by Molly Boyle on
THE SANGRE DE CRISTO MOUNTAINS SEEMED to dare her to write about them. The literary allure was in their potent name, meaning “the Blood of Christ.” It evoked the saturated hue that flushed over them at the end of most days, when the piñon-covered slopes of the southernmost Rockies turned fuchsia in the sunset.
The mountain range’s past and people were shaped by the remote and dangerous frontier country that surrounded it, more than 600 miles from the prairie where she was raised in Red Cloud, Nebraska. The history of that territory seemed as mystical as the Sangre de Cristo moniker. She knew much of the blood that had been shed there over the centuries was due to colonial matters of religion. And although she was not devout, she recognized that both faith and conquest tended to lay bare the beating heart of human nature.
Since Willa Cather (1873–1947) was going on her ninth novel, the ability to convey that kind of stripped-down emotion was in her wheelhouse. In 1922, the author had argued for “the inexplicable presence of the thing not named” in an essay for the New Republic, spurring on the modernist approach that would come to dominate early 20th-century literature. The wordless yet storied presence of the northern New Mexico mountains kept calling to Cather over the six trips she took to the Southwest between 1912 and 1926. Finally, in 1927, she managed to distill their power into Death Comes for the Archbishop—a work of historical fiction “as elegantly spare as one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie houses,” as the Atlantic put it in 2024.
The best-known product of Cather’s working vacations has been translated into 24 languages and is frequently published in editions with the subtitle “A Classic Novel of New Mexico.” It follows two French men of the cloth, a priest and a bishop, over 30 years as they establish a Roman Catholic diocese in the New Mexico Territory after its 1848 conquest by the United States. As was Cather’s custom, all characters are drawn from real-life personal histories made into composite figures, particularly that of the character of Father Jean Marie Latour. He is a stand-in for Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy, who supervised the construction of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe from 1869 to 1887.
When Cather began spending time in the state, she was getting in on the ground floor of a tourism industry that was beginning to hit its stride, drawing visitors to the region’s unique pueblos, mission churches, and a revamped downtown Santa Fe whose Pueblo Revival architecture was designed to celebrate both. The trail she blazed in pursuit of the real-life stories that became Death Comes for the Archbishop starts on a westbound train of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway; snakes through the Harvey House at La Fonda on the Santa Fe Plaza and the state library at the Palace of the Governors; stops at Laguna and Acoma pueblos and Ranchos de Taos to admire their fine adobe churches; checks out the local quarry that supplied stone for the cathedral; spends time horseback riding and on car trips with Tony Lujan from Taos Pueblo; dips in the hot springs near Arroyo Hondo; and rests in a guest casita at the fabled Mabel Dodge Luhan House in the heart of Taos.
Cather clearly fell under the Land of Enchantment’s spell, then turned generations of readers on to its stories via the characters and actual historic sites that suffuse what she considered to be her greatest novel. A century later, if a meme existed for a Literary New Mexico Tourist starter pack, it would include a requisite picture of Death Comes for the Archbishop.
“WHEN YOU SEE THIS LANDSCAPE, it’s unreal,” Garrett Peck tells me. The Santa Fe–based author of The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop (UNM Press, 2026) leads a regularly scheduled two-and-a-half-hour walking tour of Cather-related sites that begins in the Plaza, so he’s used to talking to visitors who are clutching the novel like it’s a Moon Guide. “People who read [Archbishop] are blown away by how accurate and sparse her descriptions of this place are.”
In other words, the novel’s long tail of influence is rooted in a realist portrayal of its landscapes—special places that, in most cases, still retain their cultural power and tourist appeal a century later. As Peck tells it in his book about Cather’s research before she wrote her masterpiece, there’s an affectionate shorthand for those who make Cather-centric pilgrimages to the state: They’re taking a “Cather-cation.”
University of New Mexico professor of English Jesse Alemán says he’s “fascinated by the degree to which Cather author studies is deeply rooted in tracking her travel.” Although he and Peck agree that the main demographic of these have-novel-will-travel enthusiasts is Anglo women like she was, Alemán says the research-oriented trail Cather carved out, in a time of complicated railway and early auto travel, also modeled an admirable mobility for early 20th-century woman tourists in the Southwest, not to mention queer ones like Cather. “She captures the feeling of what it means to visit a place and to be so struck by it that you want to move through that place, you want to return to it, and it leaves an imprint on you,” Alemán says.
