Death Comes for the Archbishop may be Cather's best work

Now I'm (re)reading Willa Cathers's 1927 novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, which is not really typical of her work but in some ways it could be her best novel. In this novel - about the attempts of the Catholic church in the early 19th century to bring to the Southwest, in particular the newly annexed New Mexico territory, the gospel - Cather gives some of her most beautiful writing (particularly accounts of the SW landscape and the ever-changing, dramatic weather), vivid development of character (notably the two central figures, Bishop Jean LaTour and his best friend and counterpart, Father Joseph Vaillant, but also many colorful and credible secondary characters), smart historical writing that never feels bookish or "quaint," and a series of terrific and sometimes terrifying adventure tales of survival, frontier justice, and life in a remote, almost primitive era. The novel - I'm about half-way through - consists of a series of sketches that could be read independently but work together to build for us a true sense of time and place and and of the people in the SW and their 3 cultures: Catholic (French, in this case), Spanish (Mexicans, suddenly finding themselves part of the U.S., Native American (the various pueblos in and around Santa Fe), and possibly even a 4th culture of westward-moving Americans on the frontier (Kit Carson, the famous scout, makes a few appearances). The adventures alone, though, make the novel truly engaging - notably the night the Bishop, seeking shelter from a blizzard, spent in a cave the Pecos tribe used for rituals (possibly snake worship, strange and spooky); the recollection of a Native uprising against the domain of a brutal and selfish priest, who gets tossed from the cliffs of the famous Acoma pueblo (a place fully worth a visit today, I can attest). The commitment and the faith of the two churchmen is moving, even to religious skeptics of today, and as we read deeper into this (relatively short) novel we see not only the dangers that they braved but the subtleties of church politics and the hardship of life - with no regular, easy means of communication across great distances - in early 1800s. We tend to think of Cather, at least early in her career, as a chronicle of life on the Prairie, and she's wrongly viewed sometimes as provincial and sentimental; this novel belies those presumptions and shows a side of Cather's vision not always recognized.