LITMIR.BIZ

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and his party, all in good health, were conducted across town by two friends from Cincinnati to pay a call upon Bishop Dubois of New York. After more than six weeks of inaction at sea, the travellers felt animation and purpose. They would leave the very next day on their journey inland. Purcell was not one to waste time, and there were still three hundred leagues to go until they should come to Cincinnati, nineteen days later. Their first duty on the inland journey was to pay respects to Archbishop Eccleston at Baltimore.

      Going by canal, they found themselves in a cabined flatboat which resembled Noah’s ark in a child’s drawing. The barge was drawn by horse teams on the tow paths, the movement was at the pace of a horse’s walk, and the passengers from France had their first view of farther America as it went slowly past the narrow windows of the cabin. The barges of the day combined flourishes with discomforts. Some of them contained small musical organs on which itinerant “professors” played concerts. In 1842 Charles Dickens travelled in a barge in whose common cabin men and women were separated only by a drawn curtain. The sleeping bunks were let down from the wall, were sixteen inches wide “exactly,” and had to be vacated soon after daybreak to serve as seating benches. Dickens was obliged to wash in dirty canal water poured into a tin basin which was chained to the wall for the use of all passengers, and to dry himself must use the single roller towel provided for all. If the weather was mild, passengers rode on top of the cabin, and on moonlit nights, passing through hills or gorges—for the canal boats went along by day and night—saw how the wilderness scenery held every gleam and shadow of dreamlike strangeness, in the manner of romantic painting.

      At Baltimore, the party transferred to stage coaches pulled by four horses at a fast sustained trot. There were three ranks of seats within, the sides of the coach were open except in rain when leather curtains were buttoned to wooden window frames, and the coach rocked on unimpeded. The coach was slung on leather straps instead of springs, and many occupants found the motion distressing.

      Heading for Wheeling [West Virginia] the missioners crossed the Alleghenies and at a cost of one dollar for every sixteen miles followed the rude roads through continuous forests and woods, with only an occasional village to reassure them with the sight of boulder and log houses by day, and a lighted window or two by night. At Wheeling they took passage on the steam packet down-bound from Pittsburgh, which would carry them with many twists and turns of the Ohio River in a generally southwestward course to Cincinnati.

      As they voyaged downriver, Purcell prepared the newcomers for what they would see at the journey’s end. Cincinnati was a cathedral city—but like none they had ever seen at home. It was embraced by a great curve of the Ohio River, whose banks rose away to the north with only a few streets, and on those, only scattered buildings. The waterfront where the steamers tied up presented a row of shops, chandleries, and warehouses. Here and there the hillsides on which the city spread showed a few sizable houses, some of brick or masonry, but most of wood. There was much open land, with trees, within the town. The first church—a barn-like affair—had been built of logs outside the town limits because of a local ordinance prohibiting the erection of a Catholic church within the town proper. Bishop Flaget had built it, for Cincinnati had then belonged to his see of Bardstown, Kentucky. He had later managed to have the ordinance repealed and the log church brought into the town on rollers and resituated there.

      Cincinnati had grown in response to river traffic—people still believed in 1839 that it was destined to become the greatest inland city of America—though a skeptical early settler, according to a family legend, when offered the entire site of Cincinnati “in exchange for his whiskey and molasses,… turned it down on the grounds that it was a hog wallow, and went up the Licking River and raised strawberries.” In 1821 the outlandish riverside town was declared a bishopric. Its first bishop was the Dominican Edward Fenwick, whom Flaget consecrated in 1822. He was succeeded by Purcell eleven years later. Whatever was there now, all stemmed from Flaget, who said, “When I arrived I had absolutely nothing, except the benedictions with which the venerable Archbishop Carroll of Baltimore”—the first American bishop—“clothed me.” Even now, Purcell seemed to be saying to his recruits on their Ohio River steamboat as they wound their way toward the next stage of an undertaking begun in the heart of France with so much filial regret and inner uncertainty, there was not much to find.

      It was the rivers, in their great size and grand currents, which conveyed a sense of the vastness of the continent, in a scale of nature new to the Europeans, as they entered the last lap of the journey, beneath towering smokestacks, and to the rhythmic splash of steam-powered paddles which recalled the sound of village mill-wheels. Slowly, the strangeness, amplitude, and beauty of sparsely settled America began to make claims upon the newcomers.

      Lamy, like the others, could retain a sense of what lay behind him in his venture so far from his ancient home—the form of the organized, world-wide structure of the Church, in its administration, its resources, its experience in how the world ran, which would give him support when he should need it. Its purpose was not to be questioned, for it was at the center of his life, nor were its methods, for he was their minister. At home, in Roman France, or here, established however meagrely beyond the wilderness riverbanks going by, lay the same source of conviction and energy.

       II

      THE MIDDLE WEST

      1839–1850

      i.

       Cincinnati

      THE PADDLE-WHEEL RIVER PACKET warped its way to the waterfront of Cincinnati on 10 September 1839, to its berth amidst other moored riverboats, with their tall twin smoke pipes and wide decks, bearing such names as Car of Commerce, Ohio Belle, Belle Creole, Cincinnatus, Brooklyn, and New Orleans. The missioners saw the straggle of stores, shacks, and mansions rising away on the slope in the midst of open fields. Not yet a half century old, it was, with almost fifty thousand people, the greatest city of Ohio. It all looked raw. They left the ship and proceeded to the “little seminary” where Bishop Purcell was already training local youths for the priesthood. There the newcomers were to lodge, and, they hoped, there they would have a chance to advance their study of the language of America. How could they be at home until they could communicate, or preach, or feel like Americans?

      But the few faculty members of the seminary were so busy with their duties of teaching resident seminarians and also carrying on parish work that they had no time to give English lessons, and little for conversation. To their dismay, the young Frenchmen met with the community only for a short while after supper every evening.

      There were strangenesses to become used to. In America, it appeared, priests were addressed as Mister. When priests went into the city, they changed from cassock to the dress of laymen—a long frock coat, a high-buttoned waistcoat, and (the Frenchmen laid aside the black tricorne as worn at home by Monsieur l’Abbé) a tall hat of brushed silk nap or a shapeless felt headgear with a wide drooping brim. If they looked to Purcell for continued companionship like that of shipboard they found him endistanced by work—people even invaded his mealtimes to talk business, and only now and then was he able to join in the after-supper gatherings. Lamy and his friends were left “without anything special to do” The inaction of their days was far different from the visions they had made of America and the sanctifying sacrifices that would be demanded of them. Now it was Machebeuf’s turn to fall ill—he was ill for fifteen days and he wondered if he would ever become accustomed to America.

      But at last, after three weeks, the bishop had orders for them hardly less amazing than the disappointments of Cincinnati. He saw how weary they were of inaction, and how their first eagerness might be wasted. Despite their inexperience, their lack of the language, and the state of the country, he suddenly assigned all the new Frenchmen to certain mission parishes in Ohio which had no regular pastors. It would be their duty to bring scattered settlers together to form parish groups, and to build churches. Others at the seminary wondered at the assignments—young men in their twenties given pastoral charges?

      But Lamy and his fellow countrymen assumed the inland wilderness of the Middle West with restored spirits. Each was given a central location to develop—a

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