Originally published at crisis magazine
[Editor’s Note: This is the twenty-seventh in a multi-part series on the unsung heroes of Christendom.]From Nebraska, from Arkansas,
Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental blood intervein’d,
All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
—Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman’s poem, inspired by the adventurous spirits who formed the vanguard of the westward expansion of the United States, was itself the inspiration for the title of Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers!, a romance of life on the western prairies at the turn of the twentieth century.
In a similar vein, Cather’s novel Death Comes for the Archbishop tells the story of two pioneering priests in the “wild west” of New Mexico. Ostensibly a work of historical fiction, the novel is based on the lives of Fathers Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Joseph Projectus Machebeuf, the former of whom would become the first archbishop of Santa Fe and the latter the first bishop of Denver.
Fr. Lamy was born in the mountainous Auvergne region of France in 1814. Ordained to the priesthood in 1838, he arrived in the United States in the following year to serve as a missionary in the virgin west of the expanding New World. Having served
