The Original

By Mayo Mohs

LAMY OF SANTA FE

by PAUL MORGAN 523 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

$15.

Half a century ago, Willa Gather gave American literature a classic, Death Comes for the Archbishop. Only Gather's art kept her protagonists credible: there are few greater incongruities than French Catholic missionaries set down in the deserts of the Southwest.

Yet the priests were based in fact.

The archbishop of the title, whom Cather called Jean Marie Latour, was the quixotic Jean Baptiste Lamy, first Bishop of Santa Fe. His affable Sancho Panza, Joseph Vaillant in the novel, was Joseph Machebeuf, later Bishop of Denver. After decades of research, Paul Horgan, novelist and Pulitzer-prizewinning historian (Great River), has attempted to separate the fictive from the actual. His triumph is due as much to a sense of place as to discernment of character. In his account, the shimmering, arid plateaus and the indomitable Gallic spirit are as palpable as they were in the novel--and as compelling.

"There is properly no history," wrote Emerson, "only biography." To reconstruct the New Mexican frontier of the 1860s, Horgan concentrates on Lamy. In the novel, the bishop experienced a constant inner joy: "He always awoke a young man ... One could breathe that [air] only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sagebrush desert." Horgan testifies to Lamy's love of Western saddle life, but concedes a sadder truth: "If he had any capacity to express exalted feeling, he left no record of it."

Still, if the cleric was taciturn, he was also a man of action. "Assure your salvation by your good deeds," he counseled his flock, and his life was a succession of such visible labors. When he came to Santa Fe, Lamy faced a diocese of 236,000 sq. mi.--larger than France. A mere dozen Mexican priests were in attendance, some of them living in open concubinage. The neglected adobe churches were crumbling into ruin before their eyes.

Prairie King. To this lapsed society Lamy brought a civilizer's temperament and a proconsul's firm hand. He and Machebeuf had been reared during the reaction against anticlericalism that followed the French Revolution. Both welcomed the metal authority accompanying the westward reach of empire. Though Lamy by no means condoned the military's campaign of extermination against the Apaches and Navajos, he viewed the tribesmen as murderous savages. When his own wagon train was attacked at an Arkansas River crossing in 1867, he and the caravan's military leader shared command in the kind of seven-hour battle beloved by Western film makers. Throughout, the bishop conscientiously joined in the rifle fire.

Indians were not Lamy's most formidable opponents. He and Machebeuf had come to Santa Fe in the wake of the Mexican War, only a few years after the U.S. Army. To the Mexicans of the new territory, the Frenchmen were simply invaders in different uniforms. When Lamy suspended Padre Gallegos of Albuquerque for insubordination, the popular priest stood for election to the U.S. Congress. There he ceaselessly pilloried his enemy. Padre Martinez, a pastor who ruled Taos like a prairie king, refused to be tithed by the new bishop. After an agonized power struggle, Lamy excommunicated his adversary in 1857. Martinez, recalcitrant to the end, gathered a loyal band of followers who stayed with him till he died.

Horgan's elegant, periodic prose, reminiscent of the 19th century histories of Prescott and Parkman, is at its most eloquent during these confrontations of culture. Horgan views the rebel Martinez as a tragic figure, lost "in the ashes of the old consuming conflict, in the pathos of learned agonies spent in a footless cause." The author also brings rich life to less dramatic episodes: his long, detailed accounts of the journeys over trackless desert and plateau develop a hypnotic rhythm of their own. Even minor ecclesiastical skirmishes are brilliantly employed--Lamy's exasperation with Vatican bureaucracy simultaneously reveals his ego and his humility: "The Roman piano, piano does not suit the bishop of the Navajos."

The bishop was a formidable opponent, but he was an astonishingly gentle proconsul who could intervene at St. Vincent's Hospital to let a suffering Taos Indian return to his people, or journey to the bedside of a fever-stricken old woman to feed her slices of roasted apple. His one personal indulgence was gardening:

he became Santa Fe's Johnny Appleseed, importing shade trees, fruits and vegetables, which he shared with the en tire countryside. He cultivated the arts as well: diocesan schools taught not only languages, history and mathematics but also music as a regular part of the cur riculum. He even sponsored material progress: when the railroad threatened to bypass Santa Fe, Lamy joined a group to raise capital for a spur.

When death finally did come for the archbishop in 1888, when he was 73, Santa Fe -- and Lamy himself -- had changed. "Bishop Juan," as his requiem Mass called him, was mourned by Indian, Mexican and Eastern American alike. "It was," reports Horgan at the conclusion of this superb biography, "the end of a fine day."

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