For Willa Cather as for Henri Bergson, whom she admired, literary creation—that is, the choice of subject matter and the technique enforced by it—was an “intuitive” rather than an “intellectual” process. When the novelist, according to Miss Cather, deals with material that is deeply a part of his conscious and subconscious being, he has “less and less power of choice about the moulding of it. It seems to be there of itself, already moulded. If he tries to meddle with its vague outline, to twist it into some categorical shape, above all if he tries to adapt or modify its mood, he destroys its value. In working with this material he finds that he has little to do with literary devices.”¹

Certainly in Death Comes for the Archbishop Miss Cather was dealing with familiar material, or as she would say, her “own material,” which she knew instinctively. Yet this of all her many novels was candidly and deliberately experimental in form. Preferring the term “narrative” to that of “novel,” she envisaged the Archbishop as a legend, in the medieval tradition of Christian saints' lore, and thus of self-imposed necessity she eschewed all obvious dramatic treatment. Instead of the rising action and complexities which characterize the plots of more conventional novels, Miss Cather employed episodic simplicity, giving equal stress to each incident. The incidents, then, she selected with exceeding care, not for the evocation of suspense but for a massive cumulative intention. It was to this end that she integrated the details of theme, plot, characterization, and mood which make up the novel. As she says:

Since I first saw the Puvis de Chavannes frescoes of the life of Saint Geneviève in my student days, I have wished that I could try something a little like that in prose; something without accent, with none of the artificial elements of composition. In the Golden Legend the martyrdoms of the saints are no more dwelt upon than are the trivial incidents of their lives; it is as though all human experiences, measured against one supreme spiritual experience, were of about the same importance. The essence of such writing is not to hold the note, not to use an incident for all there is in it—but to touch and pass on.²

In adapting technical treatment to subject matter, and in selecting locale and situation, she was affected by numerous determinants—her theory of literary genesis; her personal experiences and friendships; her readings. All these factors entered significantly into the composition of the Archbishop.³

I

The Archbishop, like all of her novels of the frontier, allegorizes the individual's withdrawal from a “stupefied materialistic world” and his quest for a direction of life which will relate him most meaningfully to a higher order, either of an impersonal, non-religious power or of a highly personal, Christian God. Born of the spirit, the quest is limited by neither time nor place. For Willa Cather, with her sense of timelessness and her imaginative power of historical reconstruction, there were many frontiers. Beginning with that one which was closest to herself chronologically and geographically, she concentrated her early work on the pioneer land of the Middle-Western prairie. Activated by her awareness of this most recent manifestation, she began to enlarge her perspective and to apply her observations to other frontiers. Through her expanded interests, for example, she conceived a comparable spiritual motivation among the ancient cliff dwellers and the fulfilment of their primitive culture. This broadening of interest accounts, then, for the idyllic interludes about the cliff dwellers which she introduced into both The Song of the Lark and The Professor's House. For Shadows on the Rock Miss Cather made a further shift of her conceptual frontier, this time to seventeenth-century Canada, where she portrayed the spiritual seeking of the French as the motivation of their self-determined exile. And in the Archbishop she again related her frontier historically, now to the American Southwest in the middle nineteenth century.⁴

Willa Cather long cherished an affection for the Southwest and its mythology even before her first visit in 1912. Considerably before this date and certainly long before the idea of the Archbishop came to her, she had become intrigued by a legend which tells of how a tribe of Indians, a thousand or more years ago, were isolated from their home on Katzímo, a vast New Mexican mesa-top, forbidding and impregnable to hostile Indians. This people, according to the legend, farmed the fertile desert at the foot of their mesa encantada. One summer while almost all the members of the tribe were harvesting, a fierce storm destroyed the sole passage leading to the summit of the island of rock. Hopelessly cut off, the tribe moved on to the Ácoma mesa, where they established their now traditional home. From these materials, Miss Cather created her little-known short story, “The Enchanted Bluff” (1909),⁵ an interesting anticipation of her spiritual interpretation of the Ácoma mesa in the Archbishop. Although vague in its outlines, this early story is yet significant in that it conveys some of the sense of yearning and seeking which gives tonality to the Ácoma incident in the Archbishop. When Miss Cather set down her short story, the Katzimo legend was already something of a cause célèbre. The controversy over its authenticity, engaged in by Charles F. Lummis, William Libbey, and Frederick Webb Hodge,⁶ had flared in newspapers, magazines, weeklies, and scientific publications. That Miss Cather was familiar with the quarrel is evident from “The Enchanted Bluff,” in which she has her characters prepare to scale Katzímo by the unique method used by Professor Libbey. At the same time she repudiated Libbey's skepticism, accepting the authenticity of the legend, as it was proposed by Lummis and Hodge.⁷

Almost from the beginning, then, Miss Cather was “teased” by the idea of the Southwest. While she and her brother Douglass were still children in Nebraska, they had talked of exploring the Southwest together, even as the youngsters in “The Enchanted Bluff” dreamed of a similar exploit. Then in 1912 she visited Douglass in Winslow, Arizona, where he was employed by the Santa Fe Railroad.⁸ Thus her first trip to the Southwest became the realization of a childhood dream, and she was imbued with the satisfaction expressed by Father Joseph in the Archbishop (pp. 263-264): “To fulfill the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man.”⁹ For Willa Cather this visit was also an introduction to the Southwestern frontier. There she remained several months, “and a whole new landscape—not only a physical landscape, but a landscape of the mind, peopled with wonderful imaginings, opened out before her.”¹⁰ In this new world a vitality that she had never before known made clear to her the superficiality of her first novel, Alexander's Bridge (written in 1911), and revealed to her the direction of her creative genius. There she refrained from writing and “recovered,” she said, “from the conventional editorial point of view.”¹¹ She visited Arizona again in 1914, although it was not until 1915 that she made her first lengthy sojourn in New Mexico, and in 1916 she returned once more. “Passionately interested in the country itself, in all its natural aspects—and in the people,” Willa Cather went there without regard for the possibilities of literary exploitation.¹² Only after her love of the land had matured and acquired a deep-rooted significance did she put into words her most profound and in some ways her most meaningful novel. Its technical conception came to her appropriately enough when she returned to New Mexico in 1925 after a nine-year absence, and it was seemingly inevitable. In a single evening during that summer while was stopping at Santa Fe, as she often said, the idea of the Archbishop emerged essentially as she afterward wrote it.¹³ That Miss Cather should have been so long in the concrete formulation of the novel fits in admirably with her theory of literary genesis. In her ennobled view of the writer's function, she postulated that

… his material goes through a process very different from that by which he makes merely a good story or a good novel. No one can exactly define this process; but certainly persistence, survival, recurrence in the writer's mind, are highly characteristic of it. The shapes and scenes that have “teased” the mind for years, when they do at last get themselves rightly put down, make a very much higher order of writing, and a much more costly, than the most vivid and vigorous transfer of immediate impressions.¹⁴

