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.In 1850 Manogue decamped for a Chicago semi-nary to pursue a call to the priesthood.These studies were interruptedin 1854 when he and his brother James pulled up stakes to accompanytheir sister Mary and her husband, Timothy Dooling, to the gold fields ofCalifornia.Manogue then became a hard-rock miner at a stake north ofNevada City.With his earnings, he resumed his studies for the ministry atthe Seminary of St.Sulpice in Paris in September 1858.Patrick Manogue s intellectual and spiritual formation took root dur-ing the heyday of the French Second Empire (1850 1871).NapoléonIII was one of the great urban planners of modern times, and literallyremade Paris during Manogue s years abroad.Drawing on the geniusand organizational skills of architect and planner Georges Haussmann,prefect of the Seine, Napoléon III demolished deteriorated housing andwidened narrow streets, creating the broad, straight, sweeping boule-vards that would become a hallmark of Paris.Napoléon III and Hauss-mann revamped areas around Paris s ancient churches, while churchleaders eagerly constructed new facilities that complemented the city sgrand plans.One such edifice was the Church of the Holy Trinity, builtin the 1860s.This majestic church, with its elegant facade and domi-nance of city space, must have etched itself in Manogue s mind as thebeau ideal of church design.Manogue also understood the work ofthis great new church in the life of a newly remade Paris.It added tothe city s grandeur and drew the church into a relationship with theCity of Lights that was equal parts secular and sacred in its origins andits future.Returning to the United States in late May 1862, Manogue wasappointed to the church of St.Mary in the Mountains in Virginia City,Nevada, a headquarters for scattered Catholic missions and stations in thecenter of the Comstock Lode.25 The small mining town grew by leaps andbounds.By 1873 and 1874, with the discovery of the Big Bonanza by fourIrish miners, the population soared to twenty thousand, making VirginiaCity, for a time, one of the largest urban centers west of the Rockies.26c a t h e d r a l b u i l d i n g a s u r b a n p r o j e c t 53 Bishop Patrick Manogue, ca.1890.Courtesy of SacramentoArchives and Museum Collection Center, Eleanor McClatchyCollection.Virginia City s boom times brought an explosion of home building,new gas and sewer lines, and an array of new businesses.Newspapers, afirst-class opera house, and schools enhanced city life.Rail links, whichtransferred precious ore from the mines, also connected Virginia Cityto even larger markets.The six-foot-six Manogue (his height was a defi-nite asset in the rough-and-tumble of the mining community) strode thebusy city streets like a giant and worked cooperatively with the medleyof characters in public and private life whom he met in the heyday of themining era.27 With the help of parishioners and the superrich, Manogueembellished his church as much as he could, mostly to make space for the54 s a c r a m e n t o a n d t h e c a t h o l i c c h u r c h twenty-five hundred people who attended mass weekly.He recruited theSisters of Charity to staff a hospital, orphan asylum, and schools for girlsand boys.28 After a fire in 1875, Manogue substantially rebuilt St.Mary inthe Mountains and made it the neo-Gothic gem of the American West.Summarizing his years in Virginia City, Manogue wrote to a priest inRome: When having charge for 20 years of Virginia City, I put up twochurches at a cost of more than $160,000, a hospital at $40,000, an orphanasylum for $30,000 and schools averaging $20,000. He concluded withan understatement: I have been now thirty years on this Pacific Coastand I may lawfully say I have not been idle. 29mano gue as urban developerThe mining frontier was an unstable place for those with grandiosedreams.Virginia City collapsed as quickly as it rose once the mines fal-tered.Its demise was sealed by the shifting monetary policies of the gov-ernment in the nineteenth century.30The fortunes of mining enterprises in California and Nevada alsoaffected the location of the Catholic headquarters.In 1861 a temporaryheadquarters at Marysville, with jurisdiction for California and Nevadaabove the thirty-ninth parallel, was established, with Bishop EugeneO Connell directing it.31 In 1868 O Connell was transferred to the newheadquarters at Grass Valley, a center of hydraulic mining.Grass Valleyflourished as a Catholic center for a time, accommodating a girls acad-emy and orphanage.32 Yet by the 1870s Grass Valley too was in decline
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