Willa Cather’s novel about faith, discovery, and calling, traced in this pretty city’s sights.

G reetings from Santa Fe, Death Comes for the Archbishop country. Willa Cather is among my most-loved writers for her empathy for rural settings and for her portrait of pioneers and the centrality of endurance, atmosphere, and history. Death Comes for the Archbishop, published in 1927, is set mostly in New Mexico between 1850 and 1890. Cather (1873–1947) translates into fiction the lives of two French missionaries: Jean-Baptiste Lamy (1814–1888), named Jean Marie Latour in the book; and Joseph Machebeuf (1812–1889), or Joseph Vaillant in the novel. The two are sent to New Mexico to build the Roman Catholic faith among frontier Mexicans and Natives, many of whom mixed traditional Catholic practices and beliefs with insurmountably pagan ones like priestly concubinage. Over decades, Latour and Vaillant prod and push, but they accommodate and integrate, too. And they learn to respect Native faiths so different from their own.

I was in Santa Fe for a few days for its first-rate opera festival but also to experience its vibrant visual arts scene and as much of Latour’s and Vaillant’s worlds as still exists, which is plenty. Santa Fe is old, founded in 1606 as the capital of New Spain, and it’s still small, having only about 85,000 people and keeping its Old West look.

Cather puts the two priests, together or on their own, in close to 40 places in Europe and the Southwest. Latour, who arrives in New Mexico as a 40-year-old, newly made bishop, and Vaillant, in the novel a few years younger and his vicar, are peripatetic on steroids. The diocese, at its biggest, stretched from Tucson in Arizona, to all of New Mexico and part of West Texas, to Pike’s Peak in Colorado, added when gold was discovered there. Much of the book’s drama comes during long, grueling journeys. The novel starts in Rome, where an American priest based in the Midwest persuades a cardinal and, then, Pope Gregory XVI to establish a new diocese in territory that Americans had just won during the Mexican War. In Rome, New Mexico was understood as filled with hostile Natives, buffalos, and rattlesnakes. Other than that, Vatican knowledge drew mostly from what one cardinal in the novel calls “the romances of Fenimore Cooper.”

How best to describe Latour and Vaillant? Latour comes from an old French family of scholars. Vaillant’s father was a baker. Though they grew up not far from each other, they didn’t meet or become fast, close friends until they were seminarians. Latour is scholarly, reserved, organized, calculating, and dogmatic. He’s good-looking, too, but lives the life of the mind. By contrast, “one of the first things a stranger decided upon meeting Father Joseph,” Cather writes of Vaillant, “was that the Lord had made few uglier men.” Short, skinny, bow-legged, prematurely wrinkled, with a jumbo wart on his chin, Vaillant might have repelled except for a look of animated, complete kindness, a mouth stiffened by work and excitement. He’s tireless, enthusiastic, a total optimist, a good cook, a lover of music, and passionate about his Catholic faith.

They’re yin and yang. When they arrive in Santa Fe as the new bishop and vicar, the local priests reject both of them as foreign and particularly dislike Latour as bossy and inflexible. Latour is forced to make the long, nearly thousand-mile trip to Durango in Mexico to secure written orders from the Vatican via the bishop there, telling the locals in Santa Fe to obey. By the time Latour returns, Vaillant has softened the crowd. Latour builds. Vaillant inspires.

Cather, who visited New Mexico often in writing her novel, and also Lamy and Machebeuf knew well three Santa Fe buildings that are the oldest of their kind in the United States: San Miguel Chapel, the De Vargas Street House, and the Palace of the Governors.

San Miguel Chapel, built around 1610, is the oldest church in America, though it might have been rebuilt at least once. Across the road is the De Vargas Street House, thought for years to be America’s oldest private dwelling, though that’s been debunked. It’s from around 1690, in one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city, and open to the public. Oldest or not, both structures are classic, early Pueblo-style buildings. Much of Santa Fe developed in the same style, with handmade brick covered in ruddy-colored clay, wooden ladders, stepped corbels, log roof beams, keyhole doorways and windows, and, in the day, earth floors covered with thick Indian blankets. Latour and Vaillant saw in Pueblo-style architecture a look of humility in mud, straw, stone, and wood.

Lamy’s two-room house, not far from the De Vargas Street House, is no longer standing. Everything in the house was handmade. In the early days of Lamy and Machebeuf’s time in Santa Fe, there wasn’t a turning lathe or sawmill in all of New Mexico. Carpenters whittled and axed to make furniture. The house had rounded fireplaces, and no wall was entirely flat. Recesses in the wall served as bookcases for Lamy’s library.

Old Santa Fe houses like the De Vargas House and Lamy’s weren’t the stuff of World of Interiors. For much of the priests’ time there, Santa Fe veered toward ratty. With about 5,000 people, it was the market town serving the edge of Western civilization.

