joins Father Martinez's new church (Martinez dies an apostate while Lucero receives absolution from Vaillant after repenting near death). Cather portrays the aboriginal people of the Pueblos, the Hopi and the Navajo sympathetically, including a discussion of the Long Walk of the Navajo (mentioned as a reminiscence of the dying Latour of his Navajo friend Eusabio and the Navajo leader Manuelito). Latour reflects that the removal of the Navajos was a wrong comparable to "black slavery," and the narrator describes Kit Carson's actions with the Navajo as "misguided" and "a soldier's brutal work." Cather's characters express the near futility of overlaying their religion on a millennia-old native culture. For example, while caught in a snowstorm with his native guide Jacinto (who dwells in the Pecos Pueblo, which in reality was already deserted by the time of Lamy), Latour and Jacinto are forced to spend the night in a cave sacred to Jacinto's people. Latour initially finds a disagreeable smell, and the unexplained actions of Jacinto with regard to the place make him uneasy. Historical background The novel is based on the life of Jean-Baptiste Lamy (1814-1888), and partially chronicles the construction of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. The capture of the Southwest by the United States in the Mexican–American War is the catalyst for the plot. "The Padre of Isleta", Anton Docher is identified as the character of Padre de Baca. Among the entities mentioned in the novel are Los Penitentes, a flagellant lay confraternity in Southern Colorado and New Mexico that still operates today. Significance and criticism The novel was reprinted in the Modern Library series in 1931. It was included in Life Magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924–1944. It was also included on Time 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005 and Modern Library's list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century and was chosen by the Western Writers of America to be the 7th-best "Western Novel" of the 20th century. James Paul Old of Valparaiso University uses Death Comes for the Archbishop as a literary example of the notion that religious faith is able to develop and maintain strong social bonds in nascent democratic political orders. He argues that even though Cather's early novels, such as My Ántonia, typically represent religious characters as closed-minded, her personal religious realignment at the time allowed her to alter her perspective