An Enchanted Place - New Mexico

IN October of 1852, a French clergyman saddles up a fine cream-colored mule and rides south out of Santa Fe. As the new Catholic bishop of the territory of New Mexico, he is embarking on his first visit to Indian pueblos.
“His great diocese was still an unimaginable mystery to him,” wrote Willa Cather in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Death Comes for the Archbishop.” “He was eager to be abroad in it, to know his people.”
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.
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. 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.
By the time the travelers approach Ácoma, the third pueblo, they are passing colossal rock mesas, jutting upward 700 feet from the sandy plain. 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.
Today, these three pueblos are connected by freeways. Isleta and Ácoma have their own casinos. But each community still preserves its ancient identity. 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. One warm March day, paperback in hand, I found my way to all three pueblos, grateful for Cather's sensitivity to the great beauty and mystery of the Southwest and for her ability to bring to life the characters who had encountered one another in the same landscape so long ago.
Cather's portrayal of Jean Marie Latour (her fictional name for the real-life bishop, John Baptist Lamy) paints a complicated but very romantic picture of New Mexico in the mid-19th century, just after its annexation to the United States. Despite its fictional embellishments, her book provides a realistic account of the bishop's efforts to replace the lawless and profligate Spanish priests of the territory, his visits to a beloved Navajo chief, his friendship with the Old West explorer Kit Carson and his dream of building a cathedral in Santa Fe.
But it is the trip to the pueblos that reveals the most about the bishop's predicament in the new country, because it imagines how he felt as he first entered the strange world of the Pueblo Indians. In Cather's telling: “When he approached the pueblo of Isleta, gleaming white across a low plain of gray sand, Father Latour's spirits rose. It was beautiful, that warm, rich whiteness of the church and the clustered town. The church and the Isleta houses were made of adobe, whitewashed with a bright gypsum.”
Today the pueblo houses are earth-colored, but the church is still pure white, its surface still regularly refinished. With its plain walls and heavy iron bells, it is an archetype of humble Southwestern style.
The church would have looked a little different in the bishop's day, and even then not as it did when it was first built in 1613. The roof and choir loft of the original building — a simple, long, high-ceilinged sanctuary — were destroyed in 1680, when the Pueblo Indians rebelled against the Franciscan missionaries. Rebuilt on the same walls in 1716, the church was given two wooden bell towers, now gone, which the bishop would have seen.