Books: The Original

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.