“The sun had set now, the yellow rocks were turning
grey, down in the pueblo the light of the cook fires made red
patches of the glassless windows, and the smell of pinon smoke came
softly through the still air. The whole western sky was the color
of golden ashes….”
— Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
(1927)
The Santa Fe-Taos region of New Mexico is an upscale
enclave and playground for celebrities. It’s one of the more scenic
parts of the “Land of Enchantment,” and is the epicenter of the
history of the Southwest. The 400-year-old “Palace of the
Governors” is still a tourist attraction. But other than the
Hispanic tradition, scenery, and great weather (300 days of
sunshine per year), it epitomizes the artistic culture of the
Southwest, from its “Santa Fe style” earth-tone adobe architecture
to its renowned Native American silver and turquoise jewelry
work.
Santa Fe was founded in 1608 (Spain’s colony started
within a year of both Jamestown and Quebec, interestingly enough),
New Mexico being Old Mexico’s northernmost province. It was also
the land of the pueblos, those ancient Indian communities so
interesting in their cultural and archeological aspects. The
Mexican War (1846-48) ceded the Southwest to the United
States.
In the late 19th century the place began to attract
artists, writers and assorted eccentric bohemians.
Nineteen-seventeen saw the arrival of Mabel Dodge, a New York
socialite and radical-chic arts patron (and linked to such writers
as Max Eastman, Walter Lippmann and John Reed), who married an
Indian named Tony Luhan. Word spread among her circle in New York
about New Mexico’s landscape and quality of light, so interesting
to painters. Both Santa Fe and nearby Taos soon had thriving arts
colonies.
At Mabel Dodge Luhan’s behest, D.H. Lawrence and his wife
Frieda arrived in 1922. They stayed for two years, eventually
buying a ranch near Taos (now owned by the University of New Mexico
and where the English writer’s ashes are buried), using it as a
base for more extensive travels in Mexico, resulting in the novel
The Plumed Serpent (1926) and the travel book Mornings
in Mexico (1927). These wanderings also brought on the
tuberculosis that killed Lawrence in 1930. Today a memorial
attracts scholars and aficionados to the “D.H. Lawrence
Ranch”.
Another New Mexico habitué was Willa Cather. She had first
visited the region in 1912, and spent much of 1925-‘26 in residence
at Santa Fe’s La Fonda Hotel, researching and writing Death
Comes for the Archbishop, considered by many critics her
finest novel. Her archbishop is Jean Marie Latour, based on the
real-life Jean Baptiste Lamy (1814-1888). Lamy was a noteworthy
figure in Southwestern history. He built Santa Fe’s first hospital
and the cathedral that is one of the city’s prominent landmarks.
The archbishop was a close friend of Kit Carson and his family, who
were his parishioners.
California author and Jack London confidante Mary Austin
moved to Santa Fe in 1924, living there the last decade of her
life. She was famous for The Land of Little Rain (1903) a
work California natural history. While in New Mexico she published
— among other things — The Land of Journey’s Ending
(1924), a book of Southwest travel sketches focusing on Native
American culture. She also helped found Santa Fe’s Community
Theater. We find her chronicled in Oliver LaFarge’s Santa
Fe (1959), as a woman with “…that mark of distinction which
make her a fine interpreter of the Indian spirit and so great a
writer.”
Santa Fe is a chronological
collection of news items and fragments gleaned from Santa Fe’s
newspaper, the New Mexican, where LaFarge — author of a
score of books —was a columnist. The entries date back to the
paper’s founding in 1849 and cover a century of Santa Fe history.
LaFarge also wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning Laughing Boy
(1929), a novel of Navajo life and the first book to treat American
Indians as a serious subject for fiction.
Paul Horgan lived most of his life in Albuquerque, setting
his best novel A Distant Trumpet (1951) on an army post in
19th century New Mexico. Author of 37 books, Horgan set a number of
his novels in Santa Fe. He’s was also a two-time Pulitzer Prize
winner, being the author of the two volume Great River: The Rio
Grande in North American History (1954), a history of the
region as drained by the Rio Grande. His second Pulitzer was for
the biography Lamy of Santa Fe (1975). Horgan can be
compared to another prolific Westerner, Wallace Stegner, in that he
excelled in both fiction and nonfiction.
Georgia O’Keefe first visited in 1929, and finding Santa
Fe too culturally busy, took up residence on part of the legendary
“Ghost Ranch” near Abiquiu in 1940. Here she painted the strange
landscapes, portraits and self-portraits that made her famous
through a life lasting almost a century. Besides O’Keefe, scores of
painters are associated with Santa Fe and Taos, notably Thomas
Moran, Edward Borein and Joseph Henry Sharp.
Photographers loomed large, as the New Mexico landscape
and its fascinating light beckoned. It was even promising at night,
as Ansel Adams proved with his iconic photograph “Moonrise,
Hernandez, New Mexico” (1941), with its moonlight illuminating the
white crosses in a rural church cemetery. It’s all there in one
picture: So much history; so much art; so much New
Mexico.