San Miguel Chapel has a trapezoidal apse and a single rectangular nave. It’s about 70 feet from the altar to the front door, 25 feet from floor to ceiling, and about 25 feet from wall to wall. The beamed ceiling is hand-hewn cedar. The altarpiece is a traditional Spanish retablo, composed not of an anchor painting flanked by smaller, supporting scenes but of a group of paintings and painted wooden sculptures arranged in rows. Figures are Jesus but also Michael the Archangel, Teresa of Avila, and Francis of Assisi, painted in the late 18th century by an itinerant artist working in a folk Spanish style.

In the church is a massive bell that Lamy and most every Santa Faen of his time believed was cast in 1356, dedicated to Saint Joseph during the Reconquista, and brought to Mexico by the conquistadors. Lamy thought it had a considerable quantity of silver and gold in it, accounting for its mellifluous tone, and that it was actually made by Moorish craftsman, as were most Spanish silver and gold wares. In the novel, this gives Latour a moment to reflect for the first time on how New Mexico’s brand of Catholicism would always be an amalgam of Vatican rules and rituals and a touch of infidel spirit. Today, we know that the bell was cast in the 1850s, sad to say, spoiling a good story.

The Palace of the Governors is the oldest public building in America, built by the Spanish in 1610 first for colonial administration and, later, U.S. territorial government. In the 1880s, it incurred the indignity and impropriety of a parapet, removed a generation later. Today, it’s the home of the Museum of New Mexico. On the weekends, on the beamed overhand running the length of the building, are souvenir sellers.

Cather writes very little in Death Comes for the Archbishop about territorial New Mexico’s government and next to nothing about politics. It’s assumed that the territorial government, like the Catholic Church there, was a work in progress with Native, Mexican, and, here and there, Anglo qualities. In the book, local authorities are activated in extreme cases, like that of a man in the boonies, a wife beater and a degenerate, who nearly murders Latour. He’s finally arrested and hanged after his wife tells the local notary that he’d robbed and killed four lost gringos and buried them in his backyard. Latour and Vaillant say that much in the way of public order came from the U.S. Army fort near Santa Fe and from Kit Carson, explorer, mountain man, Indian agent, and Apache and Navajo fighter based in Taos. Carson comes and goes in the novel, favorably presented as an enforcer of commonsense civil law and as a Native whisperer without peer.

Not everything in Latour’s Santa Fe is adobe. An incongruity, and not what I’d call the architecture of humility, is the Loretto Chapel, which opened in 1878. It’s in Gothic Revival style and meant to evoke Sainte-Chapelle, both Latour’s and Lamy’s favorite Paris church. It’s got spires, buttresses, and French stained glass that was hauled along the Santa Fe Trail. Early in the novel, Latour goes to St. Louis for a conference, returning to Santa Fe with five young nuns from the order of the Sisters of Loretto. He charges the nuns with opening a school of Santa Fean girls, most of whom are illiterate. The nuns pop in and out of the story as symbols of the power of faith and education properly entwined.

The chapel is renowned for its Miraculous Stairway. The chapel is tiny — the initial plan provided for ladders rather than a conventional staircase to reach the choir loft, since a staircase wouldn’t fit. The nuns, and by the 1870s there were dozens of them, decided they didn’t want to climb a ladder, exposing the bottom of their habits to intrusive ogling. What to do? They prayed for a miracle. An unknown carpenter appeared, built the spiral staircase, accepted no money, and disappeared, never to be seen again. A miracle in more ways than one. The staircase has no central support. It’s held together with wooden pegs and glue rather than metal nails. And the wood, a type of spruce, is nowhere to be found in New Mexico.

I’m all for miracles. What I don’t like about the chapel, now deconsecrated, is its gift shop, the size of a junior Macy’s, and its marketing as a wedding venue. Neither Latour nor Vaillant would approve.

And then there’s the cathedral, Lamy’s architectural opus. Saint Francis Cathedral, officially named the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, was dedicated in 1887 but conceived by Lamy in the mid-1860s to replace a rickety adobe church built in the 1710s. It’s a pile that seems never to be finished. Lamy found the golden-ochre rock about 15 miles from Santa Fe. It reminded him of the stone used for the old papal palace in Avignon. He called the style “Midi Romanesque,” popular in southern France from the sixth through the eleventh centuries; it favored thick walls, blocky towers, and thick pillars, all suggesting formidable mass and permanence. In the novel, Latour hires a young French architect to design it, wanting “nothing sensational, simply honest building and good stone-cutting” and a look that “was of the South,” not of the Southwest but of southern France. Steep hills nearby, in a warm, vibrant reddish brown, contrast with the stone church. “The tawny church seemed to start directly out of those rose-colored hills,” Latour says, “with a purpose so strong it was like action.”