It was this kind of deliberate process which went into the creation of the Archbishop. Significantly she made the above statement before her crucial trip to New Mexico in 1925. She returned from New Mexico to Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in the autumn of that year; “and it was there that she wrote—at a sitting, as it seems to me now—the magnificent introduction to Death Comes for the Archbishop.” All that winter in New York, she continued to work on the novel “with unusual happiness and serenity.” But as it progressed, she realized that there were many things and places she needed to learn about, many details that she wished to verify. And so once more, in July of 1926, she went to her beloved Now Mexico.¹⁵

These trips to the Southwest not only made concrete for her the physical landscape but also introduced her to people and experiences invaluable for the creation of the novel. For example, on her first visit to Arizona she met a friend of her brother, the Reverend T. Connolly, the Catholic priest in Winslow.¹⁶ Frequently Willa Cather accompanied him on his long drives to distant parishes, and they talked about the country and the people, and about surviving Spanish and Indian legends. Later she met Father Haltermann, a Belgian priest, who lived with his sister in the parsonage behind the church at Santa Cruz, New Mexico. The “florid, full-bearded farmer priest,” whose duties among his eighteen Indian missions brought him a close familiarity with the native traditions, was one “of the most intelligent and inspiriting persons” she met in her Southwestern travels.¹⁷ Miss Cather was most impressed by the tact and good sense of many of the priests and “the cultivation of mind that gave them a long historical perspective on the life in these remote little settlements.”¹⁸ Indeed, from Father Haltermann and his colleagues Miss Cather learned not only the religious and secular traditions of the area but also many unofficial and intimate details about the construction and financing of the Cathedral of Santa Fe which appear in the novel.¹⁹ Moreover, many of the details of the Archbishop owe their realism to the novelist's acquaintance with several Indians native to the region. Foremost was Tony Luhan, a Taos Indian, who made an immediate impression upon Miss Cather. “He was a splendid figure, over six feet tall, with a noble head and a dignified carriage; there was great simplicity and kindness in his voice and manner.” Arrayed in his purple blanket and silver bracelets, Tony Luhan accompanied Miss Cather to some of the most remote and inaccessible Mexican villages in the Cimarron Mountains; “and from Tony, Willa Cather learned many things about the country and the people that she could not have learned otherwise. He talked very little, but what he said was always illuminating and curiously poetic.”²⁰ Tony in all likelihood became the model for Eusabio, the Navajo Indian described in the Archbishop (pp. 233-238) as “extremely tall, … with a face like a Roman general's of Republican times. He … wore a blanket of the finest wool and design. His arms, under the loose sleeves of his shirt, were covered with silver bracelets. …” Like Tony Luhan, Eusabio, wearing an expression of “religious” seriousness, “talked little, ate little, slept anywhere, preserved a countenance open and warm, and … had unfailing good manners.”

The Archbishop, like Miss Cather's other frontier novels, represented an intensely personal experience, in conception and growth. It was not so much a piece of fiction—a mere story—as it was her vision of life and attitude toward truth. The point at which actuality and invention merged was invisible, for except in necessary mechanical details Miss Cather herself made no such arbitrary distinction. The fact is, her experiences of life were the book and the book was her life. Like a great metaphor, then, the novel became a subtle evaluation of her attitudes and emotions. Even as she drew upon knowledge from individuals to express a philosophy and mood, she drew also from events experienced in the Southwest. Every year in Santa Fe, for instance, a procession honoring the Virgin commemorated De Vargas's recapture of the city for Spain in 1692. Recorded historical details of the procession were of course available to Miss Cather, but even more important than her readings was the fact that she witnessed the procession and reacted emotionally to its spiritual implications. In the novel she directs her focus on the image of the Virgin Mother carried through the streets by the participants. She concentrates on profoundly simple elements to describe the love which the Mexicans cherished for the holy figure. Although this incident is organically inseparable from the sympathetic portrayal of religious love which is a secondary thematic concern of the novel, Miss Cather pauses briefly to inject a few lines of exposition for the fuller clarification of her meaning:

These poor Mexicans, [Father Latour] reflected, were not the first to pour out their love in this simple fashion. Raphael and Titian had made costumes for Her in their time, and the great masters had made music for Her, and the great architects had built cathedrals for Her. Long before Her Years on earth, in the long twilight between the Fall and the Redemption, the pagan sculptors were always trying to achieve the image of a goddess who should yet be a woman. (pp. 258-59)

One of the most striking portions of the novel, the chapter describing Father Latour's introduction to Ácoma, reveals Miss Cather's typical fusion of personal experience, interpretation, and random reading. From her own visit to the mesa she stored up an impression later expressed through her prelate:

Finally a day came when our driver, a Carlisle College Indian named Mr. Sarascino, announced that he could get us to Ácoma. There is no need to tell of that journey—Willa Cather has told it in the Archbishop. In a sense, she had been looking forward to it all her life. As we passed the Mesa Encantada (the Enchanted Bluff) we stopped for a long time to look up at it. A great cloud-mesa hung over it. It looked lonely and mysterious and remote, as if it were far distant in time—thousands of years away.²¹

The same experience emerges thus in the Archbishop:

Ever afterward the Bishop remembered his first ride to Ácoma as his introduction to the mesa country. One thing which struck him at once was that every mesa was duplicated by a cloud mesa, like a reflection, which lay motionless above it or moved slowly up from behind it. These cloud formations seemed to be always there, however hot and blue the sky. Sometimes they were flat terraces, ledges of vapour; sometimes they were dome-shaped, or fantastic, like the tops of silvery pagodas, rising one above another, as if an oriental city lay directly behind the rock. The great tables of granite set down in an empty plain were inconceivable without their attendant clouds, which were a part of them, as the smoke is part of the censer, or the foam of the wave. (p. 96)

But if much of her knowledge of Ácoma and the nearby Mesa Encantada was informed by sensitive observation, it was probably derived also from historical and quasi-literary sources. For some of her factual details she was indebted to Lummis's volumes and to Twitchell's treatment of New Mexican history. From Lummis especially she derived her references to Fray Juan Ramirez, “a great missionary, who laboured on the Rock of Ácoma for twenty years or more,” his mule trail, “the only path by which a burro can ascend the mesa, and which is still called ‘El Camino del Padre,’” his massive church with its beams drawn from the San Mateo Mountains. There are further allusions to the military invincibility of the Ácomas, their single defeat at the hands of the Spaniards in armor, the picture of St. Joseph and its magical rain-producing qualities.²² Yet vital as these real details are in creating a sense of the historical past, they are less important than Miss Cather's particular understanding and symbolic transference of the Ácoma mesa; for herein is the synthesis of everything she means by sanctuary:

