Lamy of Santa Fe. Paul Horgan

      ii.

       The Society

      AT STAKE WAS HIS AUTHORITY over a diocese larger than France. New Mexico still loosely included all of present-day Arizona, and other areas imprecisely defined, which were part of the Mexican cession after the war. Lamy had already seen much of his new diocese, whose overall size was about two hundred and thirty-six thousand square miles, and if the desert seemed to predominate in its character, the country around Santa Fe had great variety. It lay at an altitude of seven thousand feet in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo range, which rose nearby in the east—wooded mountains which took the sunset light in such color that the early Spaniards named them for the Blood of Christ. To the south were rolling hills dotted with piñon and juniper trees. Sixty miles away across a vast plain rose the superb arc of the Sandia Mountains at Albuquerque, and on the northern horizon was the grand line of the Jemez Mountains, beyond great barrancas of sandstone and earth, the color of rosy flesh, through which ran the Rio Grande on its two-thousand-mile course from the Colorado Rockies to the Gulf of Mexico. Overall was a light so clear by day that prehistoric Indians named the place of Santa Fe “the dancing ground of the sun.” The air was pungent with the exhalations of mountain forest and desert bush; and every play of mountain sky, with light and cloud, and every gradation of blue in the mountains from near to far, and the rustling cool under cottonwood groves in summer, and the warm sunlight of even the coldest winter day, when the smoke from hearth fires of piñon wood gave a resinous perfume over the town, brought a sense of thoughtless well-being to most people, and an awareness of unique beauty. The bishop found some four thousand residents in Santa Fe, out of a total of 65,984 as reckoned in a census taken for New Mexico five months before his arrival.