On Saturday, I walked in the footsteps of Bishop Jean Latour and his vicar, Joseph Vaillant, the two missionary priests, each a stargazer in his own way, depicted in Willa Cather’s 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop. Cather thought it was her best novel, and she won a Pulitzer Prize for it in the days when a Pulitzer meant an originality that thrills, not political conformance that bores and depresses. Cather’s priests are based on two real priests who died in the late 1880s — Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Joseph Machebeuf, his vicar and, later, the first bishop of Colorado. With an intensity that had to be divinely inspired, she researched their lives and their ambiance in New Mexico from the 1850s to their deaths.
Today, I’ll write about the difference between the Santa Fe that her priests knew and the Santa Fe of Cather’s era and of our own. Cather’s first trip to New Mexico was in 1912, just a generation after the deaths of Lamy and Machebeuf. Though so little removed in time, her Santa Fe was different from theirs. Theirs was an old Santa Fe, just feeling its American oats but still rooted in Spanish and Mexican culture. New Mexico was home to two dozen Native tribes, some controlling vast parts of the Southwest. In the 1850s and ’60s, Santa Fe, though the Camino Real ran through it, looked more ratty than royal. Old Pueblo-style buildings, with thick, adobe walls and ceilings beamed with logs, many a hundred years or more in age, gave the town an air of poky decrepitude.
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