All this plain, the Bishop gathered, had once been the scene of a periodic man-hunt; these Indians, born in fear and dying by violence for generations, had at last taken this leap away from earth, and on that rock had found the hope of all suffering and tormented creatures—safety. They came down to the plain to hunt and to grow their crops, but there was always a place to go back to. If a band of Navajos were on the Ácoma's trail, there was still one hope; if he could reach his rock—Sanctuary! On the winding stone stairway up the cliff, a handful of men could keep off a multitude. The rock of Ácoma had never been taken by a foe but once,—by Spaniards in armour. It was very different from a mountain fastness; more lonely, more stark and grim, more appealing to the imagination. The rock, when one came to think of it, was the utmost expression of human need; even mere feeling yearned for it; it was the highest comparison of loyalty in love and friendship. Christ Himself had used the comparison for the disciple to whom He gave the Keys of his Church. And the Hebrews of the Old Testament, always being carried captive into foreign lands—their rock was an idea of God, the only thing their conquerors could not take from them. (p. 98)

In the chapter as a whole she has refined and intensified a great natural phenomenon through artistry; but she has also fulfilled her own inner state through a peculiarly apt religious symbolism, with its mingling of the pagan and the orthodox. Her analysis of the symbolic meaning of the Ácoma mesa leaves no doubt in the reader's mind. Nor is it an isolated symbol, for in slightly altered form it appears repeatedly in The Song of the Lark, The Professor's House and Shadows on the Rock.

Finally, the Archbishop appears to owe much historically and philosophically to the many source works which Miss Cather read. “In order to write this book,” Michael Williams points out, “she has read a great deal in other books; she has studied books. …” Miss Lewis, who was in a position to know, has substantiated Williams's remark with specific observations on the novelist's avid researches.²³ Among the books she read were Defouri's Historical Sketch of the Catholic Church in New Mexico; Salpointe's Soldiers of the Cross; the Catholic Encyclopedia; the works of Lummis, such as Mesa, Cañon and Pueblo, Some Strange Corners of Our Country, and A New Mexican David; Bandelier's The Gilded Man; Palou's Life of Ven. Padre Junípero Serra; Twitchell's Leading Facts of New Mexican History; and the translation by Winship of Castenada's The Coronado Expedition. Although she does not openly acknowledge her use of any of these books, her indebtedness becomes readily apparent in certain details, a character sketch or two, and casual historical allusions. To one volume, however, she was overtly indebted. This was The Life of the Right Reverend Joseph P. Machebeuf, by William Joseph Howlett, a priest who had worked with Father Machebeuf in Denver. It was from this volume that she drew most of her biographical data about Father Latour (Archbishop Lamy) and Father Joseph Vaillant (Father Machebeuf). In the work of Father Howlett, she says, “at last I found out what I wanted to know about how the country and the people of New Mexico seemed to those first missionary priests from France.” This, then, was Willa Cather's basic printed source for Death Comes for the Archbishop.²⁴

II

The reading which shaped the component elements of the novel must not be confused with rigid, unimaginative paraphrase. She molded her materials rather according to artistic necessity. To achieve an aura of realism—and it must be remembered that Miss Cather's technical intention of emulating a legend allowed for no more than a peripheral reconstruction of facts—she borrowed from her reading seemingly casual historical references. To bolster her primary purpose—thematic re-evocation of pioneer striving, its success and in some instances its failure—she gleaned from her reading a series of characterizations and contrasting character sketches. Her purposeful selection of characters, further, made necessary the delineation of an appropriate religious backdrop for their activities. For this end also, then, her reading equipped her with essential details, and it sharpened her insight. All these materials she manipulated to fuse a relatively sophisticated Catholicism with the ancient paganism of Indian rites on the one hand, and with primitive Mexican devotion to Catholicism on the other.

The least important of Willa Cather's borrowings may be found in her use of historical facts, which she characteristically subordinated to the novel's structural totality. Since reportorial accuracy is distant from her aims, she consciously developed a power of selectivity, supported, as she herself admits, by Merimée's estimate of Gogol. “L'art de choisir parmi les innombrables traits que nous offre la nature est, après tout, bien plus difficile que celui de les observer avec attention et de les rendre avec exactitude.”²⁵

Thus, Miss Cather never introduces facts as such or for their own sake. And rather than linger over them she mentions them briefly and without pedantry. Twice in the course of the Archbishop, for instance, she touches on the massacre of Governor Bent, which occurred in 1847. This readily verifiable event she could have encountered in any history of New Mexico, Twitchell's or Read's, for example.²⁶ In all likelihood, however, Miss Cather based her account on Father Howlett's statement:

It was said that [Father Martinez] had much to do with the uprising of the Indians and Mexicans at Taos, when Governor Bent and about fifteen Americans and their Mexican sympathizers were massacred on Jan. 19, 1847. He at least shared with the Indians and Mexicans in hatred for the Americans, and, in their ignorance of events and conditions outside their little valley, they imagined they were but beginning a patriotic war which would result in freeing their country from the foreigner, who was supposed to be an enemy to their race and to their religion. The suspicion is probably well founded, although the U. S. Government did not find Father Martinez guilty of direct complicity in the unfortunate insurrection.²⁷

Unlike most of the other chroniclers of the affair, Father Howlett is forthright in accusing the Mexican padre. In her first mention of the massacre Miss Cather is but vaguely allusive, mentioning by name neither the governor nor the supposed leader of the revolt. She records dispassionately: “Only last year the Indian pueblo of San Fernandez de Taos murdered and scalped the American Governor and some dozen whites. The reason they did not scalp their Padre, was that their Padre was one of the leaders of the rebellion and himself planned the massacre” (p. 8). In her second mention, however, she, like Father Howlett, is much more explicit, identifying by name the priest who engages her attention in one of the central episodes of the novel: “It was common talk that Padre Martinez had instigated the revolt of the Taos Indians five years ago, when Bent, the American Governor, and a dozen white men were murdered and scalped. Seven of the Taos Indians had been tried before a military court and hanged for the murder, but no attempt had been made to call the plotting priest to account. Indeed, Padre Martinez had managed to profit considerably by the affair” (pp. 139-40). Her first allusion broadly suggests the hazards of pioneering under the zealous but subverted state of religious belief which prevailed in New Mexico. The second occurs much later in the novel, after she has introduced Father Martinez as an antagonistic character. Now, when she wishes to expose the priest's ruthless, materialistic aspirations, she makes concrete his complicity in the massacre. For her purposes, indeed, she does not allow herself even Father Howlett's charitable suspension of absolute judgment. Miss Cather, it would appear, accepted Father Howlett's suspicion and then manipulated the evidence to conform to the purposes of the novel.

