Cathers's extraordinary and unusual historical novel set in the Southwest

Today we would call Willa Cathers's Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) a book of "linked stories," as the novel is a series of adventures and encounters experienced by the Jean Latour - from his time as a young man in southern France, his posting as a missionary priest in Ohio (ca 1840) and then Santa Fe, his rise through the church hierarchy to the rank of Archbishop, his retirement and death. It's a work of historical fiction; I'm pretty sure Letour and his lifelong close friend, colleague, and alter ego, Father/Bishop Jean Vaillant are fictional, but many of the incidents, locations, and secondary characters (e.g., Kit Carson) are real and in fact you can visit the sites of many of the events in this novel today, and they are relatively unchanged (e.g., the Santa Fe cathedral, the Acomo pueblo, Canyon de Chelly), but this novel never feels like the product of research and scholarship. The characters are as alive and "rounded" as any in 20th-century literature; they grow and evolve over the course of the novel to the point where, at the end of his life, the final section of the novel, Latour reflects on his life,his successes and failures, and we feel a strange mixture of sympathy and sorrow about his life. Cather vividly portrays the hardships of the life of a missionary priest, particularly in the Southwest with the clash of multiple cultures: A young French Catholic priest sent to establish the Roman Catholic church in a territory rife with violent cultural, historical, and relgious clashes and conflict: American settlers, Mexican/Spanish control (the territory had just been annexed/purchased from Mexico), Native American (tribes that were fighting among themselves, Navajo v Hopi for example). Travel and communication with the home base in Europe was slow, dangerous, sometimes impossible. Yet these priests - each in his own way, and the 2 were opposites in some ways - gave up his entire life to establishing the church on such hostile ground. You have to admire their faith, bravery, and commitment - yet there are points in the novel where we can judge the missionaries harshly, for example when Father Latour helps a young woman who is being kept more or less as a slave for a wealthy family in Santa Fe: he gives her some blankets, but he does nothing to confront the family that is abusing her, as they're too powerful and he fears the hostility of the Protestant community. Should he spend less time planning the building of a cathedral, which will be his memorial, and more helping the poor and oppressed in his community and care? We think about this the whole way through this unusual novel, a novel of the most unlikely heroes and the most extraordinary episodes and anecdotes, many it would seem based on actual accounts of the early days of the Catholic church in North America.