Death Comes for the Archbishop

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1927

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Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Book 2

Books 3-4

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Character Analysis

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Background

Authorial Context: Willa Cather

Willa Cather (1873-1947) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author best known for novels depicting pioneer life on the American frontier. Cather was born in Virginia, and her family moved to Nebraska when she was a young girl. Many of her books are set in the Great Plains region, which she called home throughout her youth. Cather earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and then worked as a journalist and high school English teacher in Pittsburgh and New York City. Her work was popular during her lifetime, resonating with period readers because of her exploration of themes related to the rugged frontier life, isolation and exile versus belonging and community, and the struggles of early settlers and Indigenous Americans during US expansion.

Cather’s early novels are among her most famous and are still widely read. O Pioneers! (1913) tells the story of a Swedish-American family trying to hold onto their farm during an era when many early immigrants left the prairie for the economic security of the city. Like Death Comes for the Archbishop, it explores the relationship between place and identity, or how rugged frontier spaces shaped the lives and experiences of individuals who lived and worked there, with a particular eye toward immigrant and outsider communities. In The Song of the Lark (1915), the protagonist is a talented artist born in a small frontier town in Colorado, and like Death Comes for the Archbishop, it’s set amid rapid growth and expansion in the American West. My Ántonia (1918), which features immigrant characters making their way on the American prairie, anticipates Death Comes for the Archbishop’s interest in the tension between isolation and belonging and its representation of a character who draws inner strength and self-reflection from the stark, remote landscapes in which one often finds oneself alone. Cather received the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours (1922), a novel that follows a young man from the prairies of Nebraska to the battlefields of World War I. Like Bishop Latour, its protagonist gradually finds his life’s purpose and discovers a deep connection to place and landscape.

Historical Context: New Mexico’s Cultural and Religious History

Death Comes for the Archbishop is set in the newly acquired New Mexico territory. New Mexico has a long and storied history, beginning with its settlement by various Indigenous groups and stretching through several waves of European settler-colonialist expansion. Cather draws on this historical material to help contextualize her narrative and provide an accurate representation of what life was like for both Indigenous and European communities in the territory during both its Spanish and American (US) periods.

The characters of Father Latour and Father Vaillant are based on two historical priests who played key roles in the history of the Catholic Church in New Mexico. Jean-Baptiste Lamy is the basis for Bishop Latour. Like Latour, he was born in the Auvergne region of France. After receiving an education in France, he requested transfer to missionary service and received a post in Ohio. He served in several missions in both Ohio and Kansas before he was appointed by Pope Pius IX to the newly created Apostolic Vicarate of New Mexico.

Like Latour, Lamy arrived in Santa Fe after an arduous journey and was initially told that his authority in the diocese was unrecognized. He worked tirelessly for many years to tend to the needs of Catholics in the region and to reform the church in New Mexico. He conceived of and then oversaw the construction of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi and the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe. He died of pneumonia in 1888 and is buried under the sanctuary in the basilica that was such a large part of his life’s work. The basilica, as well as a statue erected in his memory outside of its front entrance, still stands.

Father Joseph Projectus Machebeuf is the basis for the character of Father Joseph Vaillant. Educated in Europe, Machebeuf traveled to the US to join the Diocese of Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1851, he left to join his friend Father Lamy in New Mexico. Like Vaillant, he was later transferred to Denver and spent many years evangelizing and growing the Catholic Church’s presence in Colorado. He died in 1889 after being named the first Bishop of Denver.

In 1854, the US acquired from Mexico a roughly 30,000-square-mile region of present-day New Mexico and Arizona in the Gadsden Purchase. The purchase, which included land south of the Gila River and west of the Rio Grande, contained the land through which the US wanted to build a transcontinental railway. During the decades leading up to the Gadsden Purchase, the region became increasingly unstable as Indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, and US-based groups vied for control of both land and resources. The purchase enabled the construction of the transcontinental railroad but also brought much change to the newly established territory. Economic development increased; the largely Mexican aristocracy saw an influx of new, white immigrants from other US regions; and suppression of Indigenous nations continued but was now largely perpetrated by the US government rather than foreign countries.

The Gadsden Purchase is one of the events Death Comes for the Archbishop discusses that brought real change to the region, and in Latour’s final days, he notes the presence of the railroad in an area that, upon his arrival, had been the purview of buffalo, horses, and stagecoaches.

Sociohistorical Context: The New Mexico Pueblos and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680

The name Puebloans refers to various Indigenous peoples of the American Southwest who share cultural, spiritual, agricultural, and linguistic histories. The Pueblo people have lived in the Southwest for millennia and established many communities scattered across modern-day Arizona and New Mexico. Once called “Anasazi,” they’re now referred to as Puebloan, and the term “Anasazi” (a Navajo word for “ancient enemy”) is largely seen as offensive.

Pueblo is Spanish for “village” and dates to Spanish colonization of the American Southwest. This society, at the time that Spain invaded, was advanced, and the Spanish encountered complex villages with multistory houses made of adobe and stone. Many of these ancient Pueblos still exist, including Acoma, Laguna, and Isleta, which Fathers Latour and Vaillant visit during their travels throughout the diocese. Spain sought to convert the Puebloans to Catholicism as part of its colonialist and assimilationist project in the region, and the Pueblos became the site of important churches (“missions”). Many of the priests whom Fathers Latour and Vaillant encounter are based on historical figures and reflect what life was like for early European clergy in the region.

Violence and conflict characterized Spain’s colonial and assimilation efforts, and the Indigenous people fiercely contested the church’s presence in the Pueblos. Numerous armed and organized rebellions occurred against what Indigenous communities saw as the church’s tyranny; the Pueblo Rebellion of 1680 was the largest and best known. Death Comes for the Archbishop mentions this rebellion and the undercurrent of violence it represented to European settlers and colonizers in the region and is historically accurate. Several Pueblos in and around Santa Fe organized the rebellion in response to brutality and corruption among area clergy.

Among the practices that the Puebloans objected to were exploitation of Indigenous people, communities, and resources; enslavement; sexual violence against Indigenous women; forced assimilation; and religious conversion. Initially successful, the revolt killed hundreds of Spaniards and drove out those who weren’t killed. Twelve years later, the Spaniards returned and conquered much of the area, though they did not successfully convert all the Indigenous people in the region to Christianity or exert the power of Spain’s church and government, and relations between Spanish colonizers and Indigenous communities remained fraught.