![]() Both are decent, honorable men, and they tend to their duties with compassion and the hope of building a better future for their flock. One part character study, one part travelogue, one part history, and one part anthropology, Death Comes For the Archbishop unspools through a series of vignettes over the course of forty years in the lives of its protagonists, Bishop Jean Marie Latour and his life-long friend Father Joseph Vaillant. In a letter (helpfully included in the version of the book I read, along with useful footnotes translating the smattering of French and Latin) Cather describes the book as a narrative, rather than a novel. Closely based on historical figures, Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather tells a fictionalized account of two French priests sent to bring the far-flung and neglected territory back under the umbrella of Catholic orthodoxy. ![]() Subsequently, the Catholic Church decided to make a new diocese out of this new slice of rugged frontier America, populated for generations by Mexican settlers and many, many more generations by the local American Indian tribes. In the 1850s, America gained control of New Mexico Territory following the Mexican-American War. ![]()
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