Word: bishop
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...archbishop of the title, whom Cather called Jean Marie Latour, was the quixotic Jean Baptiste Lamy, first Bishop of Santa Fe. His affable Sancho Panza, Joseph Vaillant in the novel, was Joseph Machebeuf, later Bishop of Denver. After decades of research, Paul Horgan, novelist and Pulitzer-prizewinning historian (Great River), has attempted to separate the fictive from the actual. His triumph is due as much to a sense of place as to discernment of character. In his account, the shimmering, arid plateaus and the indomitable Gallic spirit are as palpable as they were in the novel-and as compelling...
...There is properly no history," wrote Emerson, "only biography." To reconstruct the New Mexican frontier of the 1860s, Horgan concentrates on Lamy. In the novel, the bishop experienced a constant inner joy: "He always awoke a young man ... One could breathe that [air] only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sagebrush desert." Horgan testifies to Lamy's love of Western saddle life, but concedes a sadder truth: "If he had any capacity to express exalted feeling, he left no record...
...Apaches and Navajos, he viewed the tribesmen as murderous savages. When his own wagon train was attacked at an Arkansas River crossing in 1867, he and the caravan's military leader shared command in the kind of seven-hour battle beloved by Western film makers. Throughout, the bishop conscientiously joined in the rifle fire...
...were simply invaders in different uniforms. When Lamy suspended Padre Gallegos of Albuquerque for insubordination, the popular priest stood for election to the U.S. Congress. There he ceaselessly pilloried his enemy. Padre Martinez, a pastor who ruled Taos like a prairie king, refused to be tithed by the new bishop. After an agonized power struggle, Lamy excommunicated his adversary in 1857. Martinez, recalcitrant to the end, gathered a loyal band of followers who stayed with him till he died...
...episodes: his long, detailed accounts of the journeys over trackless desert and plateau develop a hypnotic rhythm of their own. Even minor ecclesiastical skirmishes are brilliantly employed-Lamy's exasperation with Vatican bureaucracy simultaneously reveals his ego and his humility: "The Roman piano, piano does not suit the bishop of the Navajos...