In front of the cathedral, bronze doors made in the 1980s depict scenes from the history of the Santa Fe church. A retablo behind the altar depicts saints from the New World surrounding a central painting of St. Francis of Assisi. A baptismal font in the center of the nave dates to 2001. The oldest part of the cathedral is La Conquistadora Chapel, in the north transept, which houses La Conquistadora, a wooden sculpture of Jesus’s mother, Mary, brought to New Mexico in 1626 from Spain. The cathedral’s stained glass is French. There’s outdoor sculpture, too. A prayer garden in what was once Lamy’s orchard and garden displays bronze sculptures by Gib Singleton, a Santa Fe–based artist specializing in religious subjects. His 14 life-size bronzes represent the Stations of the Cross.

In the novel, Latour takes Vaillant to the mountain location to see the golden rock he’s selected for the building. On the way back to town, Latour asks Vaillant whether his dream of a cathedral is “too worldly.” Vaillant doesn’t know what to say. It’s a grand building, and I won’t ask whether or not it’s “too worldly.” But, rather, is it too European, or too assertive, or does it have the whiff of the Gilded Age? I went to Sunday Mass there. The acoustics are awful. The sermon wasn’t bad. It was a joy to see a packed church.

This is New Mexico. Following in the footsteps of the book’s characters necessarily means assessing the sky, the land, and the weather. Each is a key character in the book. “The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still,” Cather writes, “and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world.” Latour believed that “elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.” He felt that “the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!”

In their travels, the priests face sandstorms like moving walls and tapestries. Of the cathedral when a storm was closing in on it, Cather writes:

The sky above the mountain grew black, and the carnelian rocks became an intense lavender, all their pine trees strokes of dark purple; the hills drew nearer, and the whole background approached like a dark threat.

At sunset, the hills become “the colour of the dried blood of saints and martyrs preserved in old churches in Rome, which liquefies on occasion.” Early in the book, on his first visit to Santa Fe, riding alone through monotonous red-sand hills, what seems to Latour to be a signal from God is a gnarled juniper tree shaped perfectly like the Cross.

More than once in their travels through deserts, Latour and Vaillant, at the last moments of their and their animals’ endurance, find an unmapped oasis waiting for them, “a thread of verdure and a running stream . . . clover fields, cottonwoods, acacias,” and sometimes a few adobe homes. One time, a cave in a black volcanic cliff saves Latour and his Native guide, Jacinto, in a terrific snowstorm — New Mexico does indeed have four seasons. Jacinto knows exactly where to go and what to do, though Latour, passionate Catholic that he is, is seriously spooked by what he senses are ancient, powerful Native spirits, older than Christianity and tied intimately with nature. “No white man knows anything about Indian religion,” Jacinto tells him. Latour realizes he’s right.

When he and Jacinto would leave a spot in which they had camped for the night, Jacinto “was careful to obliterate every trace of their temporary occupation.” Latour judged that “just as it was the white man’s way to assert himself in any landscape, to change it, . . . it was the Indian’s way to pass through a country without disturbing anything; to pass and leave no trace, like fish through the water, or birds through the air.” Natives vanished into the landscape rather than being conspicuous in it. Unlike gringo Americans or Europeans, they had no desire to master nature. Caution and respect ruled their relationship with the land, as if, Latour thought, “the spirits of earth and air and water were things not to antagonize and arouse.”

On Wednesday, my last day in Santa Fe, I found Lamy’s tiny home — two modest whitewashed adobe rooms and private chapel — in a remote, rural edge of the city, where he lived after his retirement as archbishop. Latour’s last home in the novel mirrors Lamy’s, which wasn’t easy to find. It’s on the land of a very high-end dude ranch and resort called the Wrangler. In the novel, it’s where Latour cultivates cherries, apricots, apples, quinces, and what he calls “the peerless pears of France.”

He encouraged new priests to plant gardens wherever they went. “Man was lost and saved in a garden,” he told them. Covering a slope by the house were wildflowers such as purple verbena, which Cather describes as

like a great violet mantle thrown down in the sun; all the shades that the dyers and weavers of Italy and France strove for through centuries, the violet that is full of rose color and is yet not lavender; the blue that becomes pink and then retreats again into sea-dark purple.

Gardens meant roots and nourishment but also accommodation and compromise with nature — whether the nature of land, water, and weather; or human nature.

Pretty as his little cottage is, and as much as he loves it, Latour returns to Santa Fe, near his cathedral, to die. As he nears death, Latour thinks he is leaving the past, not missing the future, which, he believes, will take care of itself. He doesn’t consider himself ill with a disease. Rather, he believes, simply, that he is dying from having lived.