Willa Cather · 1927 · overland

Willa Cather's 1927 novel, from the real lives of Archbishop Lamy and his vicar Machebeuf. A young French priest is sent from Ohio to a New Mexico vicarate the size of France, takes a year to reach Santa Fe, is refused by the clergy there, and rides three thousand miles to Durango and back for a piece of paper. Then the work begins.

1. 1
   Rome

   The prologue: three cardinals and a missionary bishop at dinner in a villa above the city in 1848, deciding who to send to a vicarate the size of France that has just become American - and settling on a young Frenchman from Ohio.

2. 2
   Cincinnati

   The end of the railway line west, where Jean Marie Latour and his boyhood friend Joseph Vaillant set out - and it will take them a full year to reach Santa Fe, by riverboat to the Gulf and then overland.

3. 3
   New Orleans

   Down the Mississippi and out to the Gulf, and a shipwreck at Galveston in which Latour loses everything he owns - the first of the trials Cather narrates without any of the machinery of a plot.

4. 4
   San Antonio

   Overland across Texas by wagon, and a broken leg when the wagon goes over - which costs him three months in bed at San Antonio and is described in one sentence.

5. 5
   Santa Fe

   He arrives at last and the Mexican clergy will not accept him, having had no notification - so having travelled a year to get there, he leaves again within weeks.

6. 6
   Durango

   Three thousand miles alone on horseback to the Bishop of Durango for the documents that define his vicarate, because there is no post - and on the way back he gets lost and nearly dies of thirst before his mare finds water.

7. 7
   Santa Fe

   Home to find Vaillant has won the town over in his absence - and a bell dated 1356 found in the basement of San Miguel, ringing the Angelus over New Mexico in a Moorish note nobody there can account for.

8. 8
   Albuquerque

   Padre Gallegos, who behaves more like a professional gambler than a priest and is popular for it - and whom Latour replaces with Vaillant, which is the first real exercise of the authority he crossed a continent for.

9. 9
   Acoma

   The sky city on its mesa, where a church was built with beams carried forty miles and hauled up a cliff - and where Latour says mass for people whose belief he cannot reach, and understands that he will never entirely reach it.

10. 10
    Taos

    Padre Martinez, who keeps a household, fathers children openly and led the 1847 revolt - the antagonist the book takes most seriously, because he is right that the Church is being imposed from outside.

11. 11
    Denver

    Vaillant is sent north to the Colorado gold camps and the two friends part for the last time - Latour giving him a wagon and watching him go, which Cather makes the emotional centre of the whole novel.

12. 12
    Santa Fe

    The cathedral of yellow sandstone finished at last, and an old archbishop who chooses to die in New Mexico rather than in France - lying in the adobe room listening to the bell, remembering everything at once.