Eighty years after Cather's novel was published and more than 150 since the events she recounted, it is possible to use her narration as a visitor's guide. But each community still preserves its ancient identity. Today, these three pueblos are connected by freeways. These formations look so bizarre to the bishop as to seem not part of nature at all, but rather like “vast cathedrals” or the remnants of a monumental city. Clumps of wild pumpkin look “less like a plant than like a great colony of gray-green lizards, moving and suddenly arrested by fear.” What seems at first to be bright waves of sand turn out to be petrified rock, “yellow as ochre” and dotted with ancient juniper trees.īy the time the travelers approach Ácoma, the third pueblo, they are passing colossal rock mesas, jutting upward 700 feet from the sandy plain.

The scenery turns strange, though, as he rides west with his young Indian guide to Laguna Pueblo, and he begins not to believe his own eyes. Isleta Pueblo, 13 miles south of Albuquerque, looks almost familiar to the bishop, with its startlingly white church, its clustered town and its acacia trees of the same blue-green color he knew in the south of France.

“His great diocese was still an unimaginable mystery to him,” wrote Willa Cather in her novel “Death Comes for the Archbishop.” “He was eager to be abroad in it, to know his people.” As the new Catholic bishop of the territory of New Mexico, he is embarking on his first visit to Indian pueblos. IN October of 1852, a French clergyman saddles up a fine cream-colored mule and rides south out of Santa Fe.

Death comes for the archbishop