in 1851. The parish church of San Fernando (later a cathedral) faced the military plaza. Mingled with the flat-roofed adobe and masonry houses of the Mexican period were new, pitched-roof two-storey houses and stores built by the eastern Americans. Scars of the Texan war of independence were still visible—the empty mission of the Alamo faced its plaza in a ruined state. The town was ringed by four other great stone missions, also unused and broken since the change of sovereignty in 1836. In Commerce street, business was lively—merchants sold French candies, German toys, Boston biscuits, silks, champagnes and liquors, all brought by the Gulf steamers to Matagorda Bay and carted overland. There was an active market in hides and wool, reflecting the ranching of the region. It was an inviting town with its mild climate, the grace of its Latin people, and the style of the United States garrison.

There Lamy reckoned up what was lost, and wrote to the Society at Paris, asking for a loan of five thousand francs. This letter never reached Paris, and he had to write again later, citing the total sum of ten thousand francs, most of it borrowed, some of which had gone to pay for all he had bought for his journey, the rest to be held for its continuing expenses, which “will be three times greater than I expected.” Until help should come from Paris, he must again take out loans to send him forward. “Poor Bishop Lamy has made a disastrous beginning to his labours,” wrote a priest of Cincinnati to Archbishop Purcell, who was in Europe that spring, “… but he is an apostolic man and God will certainly guide and protect him in his most arduous labors …”

Once again Lamy set about organizing his approach to New Mexico. He made the acquaintance of Major General William S. Harney, commander of the department of Texas, whose headquarters were at San Antonio. It was to be a useful connection. At regular intervals the Army sent supply trains across the southern plains to the garrison near El Paso and others up the Rio Grande in New Mexico. With one such supply train Lamy and his small party were welcome to travel when he should be prepared to go. One thing he must replace was his New Orleans carriage. While waiting for Machebeuf, he bought a stout Mexican waggon and a span of “bronco mules,” and gave further thought to his long day with Odin at Galveston; for on 8 February Odin was writing to Archbishop Blanc, “I received a letter from Mon-seigneur Lamy. I think you will see him at New Orleans soon again. He will decide, as soon as he receives your letter, to go to Europe. He awaits only a word from you to take his departure …”

Meanwhile, Machebeuf had arrived at New Orleans on 21 January, only to read in that day’s issue of the Daily Picayune of Lamy’s shipwreck. He found Lamy’s letter urging him to follow to San Antonio, and he at once made arrangements for passage to Matagorda Bay for the next Saturday, 25 January, the day, he noted in a letter to his sister, consecrated to the Blessed Virgin, who, he hoped, would protect him, in his turn, against all danger. He went with sad news for his old friend, for he would have to tell Lamy that on the day after he had sailed on the Palmetto, his sister Margaret (Soeur Marie) had died in the hospital of the Sisters of Charity at New Orleans.

Whenever “these two vicars” came together after being separated, they usually had much news for each other, and it was so in early February as Machebeuf arrived at San Antonio. He found Lamy an invalid, laid up with his leg so badly sprained that he would be unable to move without great pain for six or eight weeks. What had happened was this: since Odin had given him authority to make religious visitations in the Galveston diocese, Lamy had gone about, with the added encouragement of General Harney, to various Army posts in Texas, driving his new “bronco mules.” He found eager response among the officers and men and their families. He often travelled with detachments of troops moving between the outlying posts and the San Antonio headquarters. Recently returning, he had set out after the soldiers, and approaching San Antonio, wanting to overtake them, he whipped up his team. Unluckily he came to a rough place in the road. The mules now running wild—they were broncos, after all—dragged the waggon on a reckless career. Lamy thought he was sure to be overturned. Seeing a sandy patch by the road, he jumped for it, and on hitting the ground, wrenched his leg so seriously that he couldn’t move. Someone came along and found him, and he was carried to his quarters in the city.

The accident, aside from being a general nuisance, had direct results. One was that a quartermaster caravan for El Paso, with which Lamy had expected to set out in February with Machebeuf, left without them, for Lamy could not yet travel. They must wait for the next train. The other was that, as he could not go to Santa Fe, so he could not go to Europe. Odin received word of this setback and wrote to Blanc from Galveston on 17 February, “Monseigneur Lamy will start for Santa Fe at the beginning or the middle of March … I write in haste.”