Plotting my own Catherish sojourn after I read Peck’s lively book, I meet the author and tour guide at Bishop’s Lodge, in Tesuque. On a 317-acre property that’s now part of the Auberge Collection of worldwide luxury properties, Archbishop Lamy built a retreat chapel, surrounded by his signature fruit orchards in 1874, while the cathedral in Santa Fe was being constructed. Couples now book picturesque weddings outside the Lamy Chapel, and resort guests slip in for meditation or yoga sessions in the deconsecrated three-room building, which retains a hallowed ambience.
Peck and I hang out on the terraced patio below the chapel for Bishop’s Hour, a weekday three-hour menu discount at the sleek SkyFire lounge. The author of eight previous nonfiction books says he named his newest project after a well-known passage in Archbishop. In it, Cather nails the ineffable feeling of New Mexico air, “with the fragrance of hot sun and sage-brush and sweet clover; a wind that made one’s body feel light and one’s heart cry ‘To-day, to-day,’ like a child’s. … one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.”
Outside today’s genteel Bishop’s Lodge, a world-class Southwest art collection is just steps away, along with Prickly Pear Poolside Dining. But I can still smell the wilderness on the wind. In Peck’s book, he writes that the “bright edges of the world” represent “the boundaries of nature, not yet exploited and harnessed by civilization; the edge of the American frontier; and the narrow path between death and life.”
These are lofty themes. Contemplating them, I drive the High Road during Holy Week, winding north through the same Penitente strongholds depicted in the novel. Over 18 days spent visiting Taos arts doyenne Mabel Dodge Luhan in the summer of 1925, Cather and her life partner, Edith Lewis, recorded several penciled notations on area attractions that made their way into Death Comes for the Archbishop. Following Peck’s transcriptions of the mass-produced Blue Jay notebook in which the couple logged these observations, I search Google Maps for a wilder place.
I head to El Salto del Agua waterfall and cave, near Arroyo Seco, which is the basis for a passage set in a ceremonial kiva-like natural cave that Cather relocates to Pecos in the novel. As a group, the 1920s-era Anglo literati of Taos seem to have had their minds blown by the known site, transplanting it to their own narratives while working on their own big recurring ideas. After her soon-to-be-husband, Taos Pueblo member Tony Lujan, took the recently transplanted New York socialite Mabel Dodge to El Salto for the first time in 1918, she wrote about the cave in three different memoirs. Meanwhile, British writer D.H. Lawrence included the setting in a 1924 short story where a character clearly based on Mabel is sacrificed by an Indigenous tribe during the winter solstice. For these writers, the site is clearly a place to work out their outsider’s experience of the insularity of Native culture and traditions.
Cather occasionally trains her White woman’s lens on Pueblo, Mexican, and Hispanic cultures somewhat clumsily in Death Comes for the Archbishop. The narrative clearly exalts the learned European friars over the less-trained native New Mexican padres, some of whom had been left to practice in isolation for centuries. But for novelist Kali Fajardo-Anstine, who penned the introduction to the 2023 Penguin reissue of Archbishop, some of Cather’s other choices in representation are a welcome surprise.
“Her voice amplified an entire time period for me,” says Fajardo-Anstine, who is of European, Pueblo, Chicana, and Filipino ancestry with generational roots in the San Luis Valley. Having long searched for any depiction of her ancestors’ circumstances during the Territorial era, Fajardo-Anstine says that after she picked it up, “I immediately fell in love with the novel.” Her favorite character, Magdalena, is first dismissed by the French priests as a dumb provincial wife from Mora. But when she warns the others about her murderous husband, her “stupid face became intense, prophetic, full of awful meaning,” Cather writes. “She proves to be a savior,” Fajardo-Anstine writes.
Following a GPS dot with one bar of cell service, I self-pay a fee for the privately owned trail to El Salto del Agua waterfall and cave at a kiosk near the entrance. In misty morning rain, I then trek 10 minutes to a trickle of water that gets louder the harder it comes down, cascading prettily through a 50-foot open cathedral of rock.