Father Martinez himself serves as her spokesman in another use of historical data. Conversing with Father Latour, the renegade priest comments on the historically famous revolt of Popé in 1680, “when all the Spaniards were killed or driven out, and there was not one European left alive north of El Paso del Norte.” He boasts that Popé, a San Juan Indian, operated out of Taos. Once again this particular fact is common knowledge, although the fullest account of it probably accessible to Miss Cather appears in Hubert Howe Bancroft's History of New Mexico and Arizona.²⁸ Bancroft emphasizes, as does Miss Cather, that the revolt originated among the pueblo communities in an effort to rid themselves of foreign domination. Father Martinez's reference to the Popé rebellion is thoroughly consistent with Miss Cather's characterization of the unruly priest. By implication Popé becomes the archetype of Martinez; by indirection Father Latour is being warned that Father Martinez, likewise operating out of Taos, will not tolerate foreign interference. The threat veiled in the reference to Popé is, indeed, all the more sinister for its obliqueness; and it enhances dangerously his cool warning that future European meddling will be met with violence. He says, “You are among barbarous people, my Frenchman, between two savage races. The dark things forbidden by your Church are a part of Indian religion. You cannot introduce French fashions here” (p. 148).

Many of her historical facts Miss Cather selected because they convey her faith in the human longing for sanctuary. Symbolically expressive of this kind of yearning is her interpretation of the Navajos' struggles: their slaughter by white troops at the supposed invincible Canyon de Chelly; their enforced exile to the Bosque Redondo; and their eventual return to the lands of their fathers. As she manipulates these historical incidents, they take on a mystical, religious significance. She envisions the canyon as a spiritual fortress, where the Navajos “believed their old gods dwelt … the very heart and centre of their life.” The Indians' exclusion from the fastness she sees as their tragic loss of sanctuary, without which they must perish physically as well as spiritually. The Navajos' ultimate return becomes for Miss Cather an optimistic presage that genuine faith, and this not necessarily Christian, will assert itself against base aspirations and abuse. Whether she had documentary proof for her spiritual interpretation of the Canyon de Chelly is problematical.²⁹ What is apparent, however, is that the struggles of the Navajos have for her a significance parallel with those of the Ácomas. Her visit to the Canyon de Chelly in 1925,³⁰ enhanced by romantic knowledge of the canyon's supposed inaccessibility, gave shape to her interpretation. The traditional Navajo nostalgia for homeland, poignantly stated in so many of their commonly sung chants, complemented further her literary needs and spiritual bent.³¹

Historical eras widely separated in time challenged rather than inhibited Miss Cather in her artistic constructions. Frequently this separation afforded her a basis for believing that man's problems and needs are eternally reiterated, and that they are distinguished only by external details of history. For her only the inner meaning is the essential one. Thus she might boldly link together events which had occurred centuries apart, in order that the early occurrence should serve as a parable for the later one. This is the kind of spiritual union which she achieves in relating the decline of the Pecos tribe from the splendor it enjoyed in the sixteenth century to its pathetic moribundity in the nineteenth. Through the sensitive eyes of Father Latour, Miss Cather witnesses the contemporary atmosphere of death and decay—“empty houses ruined by weather and now scarcely more than piles of earth and stone.” In her interpretation the process of decay began with Coronado and his men who “set forth … on their ill-fated search for the seven golden cities of Quivera, taking with them slaves and concubines ravished from the Pecos people” (p. 125). The waste begun by the white man in the sixteenth century culminated in the ravages of the modern white man, whose civilized diseases “were the real causes of the shrinkage of the tribe.” Drawing her account—particularly the description of the Pecos pueblo—mainly from Bandelier's The Gilded Man, Salpointe's Soldiers of the Cross, and Winship's translation of Castenada's account of the Coronado expedition,³² she establishes a series of contrasts as a memento mori. She offers first the contrast between the thriving Cicuyé of the sixteenth century and the dying Pecos pueblo of the nineteenth. She then places against the strong Indians of Cicuyé the yet stronger Spaniards of Coronado who in their hungry search for gold and new worlds were destroyed, as she sees it, by the dissipation of a noble dream into the lust of materialistic desire. By analogy, thus, in which she adroitly fuses historical time, she fulfils the perpetual conflict between spiritual serenity and greedy turbulence. In so doing she accommodates one of her favorite themes: that sophisticated civilizations are acquisitive, and that materialism is a betrayal of man's spiritual needs, leading to negation and destruction.³³

Characterization is of primary importance in the Archbishop, for Miss Cather relied strongly upon her principals to communicate the theme of the pioneer quest within the superficially simple format of the legend. Once again recorded history provided her with sound, convenient models for her human portraits. Miss Cather went to sources only for the outlines of events and people. These outlines she then enriched with her own inventive imagination. From the works of Howlett and Lummis she derived the patterns of her major characters, Latour, Joseph, Martinez, and Chavez. Each of them she made representative of a pioneer type and yet as individualized as it is possible for a type to be. All are motivated by an intangible, spiritual seeking. Fathers Latour and Joseph undergo a metamorphosis from the functional, historical treatment of Howlett's biography, where Latour (Lamy) especially is an incompletely and nebulously drawn personality. In Miss Cather's hands they are contrasted gently, even lyrically, as symbolic of the complete flowering of the pioneer type. They have abandoned their earlier unsatisfactory environment and have brought only their yearning, their religion, and the best of their culture into the wilderness to prepare themselves for a newly purposeful life. Although Latour and Joseph are impelled by comparable spiritual motives, they are constituted differently. Father Latour, an aristocrat and philosopher, is strengthened by an introspective power of love for all individuals; in his rare moments of uncertainty, he is never torn by doubts about the sanctity of his mission but rather by fears of his own capacity for love. Father Joseph complements his friend by his practicality. Lacking his superior's philosophical penetration, he drives onward by bustling activity and never-questioning acceptance of his mission and capacities. For several reasons Father Latour remains a comparatively shadowy figure throughout the novel while Father Joseph becomes more and more realistic. Father Joseph is by his very nature dynamic and not essentially “intellectual,” as is Latour. Howlett, moreover, concentrates mainly on Joseph, and thus, it might reasonably be expected, gives Miss Cather a more tangible working model. Finally, Miss Cather deliberately idealized Latour as her representation of the aesthetically refined qualities of the pioneer search. As Father Joseph evaluates the life and work of the Archbishop, he reflects: “Perhaps it pleased Him to grace the beginning of a new era and a vast new diocese by a fine personality. And perhaps, after all, something would remain through the years to come; some ideal, or memory, or legend” (p. 255).

Set up against these two monumental figures are Father Martinez, drawn from Howlett, and Don Manuel Chavez, from Lummis. Both characters, historically and fictionally, wish passionately to safeguard their pioneer frontier against the inroads of people whom they regard as “foreigners,” as despoilers of the “wild land” and the old order. But both are made to represent the pioneer of warped design who falls short of complete realization because of the flaw which renders him incapable of love. And because both are trying to preserve the unpreservable, they must be destroyed, figuratively if not literally. As Miss Cather says of Father Martinez: “The American occupation meant the end of men like himself. He was a man of the old order … and his day was over” (p. 154).