But a departure in March was also impossible, for reports from the plains told of how meagre the grass was. The Army must wait for more fodder before setting out across a country where even in the best of seasons grazing was sparse.

During the delay Lamy wrote an important letter—one difficult to write since he knew so little of the state of affairs in Santa Fe and in Durango. Yet courtesy required him to inform Bishop Zubiría of Durango that he had been appointed by Rome to preside as vicar apostolic over New Mexico; and that he would in due course assume his duties in what had been, until now, Zubiría’s northern province. He also stated that he would soon go to Rome “to practice consualia”—the traditional visit to the Holy See in the course of which his new estate and assignment would naturally be recognized. As he wrote on 10 April 1851, and since he would be departing from San Antonio for Santa Fe in May, an answer, considering the state of the mails in northern Mexico, might not come before he should leave Texas.

There was a sense of well-being during the delay at San Antonio. Lamy and Machebeuf studied their Spanish together, and rehearsed it among the Mexican population. The parish priest—there was only one, himself a Mexican—was “very kind” to them, and gave his “hospitality with the greatest cheerfulness.” The congregation of San Antonio was the largest in Texas. It had a new convent. Bishop Odin owned a large building which he rented to the government for use as a barracks, at $1800 a year. Lamy heard that Odin was later to make a college of it. Though there was an occasional day of cold wind, Lamy found the weather generally delightful, and said that “the boundless prairies of Texas are a beautiful sight, and the rivers and springs are also admirable. We have two rivers which run through San Antonio, one of which gives its name to the place, the other called San Pedro.” He thought that below the point of their confluence, the river which they made together—the San Antonio—would be navigable.

Texas was recovering from the 1846 war which had destroyed the local commerce until the population had begun to increase through the arrival of colonists from the East. Odin had built eighteen little churches or chapels since his arrival at Galveston in 1840, but for the forty thousand scattered faithful of the following decade they hardly sufficed. When overland gold-seekers began to hurry westward across Texas after 1849, the state’s population grew again, until in 1851 a hundred and twenty thousand new settlers arrived each year. The new communities and Army posts lacked spiritual administration, and Machebeuf, like Lamy before him, took up some of the waiting time at San Antonio by going out in April and early May to remote little stations along the Rio Grande.

By May, Lamy was recovered well enough to complete his plans to join the Army caravan which was to leave for El Paso and the upper Rio Grande at the middle of the month. General Harney figured large in his arrangements, for the department commander granted the bishop and all his party the assimilated rank of officers, which carried with it the issue of rations. Since his shipwreck Lamy was travelling light, but Machebeuf had come with all his possessions intact. These included three great chests in addition to smaller pieces of luggage. He had arranged for the transport of all of them, but at the last minute, the quartermaster captain refused to take along the three large chests in government waggons. (Lamy’s own waggon was full as it was, and he and Machebeuf went by horse when the time came.) Machebeuf could only hope that his important pieces would follow him by the next waggon train.

On 13 May, Odin wrote to Blanc, “I don’t know whether Mon-seigneur Lamy has left San Antonio. He was still there some days ago. I believe that the caravan is almost ready, and that he won’t hesitate to take to the road …” It was a report which the bishop of Galveston made “despite great reluctance.”

In fact, it was only a matter of a few days until the long train of two hundred waggons, each pulled by six mules, accompanied by twenty-five other non-military waggons, including Lamy’s, equipped with provisions of all sorts to last six or eight weeks, and escorted by a company of dragoons, set out from the dusty streets of San Antonio for the plains west. The soldiers wore newly prescribed uniforms: single-breasted frock coats; tall hats with chin-strap, orange pompoms, and level black leather visors; trousers of sky-blue kersey, “made loose and to spread well over the boots.” The troopers were forbidden “under any pretense whatever” to wear mustaches. The pace of the train was set by that of the slowest animals in the traces. They had six hundred miles to go through Comanche territory before reaching El Paso. The journey was the first lesson for Lamy and Machebeuf in the character of the country of the rest of their lives.