In the parched high desert, “the jump of water” is a welcome sound. I sit beneath the overhang for half an hour, absorbing the flow of an ancient network that leads to other, larger and more inaccessible waterfalls—or so the internet tells me. I think about all the forms that sacred spaces take in New Mexico. Cather leads her Archbishop character here via Pueblo guides who show the European a sipapu where the water emerges. Putting his ear to the mountain, Latour hears “the sound of a great flood moving with majesty and power.”
“I LOVE TO GO TO THE MABEL DODGE Luhan House,” says Tracy Tucker, director of collections and curation at the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, Nebraska. “It just feels like anybody could walk out of one of those rooms. It could be Mabel, it could be Cather, it could be Dennis Hopper.”
The certified archivist regularly leads tour groups to Cather–pilgrimage spots in Taos, including the bohemian bed-and-breakfast and conference center that’s run out of Luhan’s sprawling former hacienda on Morada Lane. It’s a groovy place that Mabel called El Gallo after her decorative collection of ceramic Mexican roosters. In a pink former guesthouse (now a private property) that still stands near the main house, New Mexico’s most famous hostess put up her old Greenwich Village neighbors, Cather and Lewis, for nearly three weeks in the summer of 1925.
It was at El Gallo, where stories mingled among salon guests from all walks of life, that Cather first heard of a Padre Antonio José Martínez (1793–1867), who became a pivotal character in Archbishop. A statue of Padre Martínez, who is widely credited for championing literacy in the territory and known as a true man of the people despite (or because of) the children he fathered after he became a priest, stands in Taos Plaza today. His ancestral home, the Martínez Hacienda, is a Spanish colonial-era museum south of town that is well worth a stop for anyone considering the domestic circumstances and vernacular santero artworks that swirl around the setting of Cather’s novel.
A room at the Luhan House with a fireplace and a pair of twin beds is named after Cather. With its cheery lace curtains and ample community dining room, Mabel’s hand-built hacienda still looks like the epicenter of the counterculture in Taos that its owner gathered here a century ago. It spawned a new generation when Hopper bought the property, which he renamed the Mud Palace during his 1970s tenure.
After an evening walk in the recently renamed Red Willow Park, past Archbishop cameo character Kit Carson’s grave, I stay upstairs for a night in what I find to be the house’s most inspirational quarters, the Solarium. Originally constructed as Mabel’s sun porch, it features 360-degree views of Taos, surrounded by old glass panes and the same furniture that shows up in decades-old photos of the distinctive room. Hopper married Michelle Phillips up here on Halloween night in 1970; according to attendees, they lit 150 candles that almost burned down the place.
Although the marriage only lasted a week, a harmonious vibe lingers in the jewel-box room perched beside Taos Pueblo. I sleep deeply despite the bright glow of a full moon.
AT AGE 51 IN 1925, CATHER’S ENERGY for road trips and horseback rides guided by Tony Lujan seemed boundless, at least according to the Blue Jay notebook. But after a few weeks of crackling literary ideas were planted in Taos and beyond, she and Lewis headed back to La Fonda on the Santa Fe Plaza for four nights.
There, Cather gathered some history books from the state library at the Palace of the Governors and settled in to bear down on her inspiration. After a few days of reading priests’ biographies and New Mexico histories at La Fonda, she climbed to the Cross of the Martyrs to watch “the Sangre de Cristo Mountains color with the sunset.” There, she decided that her next novel would take on “the story of the missionary priests.”
She went to sleep in her second-floor room at La Fonda, down the street from the stone cathedral Archbishop Lamy had built. That night, she saw the whole saga of Death Comes for the Archbishop written across the whitewashed walls of the inn at the end of the Santa Fe Trail.
“Before morning, the story was in my mind,” she recalled later. “The way of it was on the white wall of that hotel room in Santa Fe, as if it were all in order and color there, projected by a sort of magic lantern.” As Ernest Hemingway wrote in The Sun Also Rises, an equally famous novel published a year later, “Isn’t it lovely to think so.”
Managing Editor Molly Boyle recommends the lima beans at Hotel Willa, in Taos.