Lamy of Santa Fe by Paul Horgan

set about making a rectory for himself on donated land opposite the Danville church.
    The whole pattern of his work there established the terms of his labors over the next years. He had looked no farther than Ohio—except for one occasion which seemed to threaten the continuation of work so faithfully begun.
    It had to do with an impulsive notion which Machebeuf, in his parish of Tiffin in northern Ohio, seemed ready to carry out. He had been visited by the celebrated Jesuit missioner P. J. De Smet, who was already celebrated as “the Apostle to the Indians” (their name for a Jesuit was “Blackrobe”) and who brought, from his expeditions into the Far West, much of the earliest knowledge of the upper plains and Rocky Mountain regions to the established public east of the Mississippi. Machebeuf, he urged in Tiffin, should join him in his vast western missionary travels, with all its dazzling hardships and holy dangers. But what would become of Tiffin, where a little parish church of native stone was being erected? Bishop Purcell heard of the plan to go West, and knowing of the close friendship of Lamy and Machebeuf, sent Lamy to Tiffin to dissuade Machebeuf “from a project which afflicted the heart of the bishop and father.”
    After hearing Lamy set forth the views of his bishop against abandoning Tiffin and going West, Machebeuf “contented himself with asking his friend,”
    â€œ ‘Eh bien! mon cher , what would you do in my place?’ ”
    Lamy—whether placing an even graver responsibility on Machebeuf or simply expressing his innermost feeling—replied,
    â€œWhat would I do? All right. If you go, I will follow you.”
    It was a deterrent which Machebeuf was unable to ignore. Yet the episode held a prophetic note for them both, even as they remained with their own present duties—building churches, visiting their dependent missions. Purcell knew upon whom he could depend, and how to use friendship as an instrument.

iv .
    Those Waiting
    I N 1840 L AMY SET ABOUT the building of a small brick church in Mt Vernon. Its substance began with his creation of a sense of community among the people there. Someone gave land, another was to take the lead in bringing timber, others worked to use the roads and canals of Ohio to gather other materials. As resident pastor of Danville, Lamy could not give all his time to Mt Vernon—or even to Danville itself—for he was charged with mission duties also in Mansfield, Ashland, Loudonville, Wooster, Canal Dover, Newark, and Massillon, in addition to even less coherent communities by the waysides.
    In the hot, white, diffused mists of summer, and the cracking and often howling winters alike, he and Machebeuf both had to forward their home parishes and attend to their missions. As Lamy wrote to Purcell, “I have bought a horse, and I am now a great ‘traveller’; for I have many places to attend, and I don’t stay more than two Sundays a month in Danville.”
    Machebeuf, too, had acquired a horse— ”beau et excellent” —from a German priest at the exorbitant rate of one hundred dollars. His letters home were full of lively details about the life of the missioner—typical of what Lamy, too, was experiencing, and all the other young Auvergnats who had come away with them.
    In their own parishes they wore their cassocks, but travelling they put on their oldest clothes, and when they came to towns they dressed more neatly in order not to invite scornful comments from entrenched Protestants. They used a long leather bag in which to carry vestments, Mass vessels, and other supplies, and the bag was thrown over the saddle. Where roads permitted, a four-wheeled wagon served the missioners and then they could carry a travelling trunk. In the very beginning, they had to “preach by their silence” but it was not long before they were able to get along in English, to the delight of