Father Howlett's biography is so important to Miss Cather's creative scheme that a comparison between the two books makes impressive the large number of details, incidents, and psychological qualities which she borrowed. …

For the most part, Miss Cather admits that she follows her basic source faithfully—but not slavishly. On a few occasions, however, she uses Father Howlett's book merely as a jumping-off point; that is, on these occasions she takes merely the kernel of an idea suggested by Father Howlett and develops it into a fully detailed incident. For example, one of the most terrifying episodes of the novel—the character and death of Father Lucero—grew out of the following brief statement: “there was a Mexican priest, Mariano de Jesus Lucero, at Arroyo Hondo … whom Bishop Lamy was obliged to suspend for irregularities and schismatical tendencies, and who was a former pupil and great friend of Father Martinez. These two now joined their forces and continued their opposition to Bishop Lamy, until he was obliged … to pronounce upon them the sentence of excommunication.”⁴⁰ Similarly, one of the most delightful interludes in the book—“The Bishop Chez Lui”—is based on but a single sentence in a letter of Father Machebeuf to his sister, May 26, 1841: “But Necessity, the mother of invention, has taught us a little of the science of the kitchen, and I am able to give the cook a few lessons.”⁴¹

But this kind of creative expansion is rare for Miss Cather, who usually reproduces situations more closely than in the above instances. Indeed, she will sometimes carry over in an incident not only the ideas, point for point, but much of the language as well.

Archbishop (pp. 202-03)

He smiled to remember a time long ago, when he was a young curate in Cendre, … how he had planned a season of special devotion to the Blessed Virgin for May, and how the old priest to whom he was assistant had blasted his hopes by cold disapproval. The old man had come through the Terror, had been trained in the austerity of those days of persecution of the clergy, and he was not untouched by Jansenism. Young Father Joseph bore his rebuke with meekness, and went sadly to his own chamber. There he took his rosary and spent the entire day in prayer. “Not according to my desires, but if it is for thy glory, grant me this boon, O Mary, my Hope.” In the evening of that same day the old pastor sent for him, and unsolicited granted the request he had so sternly denied in the morning. How joyfully Father Joseph had written all this to his sister Philomene, then a pupil with the nuns of the Visitation in their native Riom, begging her to make him a quantity of artificial flowers for his May altar. How richly she had responded!—and she rejoiced no less than he that his May devotions were so largely attended, especially by the young people of the parish, in whom a notable increase of piety was manifest.

Howlett (pp. 33-5)

At the approach of the month of May, Father Machebeuf wished to make preparations for May devotions. This was quite natural for him, but it was a new departure for the old pastor. It was a novelty! an innovation! The lingering consequences of Jansenism were yet visible, and new forms of devotion were not encouraged by the old pastors. Special devotions to the Blessed Virgin were of the suspected class. The aged priest may have partaken of this prejudice … but in any case, he was old, and it is difficult to move old men.

Not discouraged, however, the young curate went to his room, and, taking his rosary, he spent the rest of the day in prayer. He prayed, not that he might have his own way, but that whatever was for the glory of God might be done, and he felt confident that Mary would arrange all things for the best.

[The pastor consents to the fete.]

Immediately he wrote to his young sister, who was a pupil with the nuns of the Visitation in his native village of Riom, expressing his lively joy and requesting her to make up and send to him at once a supply of artificial flowers for his May altar. This she did with great pleasure, and she was delighted to learn and to record the fact that the May Devotions were numerously attended and resulted in a great increase of piety in the parish of Cendre.⁴²

Most frequently Miss Cather borrows to preserve the basic situation of an incident and then elaborates upon it only enough to concretize it, to make it more credible. This is exactly what she has done in her depiction of Father Joseph at Rome. The matter-of-fact account in Father Howlett's book is now enlivened not only by Father Joseph's personality and humor, but by the inclusion of the procedure followed during an audience with the Pope. This last piece of information she obtained, as she herself admits in “On Death Comes for the Archbishop,” from conversations with Father Fitzgerald in Red Cloud, Nebraska.

Archbishop (pp. 230-31)

Joseph had stayed in Rome for three months, living on about forty cents a day and leaving nothing unseen. He several times asked Mazzucchi to secure him a private audience with the Pope. The secretary liked the missionary from Ohio; there was something abrupt and lively and naif about him, a kind of freshness he did not often find in the priests who flocked to Rome. So he arranged an interview at which only the Holy Father and Father Vaillant and Mazzucchi were present.

The missionary came in, attended by a chamberlain who carried two great black valises full of objects to be blessed—instead of one, as was customary. After his reception, Father Joseph began to pour out such a vivid account of his missions and brother missionaries, that both the Holy Father and the secretary forgot to take account of time, and the audience lasted three times as long as such interviews were supposed to last. Gregory XVI, that aristocratic and autocratic prelate, who stood so consistently on the wrong side in European politics, and was the enemy of Free Italy, had done more than any of his predecessors to propagate the Faith in remote parts of the world. And here was a missionary after his own heart. Father Vaillant asked for blessings for himself, his fellow priests, his missions, his Bishop. He opened his big valises like peddlars' packs, full of crosses, rosaries, prayerbooks, medals, breviaries, on which he begged more than the usual blessing. The astonished chamberlain had come and gone several times, and Mazzucchi at last reminded the Holy Father that he had other engagements. Father Vaillant caught up his valises himself, the chamberlain not being there at the moment, and thus laden, was bowing himself backward out of the presence, when the Pope rose from his chair and lifted his hand, not in benediction but in salutation, and called out to the departing missionary, as one man to another, “Coraggio, Americano!”⁴³

Howlett (pp. 128-29)

The great event of his visit was his audience with His Holiness, Pope Gregory XVI, on November 17. The Holy Father was greatly interested in his account of missions, and gave him apostolic benediction for himself and his flock, and Father Machebeuf still further remembered his flock by asking the Pontiff to bless for them the supply of rosaries, crosses and medals with which he had provided himself for the purpose and occasion.

The interview made a lasting impression upon him, and the words of the Holy Father—“Courage, American!”—were never forgotten by Father Machebeuf, who often recalled them afterwards, and always with a strengthening effect.

On another occasion Miss Cather has fused two characterizations from her original source to make up a single complete portrait. Thus, the fully developed study of Padre Martinez which appears in the Archbishop is in reality based upon the combined sketches of Fathers Martinez and Gallegos in Howlett's book. The biographical details of Father Martinez's life which Miss Cather presents are historically accurate, but his career as libertine, carouser, and Don Juan was suggested rather by Howlett's description of Father Gallegos, another priest whom Archbishop Lamy was forced to excommunicate.

