Where It All Goes Down
New Mexico (Around 1850)
Willa Cather devotes quite a lot of this book to describing the setting of New Mexico. From the moment Father Latour arrives there, we get the sense that this is not an easy place to live for newbies. Only the Native Americans and Mexicans know what it takes to thrive in such a harsh environment. The first time Latour ever sets out on his own, he gets lost because he can't distinguish certain parts of the landscape from others. As the narrator tells us:
The difficulty was that the country in which he found himself was so featureless—or rather, that it was crowded with features, all exactly alike. (1.1.1)
And in case we don't get the point about how brutal the New Mexico desert can be, Cather takes every opportunity to remind us. These descriptions almost always come through the eyes of Father Latour, who thinks of New Mexico:
… like a country of dry ashes; no juniper, no rabbit brush, nothing but thickets of withered, dead-looking cactus, and patches of wild pumpkin—the only vegetation that had any vitality. (3.2.1)
The harshness of the setting just goes to reinforce this novel's central themes about how hard it will be for Latour to make something new (like Catholicism) grow in this strange new place.
But eventually, Latour succumbs to the sheer beauty of New Mexico's landscape and realizes that it feels like home.
This setting didn't come out of nowhere, by the way. Cather spent some time hanging out in New Mexico, and was bowled over by its history and beauty.
''The longer I stayed in the Southwest,'' she wrote in a letter after the novel appeared, ''the more I felt that the story of the Catholic Church in that country was the most interesting of all its stories. The old mission churches, even those which were abandoned and in ruins, had a moving reality about them; the handcarved beams and joists, the utterly unconventional frescoes, the countless fanciful figures of the saints, no two of them alike, seemed a direct expression of some very real and lively human feeling.'' (Source.)