Willa Cather is best known for her novels about pioneering the Great Plains, but she was also one of the first female writers to describe the Southwest. She became inspired by a transformative trip to Arizona and to Mesa Verde, and she reshaped Western writing and helped create Southwestern literature.
Authorized with the stroke of a pen by Theodore Roosevelt in June 1906, Mesa Verde National Park influenced many creative people. Pioneer archaeologist Jesse Fewkes had the first National Park Service museum there. Superintendent Jesse Nussbaum helped design stone buildings in the park’s main area, now its own National Register District.
In the winters, Nussbaum built Southwestern furniture in Santa Fe, where he recommended the city’s distinctive Santa Fe style of flat roofs, projecting vigas and rooms with corner fireplaces. Designer and architect Mary Colter was inspired by Ancestral Puebloan towers at Mesa Verde and later designed The Watchtower on the Grand Canyon’s South Rim.
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Willa Cather’s impact was different. She toured Mesa Verde and soaked up the stillness and the profound antiquity of the sites first named by the Wetherill brothers, early guides to the area when it was still Ute Indian land. She learned the oft-told tale of how Richard Wetherill and Charlie Mason, looking for lost cows as it began to snow on a December day “discovered” Cliff Palace, though the Ute elder Acowitz had told them of the impressive ruins long before.
Still, the discovery of what postcards would call “an ancient city of the silent dead,” intrigued Cather, who knew she had to write about it, knew she had to fictionalize the story, and she did. In the process, she reshaped writing about the West, which had almost exclusively been about gunslingers, lovesick cowboys, lost cows and conflict on the range.
The quintessential Western novel had been Owen Wister’s “The Virginian” (1902) with its famous walk-down, or gunfight, on a town’s main street. The Virginian, a good guy though he may have worn a black hat, outdraws his adversary and restores peace to the wild frontier. Most stories about the West had been cheap dime novels, stories about Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson and the drinking, gambling Earp brothers with their shootout at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona.
Cather was captivated by the Ancient Ones. Early on, she eschewed the hustle and bustle of the cattle towns, though they provided valuable markets for the Nebraska prairie farmers she would write about in “O Pioneers!” (1913) and immortalize in her book “My Antonia” (1918), which earned the Pulitzer Prize. Yet in addition to writing about pioneer experiences, she visited Mesa Verde. Less than a decade after Mesa Verde had been declared a national park, Cather published “The Song of the Lark” (1915), about a fictional Swedish American opera singer Thea Kronberg, who sought rest in a remote place.
Cather’s inspiration for “The Song of the Lark” came from Walnut Canyon National Monument, which she visited after arriving in Flagstaff, Arizona, in spring 1912. Not her strongest book, “The Song of the Lark” still displays Cather’s literary skills and descriptive style. She revels in describing an Ancestral Puebloan village in one of the first such accounts in American literature. Kronberg finds an ancient site and carefully explores it. Cather writes:
From the ancient dwelling there came always a dignified, unobtrusive sadness; now stronger, now fainter – like the aromatic smell which the dwarf cedars gave out in the sun – but always present, a part of the air one breathed. At night, when Thea dreamed about the canyon – or in the early morning when she hurried toward it, anticipating it – her conception of it was of yellow rocks baking in sunlight, the swallows, the cedar smell, and that peculiar sadness – a voice out of the past, not very loud ...
Cather, a Nebraskan, was deeply moved by Ancestral Puebloan builders and inhabitants. She reflects that emotional response in describing her fictional character Kronberg:
She found herself trying to walk as they must have walked, with a feeling in her feet and knees and loins, which she had never known before – which must have come up to her out of the accustomed dust of that rocky trail. She could feel the weight of an Indian baby hanging to her back as she climbed. The empty houses, among which she wandered in the afternoon, the blanketed one in which she lay all morning, were haunted by certain fears and desires; feelings about warmth and cold and water and physical strength.
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Cather’s train trip to the Southwest changed her life, and she, in turn, influenced Western literature.
The trip “began a love affair with ancient cliff dwellings and the desert,” wrote Mark Athitakis in Humanities. Cather arrived in Arizona after a busy six years during which she had risen to managing editor of McClure’s magazine, “a rare accomplishment for a woman in journalism at the time.”
Living in Greenwich Village in New York City, she became overwhelmed by the contrast of the vivid air and striking Southwestern light. “I long to tell you about wonderful Arizona,” Cather wrote a friend quoting novelist Honore de Balzac. “I really learned ... In the desert there is everything and nothing – God without mankind.”
In summer 1915, Cather spent a week at Mesa Verde where according to Athitakis, “she was again struck by the union of past and ancient civilizations, nature, and culture.” Cather’s Mesa Verde trip prompted her to write about the national park and also to help promote her new book, “The Song of the Lark.” In a short essay, she described how the park’s ruins “stood as if (they) had been deserted yesterday; undisturbed and undesecrated, preserved by the dry atmosphere and its great inaccessibility.”
“The Song of the Lark” was published on Oct. 2, 1915. A New York Post reviewer noted that “the cowpuncher’s experience of the West was not the only experience possible there.” A decade later, she published “The Professor’s House” (1925) with its lengthy fictional account of the Wetherill discovery. Instead of Richard Wetherill, the character is Tom Outland. He climbs up out of a canyon, which would have been Mancos Canyon, and he sees Cliff Palace for the first time. Cather writes:
Such silence and stillness and repose – immortal repose. That village sat looking down into the canyon with the calmness of eternity. The falling snowflakes, sprinkling the piñons, gave it a special kind of solemnity. I can’t describe it. It was more like sculpture than anything else. I knew at once that I had come upon the city of some extinct civilization, hidden away in this inaccessible mesa for centuries, preserved in the dry air and almost perpetual sunlight like a fly in amber, guarded by the cliffs and the river and the desert.
Like others of her generation, Cather falsely believed that Ancestral Puebloans had gone extinct, when in fact they had continued their migrations toward the upper Rio Grande Valley and the high mesas of Acoma, Hopi and Zuni. Their descendant communities thrive today.
Willa Cather worked in New York City. She would go on to write about New Mexico in “Death Comes for the Archbishop” (1927). Though she lived back East, a part of her heart always stayed with Southwestern cliff dwellings and their sunlit, narrow ledges. Her writing helped to define the Southwest as an inspiration for other writers, artists and travelers eager to see what she had seen, and eager to soak in some of that sandstone silence.
Andrew Gulliford is an award-winning author and editor and a professor of history at Fort Lewis College. Reach him at gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu.