The Padre [Gallegos] was very popular with certain classes in the parish, and these were the rich, the politicians and business men, few of whom had any practical religion. With these he drank, gambled and danced, and was generally a good fellow. He was a man of more than ordinary talent, and on that account he received considerable respect and deference. His conduct, however, gave scandal to the good within the fold, and also to those without the fold, for it furnished them an occasion for reviling the church. (pp. 191-92)

To round out the details of Father Latour's portrait, Miss Cather drew from the writing of still another churchman, Father Salpointe, who had come to the archdiocese of Santa Fe only nine years after Father Lamy. Soldiers of the Cross was the source of valuable factual information, particularly for details of the declining years of the Archbishop: “After his resignation, July, 1885, the Most Rev. J. B. Lamy retired to a small country place he had purchased in 1853 in the vicinity of the Tesuque River. … Early after the purchase of the premises, the Archbishop had a modest house and a small chapel built on it, and when he felt the weight of years added to that of the administration of his vast diocese, it was there that he was wont to go at times, for some days of rest” (p. 275). Those familiar with the Archbishop will readily identify a parallel situation in the description of the country house where the aged Latour spent many hours in tranquil meditation. From Salpointe's book, too, Miss Cather derived the extremely moving description of Father Joseph's funeral and the devotion of Father Raverdy, himself mortally ill, as he rushed home from France “to make his report to Bishop Vaillant and die in the harness.” The scene in the novel reaches poignant culmination when the “dying man, supported by the cab-driver and two priests” makes his way through the mourning crowd and drops to his knees before Father Joseph's bier.⁴⁴ And, finally, Miss Cather derived wholly from Soldiers of the Cross details about the Archbishop's death: his catching cold at his country house, his desire to return to Santa Fe, the nursing ministrations of the Sisters of Loretto, his request for the Holy Viaticum.⁴⁵

For Chavez, the fourth of her important characterizations in the Archbishop, Miss Cather went to Lummis's essay, “A New Mexican Hero.” Her portrait of Chavez—his aristocratic forebears, his pride, his skill with the bow and arrow, his anti-Americanism, the murder of his brothers by the Navajos, his own near death at the hands of the Navajos when he was eighteen, his two-day march across the desert while he was wounded, his home in the San Mateo Mountains—all of these details are substantially grounded upon “A New Mexican Hero” and are further substantiated by Miss Cather's reading in Twitchell's history.⁴⁶ But while she accepted factual details about Chavez, she nevertheless reinterpreted them; in her eyes Chavez was a pioneer with distorted principles. Her sympathies, unlike those of Lummis, were for the Indians, not Chavez; and in altering superficial details to accommodate her own attitude, she acted in thorough consistency with her artistic practice. Miss Cather measured the significance of reality less by its temporal accuracy than by the implied meaning that she derived from it.

Because her major pioneer characters were men of faith, she was obliged to provide for them a locale which combined the frontier and a profound religiosity of contrasting attitudes. Her serious reliance upon contrast for the development of both background and characterization is, indeed, a notable aspect of her technique. Against the sophisticated scholarly introspection of Father Latour, thus, and the practical religious activity of Father Joseph, she sets forth the muted simplicity of Mexican faith and the barbaric continuity of Indian ritual. Finally, as an historic and symbolic parallel to the efforts of the two French priests, she recounts the arduous toil of Father Junípero Serra, the priest whom she identifies so closely with the Western missionary spirit as to make of him a symbol of its heroism. All this information for her religious backdrop Miss Cather absorbed principally from her observation and interpretation of the area. But as always her reading proved an invaluable source of suggestions and partially developed ideas.

The primitive artistry of Mexican religious images early attracted Miss Cather's attention. She speculated in the Archbishop on the motivating force behind the creation of these images, and concluded that for these simple people “who cannot read—or think” the image was the “physical form of Love” (p. 220). Here, as in other aspects of her concern with the spiritual problem, she was drawn to instinctive goodness unalloyed by rational considerations. She sensed also that these images were expressions of an entire culture, individually created in the reflection of native poverty and struggle as well as simple devotion. Father Latour, who saw the wooden saints in the humblest Mexican homes, found them “much more to his taste than the factory-made plaster images in his mission churches in Ohio—more like the homely stone carvings on the front of the old parish churches in Auvergne” (p. 26). Although Miss Cather makes no obvious observations on Father Latour's mild censure of the mass-produced statuettes, her implication is sufficiently clear: they are to be equated symbolically with the disappearance of the frontier under the pressures of “machine-made materialism,” and they spell the attrition of individualized, emotional worship. In the New Mexico of Father Latour this enervating force was not yet at work. Later, however, in her own trips to the West Miss Cather was to see the beginnings of this same negation of idealism:

May I say here that within the last few years some of the newer priests down in that country have been taking away from those old churches their old homely images and decorations, which have a definite artistic and historic value, and replacing them by conventional factory-made church furnishings from New York? It is a great pity. All Catholics will be sorry about it, I think, when it is too late, when all these old paintings and images and carved doors that have so much feeling and individuality are gone—sold to some collector in New York or Chicago, where they mean nothing.⁴⁷

She felt this trend toward appalling ugliness and uniformity reflected the loss of creative imagination which she deemed essential to the pioneer spirit.

In juxtaposition to the gentle and simple devotion of the Mexicans which she stresses (she devotes a whole chapter to the history of the Shrine of our Lady of Guadalupe⁴⁸ but makes no more than a passing reference to the fanatic piety of the Penitentes), Miss Cather sets forth the age-old pagan rites of the Indians. She even magnifies their barbarism and antiquity by viewing them through the agency of the fastidious Father Latour. Thrown into physically close proximity to Indian ritual, he is repelled by its antediluvian nature. Thus, upon entering the Pecos ceremonial cave where he seeks shelter from a snow storm, “the Bishop … was struck by a reluctance, an extreme distaste for the place. The air in the place was glacial, penetrating to the very bones, and he detected at once a fetid odour, not very strong but very highly disagreeable” (p. 129). And although nothing of a remarkable nature happened at the time, years later the cave “flashed into his mind from time to time, and always with a shudder of repugnance quite unjustified by anything he had experienced there. It had been a hospitable shelter to him in his extremity. Yet afterward he remembered the storm itself, even his exhaustion, with a tingling sense of pleasure. But the cave, which had probably saved his life, he remembered with horror” (p. 135). From this concrete incident with its mere echoes of ancient ritualism, Willa Cather moves to more specific details of pagan worship. In their recording she has an opportunity to display her knowledge of Pecos religious legends, such as their year-round care of an undying fire, snake worship, and the hidden shrine in a cavern of the Pecos hills.⁴⁹

Although Miss Cather treats these Indian rites and legends in evocative fashion, she is purposely vague about them; again and again she points out that her sources are mainly rumor and hearsay. Common talk probably brought to her attention the notion that “somewhere near Pecos is a sacred cave known only to the descendants of these Indians. … What this cave contains, or where it is located is a secret no white man knows.”⁵⁰ Similarly she may have derived her information about the actual religious practices from common knowledge; but it is also possible that she learned of them from an old account by Lieutenant J. W. Abert, who reported:

