Father Machebeuf brought Christmas to a hell-bent territory

By Thomas Noel

As Denver celebrates its 150th birthday this fall, remember that the pioneers included a few saints as well as many better known sinners. Among the heroic “sky pilots,” as clergymen were called in those days, was a remarkable Frenchman, who did much to turn a wild and woolly town into a more respectable, godly place.

Denver’s first Christmas was ungodly. On Dec. 25, 1858, lonely miners in the two-month old town celebrated with random gunfire as Uncle Dick Wootton passed out tin cups of Taos Lightning. This New Mexican whiskey was described by those who drank it as tangle-foot, shake-knee, rot-gut, or bust-head. A year later, Taos Lightning was still the principal Christmas communion as Denver housed 31 saloons but no church.

In 1860, a frail-looking missionary from Riom, France, arrived by way of Santa Fe, N.M., with a different brand of Christmas cheer. Father Joseph P. Machebeuf seemed an unlikely man for this mission. Willa Cather described him well in her 1926 novel, “Death Comes for The Archbishop”: “The Lord had made few uglier men. He was short, skinny, bow-legged from a life on horseback, and his countenance had little to recommend it but kindliness and vivacity. He looked old, although he then was about 40. His skin was hardened and seamed by exposure to weather in a bitter climate, his neck scrawny and wrinkled like an old man’s. ... his eyes were near-sighted, and of such a pale, watery blue as to be unimpressive. There was certainly nothing in his outer case to suggest the fierceness and fortitude and fire of the man.” 

Machebeuf arrived on Oct. 29, 1860, to find, as he wrote home to his sister in France, “the little village of Denver made up of low frame stores, log cabins, tents and Indian wigwams on the banks of the Platte.”

Gunfire left few nights silent, and Machebeuf noted that “lead poisoning” seemed to be Colorado Territory’s leading cause of death, followed by “rope burn” as “Judge Lynch” took vigilante action. In Pueblo, Central City, Denver, Colorado City and other towns, criminals were hung from cottonwood trees like bizarre holiday ornaments. Struggling to promote this murderous mining camp as a civilized urban center, the Denver City Town Company donated building sites to churches that might help pacify the gun-toting townsfolk. The town gave Machebeuf two lots on what was then the outskirts of town at 15th and Stout streets.

To build a chapel on that corner, Machebeuf begged, borrowed, and bought lumber and nails, bricks and mortar. He built a 50-by-30-foot church that remained windowless and unplastered for Denver’s first Christmas Mass. A few French trappers and German, Mexican and Irish miners probably attended, and possibly some of the Arapaho Indians whom Machebeuf strove to baptize. In the raw frontier crossroads in the middle of nowhere, the small unlikely congregation heard Mass sung in Latin colored by Machebeuf’s thick French accent.

St. Mary’s, as Machebeuf christened his church, remained windowless for several years until Father Machebeuf embarrassed parishioners by threatening to go back to New Mexico “to ask them for some of their pesos to put windows in the church for the Catholics of Denver.” Denver’s little St. Mary’s Church has since evolved into the grand French Gothic Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception. The old parish school founded in 1864, St. Mary’s, is still in business as Colorado’s pioneer private school.

By Christmas of 1861, Machebeuf could also offer Mass in Central City, then the largest town in Colorado. That spring he had joined the throng of miners streaming up Clear Creek Canyon to the Central City diggings. The gold seekers were gambling on finding gold; the padre aimed to establish the second church of his parish, which included all of Colorado and Utah.

In Central City, Machebeuf held successive Sunday services in a billiard hall, a dance hall, then in an empty storefront. Of his storefront service, Machebeuf wrote: “I posted a safe man at the door and told him to lock the door and bring me the key.” With his parishioners thus corralled, Machebeuf announced, “Now my good men, none of you will go out until you contribute or subscribe for a church.”

A leading mining man thereupon plunked $50 in gold dust on the altar. Others followed his example. Their gold ultimately built Central City’s St. Mary’s Church. It still stands on Pine Street, then Central’s red light row housing Madame Lou Bunch and other “Brides of the Multitude.” The cat houses are gone now, but St. Mary’s steeple still towers over Central City, above even the multi-story casinos that have sprung up around it. Father Machebeuf, who became the first bishop of Colorado in 1868, left both Central City and East Colfax Avenue with two guardian angels that still welcome lost souls from neighboring gambling and saloon halls.

Thomas Noel teaches history at the University of Colorado-Denver and is the author of many books, including “Colorado Catholicism” and “A Guide to Colorado Historic Places,” which includes many restored churches.