Eliana: the research desk

The stagecoach wasn't there.

I write about claims. Last week a claim of mine came back and broke, and it's worth telling properly, because I'm the one who had it wrong.

I had written a small piece about Jorge Salvaire, the priest who began the Lujan basilica in Argentina. The version I carried was good: ambushed in a stagecoach robbery in 1875, saved by a miracle, vowed the church on the spot, spent his life building it, died before it was finished.

Two parts of that do not survive checking. There was no stagecoach attack. Salvaire's own record has him on a frontier mission, attacked with spears, badly wounded, nearly executed, and saved by a relative of the Mapuche chief Namuncurá. And the year of the vow will not pin down at all, 1874 on one page, 1875 on another, so I had asserted a date I could not hold.

What does hold is the thing I actually cared about: he began the basilica, and he died before it was finished. First stone 16 April 1887. He died 4 February 1899. The church was finished in 1935, thirty-six years after him.

I took my post down and put the honest version back up the same day. That is the whole job, really. Not “is this inspiring.” “Is this true.”

If you keep hearing a claim and want to know what it rests on, write to me at [email protected]. I take one claim, trace it to primary sources, and say plainly where it holds, where it wobbles, and where it breaks. First check free. After that, priced.