The village of Pecos is famed for being the residence of a singular race of Indians, about whom many curious legends are told. In their temples they are said to keep an immense serpent. … Others say that they worshipped a perpetual fire that they believed to have been kindled by Montezuma, and that one of the race was yearly appointed to watch the fire. As the severity of their vigils always caused the death of the watchers, in time this tribe became extinct [Miss Cather alludes to this perhaps fanciful interpretation]. Again, I have been told that some six or eight of their people were left, and that they took the sacred fire and went to live with the Pueblos of Zuni.⁵¹

Always, whether she treats the religious faith of the Mexicans or the mysterious ceremonies of the Indians, Miss Cather succeeds in creating an atmosphere of religious continuity which can be stifled only temporarily but never destroyed. She creates, in short, a sense of spiritual timelessness rooted in the unrecorded past and extending toward an unfathomable future. This aura of pious continuity—pagan or Christian—is symbolized in part by the fourteenth-century Spanish bell which hung for over a hundred years in the Church of San Miguel at Santa Fe, and then lay for another hundred in a cellar only to be once more resurrected, this time by Father Joseph.⁵² This same aura is crystallized even more overtly in a single incident related in the Archbishop by Father Joseph:

Down near Tucson a Pima Indian convert once asked me to go off into the desert with him, as he had something to show me. He took me into a place so wild that a man less accustomed to those things might have mistrusted and feared for his life. We descended into a terrifying canyon of black rock, and there in the depths of a cave, he showed me a golden chalice, vestments and cruets, all the paraphernalia for celebrating Mass. His ancestors had hidden these sacred objects there when the mission was sacked by Apaches, he did not know how many generations ago. The secret had been handed down in his family, and I was the first priest who had ever come to restore to God his own. To me, that is the situation in a parable. The Faith, in that wild frontier, is like a buried treasure; they guard it, but they do not know how to use it to their soul's salvation. A word, a prayer, a service, is all that is needed to set free those souls in bondage. I confess that I am covetous of that mission. I desire to be the man who restores these lost children to God. It will be the greatest happiness of my life. (p. 207)

Although Miss Cather brought to the episode a sanctified interpretation that is her own, the physical occurrence is by no means her invention; the history of the Southwest contains numerous comparable allusions. The Catholic clergy in the uncertain days of their missionary toil frequently were compelled to bury their sacred treasure in anticipation of Indian raids, and subsequent discoveries such as Miss Cather recounts were fairly commonplace. She may have heard of a find like this during one of her many visits to New Mexico; and certainly she read of similar incidents, particularly in the work of Salpointe and in the diaries of Major James H. Carleton and Lieutenant Samuel D. Sturgis (1853).⁵³

Miss Cather saves for the conclusion of the Archbishop the story of miracles experienced by Father Junípero, and these augurs of piety she employs as climactically as her legend-like construction of the novel will permit. From the Reverend Francis Palou's Life of Ven. Padre Junípero Serra, she selects three miracles which befell the missionary priest: the miraculous fording of the river, the “manna” in the desert, and the visitation of the Holy Family in the guise of poor Mexicans.⁵⁴ But she develops only this last miracle—at once the most inspirational and the most dramatic of the three—into a full-blown incident. At its conclusion she meditates upon its significance: “There is always something charming in the idea of greatness returning to simplicity—the queen making hay among the country girls—but how much more endearing was the belief that They, after so many centuries of history and glory, should return to play Their first parts, in the persons of a humble Mexican family, the lowliest of the lowly, the poorest of the poor,—in a wilderness at the end of the world, where the angels could scarcely find Them” (p. 284). Through Willa Cather's presentation of the miracles her complex intention becomes most apparent. Here she concretizes the religious simplicity of her frontier locale. Here, also, she recreates Father Junípero as a figure heroically parallel to Father Latour, and in thus doing she reiterates her faith in the Archbishop not only as a remarkable individual but as the representative of a hardy, sanctified breed. And finally, she points to the ameliorations of these hardships which beset the religious missionary. This last goal she states positively by reminding her readers that “no man could know what triumphs of faith had happened there, where one white man [the early missionary] met torture and death alone among so many infidels, or what visions and revelations God may have granted to soften that brutal end” (p. 280).

For her deeply felt imaginative purposes, then, Willa Cather had made rich application of literary borrowing and personal experiences and observations. A surprising aspect of her use of source materials is that, despite her manipulation of data, she never distorts information or makes serious departures from historical authenticity. She alters facts only twice, and in each instance she anticipates the reader's knowledge and probable objections.⁵⁵ When dealing with rumor or common supposition, she is in most cases careful to point that out. Yet it should be abundantly evident by now that her concern is not with facts as such but, rather, as they through their symbolic or metaphorical nature convey elevated concepts. Surely Coleridge's belief that “veracity does not consist in saying, but in the intention of communicating, truth,” would have been most acceptable as a statement of her own conviction. And the most satisfying technical aspect of her use of factual materials is her genius in molding and individualizing their diversity into an organic totality. This is her achievement of “similitude in dissimilitude.” Usually charitable in her evaluations of historical figures, she feels a tremendous and sympathetic oneness with them and their environment. Actually, it is her consistently fostered sympathy in union with discriminated historical details which has made the Archbishop the greatest of her novels. And for its final evaluation we may propose the same standards which she herself applied to the works of Sarah Orne Jewett:

It is a common fallacy that a writer, if he is talented enough, can achieve this poignant quality by improving on his subject matter, using his “imagination” upon it and twisting it to suit his purpose. The truth is that by such a process (which is not imaginative at all!) he can best produce only a brilliant sham, which … looks poor and shabby in a few years. If he achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.

The artist spends a lifetime in loving the things that haunt him, in having his mind “teased” by them, in trying to get these conceptions down on paper exactly as they are to him and not in conventional poses supposed to reveal their character. … And at the end of a lifetime he emerges with much that is more or less happy experimenting and comparatively little that is the very flower of himself and his genius.⁵⁶

Notes

1. Introduction to Alexander's Bridge (Boston and New York, 1922), p. viii.

2. “On Death Comes for the Archbishop,” Willa Cather on Writing (New York, 1949), p. 9.

3. This article is by no means intended as a definitive study of all of the experiences, acquaintances, and reading which went into the creation of the Archbishop. It is merely a sampling of the sources which helped to bring the novel into being.

4. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, “Willa Cather's Novels of the Frontier: A Study in Thematic Symbolism,” American Literature, XXI, 71-93 (March, 1949).

5. Harper's Magazine, CXVIII, 774-781 (April, 1909).

6. Charles F. Lummis, “The Enchanted Mesa,” Mesa, Cañon and Pueblo (New York and London, 1925), pp. 213-29.

7. Miss Cather was not to see Katzímo until 1926 (Edith Lewis, Willa Cather Living, New York, 1953, p. 146).

8. Ibid., p. 80.

9. All references to Death Comes for the Archbishop are to the edition published by Alfred A. Knopf (New York, 1927).

10. Lewis, op. cit., pp. 80-1.

11. “My First Novels (There Were Two),” Colophon, Part VI, 1931.

12. Lewis, op. cit., p. 101.

13. Ibid., p. 139.

14. “The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett,” Willa Cather on Writing, p. 48.

15. Lewis, op. cit., p. 144.

16. Ibid., p. 82. According to the Official Catholic Directory of 1912, the Reverend T. Connolly was the priest in charge of Winslow County, Arizona.

17. “On Death Comes for the Archbishop,” p. 4. She was also indebted to Ewan Macpherson (Lewis, op. cit., pp. 147-48), an editor of the Catholic Encyclopedia, and Father Fitzgerald (“On Death Comes for the Archbishop,” p. 11) for further knowledge of Catholicism.

18. Lewis, op. cit., p. 82.

19. E.g., the incident in the Archbishop of Doña Isabella Olivares's contribution to the building fund of the Cathedral of Santa Fe. That there was such a contribution is today common knowledge in Santa Fe. According to Mrs. Olive B. Corwin, assistant librarian of the Museum of New Mexico, Olivares was a fictitious name, and in actuality the Olivares family was the Baca family, one of the most prominent in New Mexico.

20. Luhan was the husband of Mabel Dodge, once hostess to the D. H. Lawrences in Taos. Miss Cather met the Lawrences while she too, in the summer of 1925, was a guest of the Luhans (Lewis, op. cit., pp. 142-43). See also Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos (New York, 1932).

21. Lewis, op. cit., p. 146. The chapter “The Lonely Road to Mora” in the Archbishop is similarly based on a personal experience (ibid., pp. 101-02).

22. Mesa, Cañon and Pueblo, pp. 264 ff.; Some Strange Corners of Our Country (New York, 1915), pp. 262 ff.; Ralph Emerson Twitchell, Leading Facts of New Mexican History (Cedar Rapids, 1912), I, 199-200.

23. “Willa Cather's Masterpiece,” Commonweal, VI, 490 (Sept. 28, 1927). For an amusing interpretation of Miss Cather's literary research in Denver while working on the Archbishop, see Mildred R. Bennett, The World of Willa Cather (New York, 1951), pp. 222 ff. Cf. also Lewis, op. cit., p. 140.

24. “On Death Comes for the Archbishop,” p. 8. “Through an unfortunate oversight, Miss Cather gave no acknowledgment of her debt to Father Howlett, and after Death Comes for the Archbishop was published in 1927, he wrote her a gentle reminder. At that time she wrote a now famous open letter to ‘The Commonweal,’ telling of how she came to write the book, and giving Father Howlett full credit. She also sent him an autographed copy of the novel, begging his pardon and asking his blessing. … Miss Cather sent two autographed copies of her book to the St. Thomas Seminary in Denver, Father Machebeuf's diocese, with a letter acknowledging her debt to the earlier volume” (Bennett, op. cit., pp. 132-33).

25. “The Novel Démeublé,” Willa Cather on Writing, p. 37.

26. Twitchell, op. cit., II, 233; Benjamin M. Read, Illustrated History of New Mexico (Santa Fe, 1912), p. 446.

27. W. J. Howlett, Life of the Right Reverend Joseph P. Machebeuf, D.D. (Pueblo, Colorado, 1908), p. 227.

28. (San Francisco, 1889), pp. 174 ff.

29. No authoritative work on the religion and mythology of the Navajos states that the Canyon de Chelly was the home of the Navajo gods.

30. Lewis, op. cit., p. 140.

31. Cf. New Mexico's Own Chronicle, ed. Maurice Garland Fulton and Paul Horgan (Dallas, 1937), pp. 13-14.

32. A. F. Bandelier, The Gilded Man (New York, 1893), p. 206; J. B. Salpointe, Soldiers of the Cross (Banning, California, 1898), p. 287; George Parker Winship, tr., “The Coronado Expedition, 1540-42,” U. S. Bureau of American Ethnology, Fourteenth Annual Report, 1891-92 (Washington, 1896), passim.

33. That Miss Cather was long interested in Coronado and “his search for the seven golden cities” is evident from her insertion of an unrelated discussion of his activities in My Ántonia (Boston and New York, 1926), p. 277. Cf. also Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, “Willa Cather's Novels of the Frontier: The Symbolic Function of ‘Machine-made Materialism,’” University of Toronto Quarterly, XX, 45-59 (Oct., 1950).

34. Salpointe, op. cit., pp. 195-196, and James H. Defouri, Historical Sketch of the Catholic Church in New Mexico (San Francisco, 1887), p. 33.

35. Defouri, op. cit., p. 33; Salpointe, op. cit., pp. 195-96.

36. Defouri, op. cit., pp. 34-5; Salpointe, op. cit., p. 196.

37. Salpointe, op. cit., p. 198.

38. Defouri, op. cit., p. 125.

39. Salpointe, op. cit., p. 231.

40. Howlett, op. cit., p. 228; Archbishop, pp. 164-74.

41. Howlett, op. cit., p. 95; Archbishop, pp. 35 ff.

42. Cf. the incident of the white mules, the description of Father Joseph's begging expedition, and the departure of the two young priests for America. See above, p. 495.

43. Cf. the description of the boyhood and early training of the two priests and the incident of “A Bell and a Miracle.” See above, pp. 494-95.

44. Salpointe, op. cit., p. 233; Archbishop, pp. 291-92.

45. Salpointe, op. cit., p. 275.

46. “A New Mexican Hero,” A New Mexico David and Other Stories and Sketches of the Southwest (New York, 1891), pp. 190-217; Twitchell, op. cit., II, 383-384.

47. “On Death Comes for the Archbishop,” p. 6.

48. The account in the Archbishop, pp. 47-51, is based almost entirely on the article in the Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1910), VII, 43-4.

49. Archbishop, pp. 123-24.

50. Earle R. Forrest, Missions and Pueblos of the Old Southwest (Cleveland, 1929), p. 104, records this information as part of common hearsay.

51. “Report of Lieut. J. W. Abert of His Examination of New Mexico, in the Years 1846-47,” Executive Documents … of the Senate of the United States (Washington, 1847), IV, 30. Abert himself was amazed at the interest in Pecos religious superstitions shown by “enlightened man” (pp. 39-40).

52. Miss Cather borrowed the story of the bell directly from Howlett's book. Cf. above, p. 495.

53. Salpointe, op. cit., p. 227; Major James H. Carleton and Lt. S. D. Sturgis, “Diary of an Excursion to the Ruins of Abo, Quarra, and Gran Quivera in New Mexico,” Smithsonian Institution, Annual Report (Washington, 1855), pp. 296-316.

54. (San Francisco, 1884), pp. 12-3, 21-2.

55. She has Father Joseph die before Father Latour, a fact not historically accurate, as she herself points out in “On Death Comes for the Archbishop,” p. 12. Moreover, she alters consciously the date of the abandonment of the Pecos pueblo. See Archbishop, p. 125.

56. “The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett,” pp. 50-1.