New Mexico is more than the destination to which Lizzy Enders is sent: it is the unsettled frontier whose dangers, religious traditions, and competing explanations of the miraculous give the novel its distinctive pressure. From the threat of Confederate invasion to the carpenter whose work becomes a local wonder, the territory tests Lizzy’s distrust without requiring her to surrender it.

Frontier Geography and Wartime Uncertainty

New Mexico appears first as a place exposed to the consequences of the American Civil War. Violate Lacey recalls living with her family at Fort Filmore in New Mexico Territory, where they feared that Confederate forces might invade from Texas. Their fears extended beyond the territory itself: they imagined the Confederates capturing New Mexico, taking the Colorado mines, and reaching southern California. The account places the region within a broad, unstable landscape of military anxiety, rather than presenting it as a remote setting untouched by national conflict.

The territory’s dangers are also personal and material. In the author’s framing, Lizzy is a thirteen-year-old arriving from the comparatively settled small-town world of Independence, Missouri, after her mother’s death and her father’s departure. New Mexico is described as an unforgiving landscape in which a bereaved child is displaced and left to make sense of a place she did not choose. That contrast gives the setting emotional force: the distance from home is not merely geographic but part of Lizzy’s experience of abandonment.

Santa Fe, Religion, and Cultural Mixture

The novel’s New Mexico is concentrated especially in Santa Fe and the convent where Lizzy lives. In the author’s note, Santa Fe and the wider territory are associated with the words spiritual and mysterious, and with a mixture of Indigenous, Mexican, and Catholic beliefs and culture. These traditions form the setting for a story in which visions, miracles, and local lore are taken seriously by some characters, while Lizzy approaches them with caution.

That tension is made concrete through the religious life surrounding the chapel. The nuns pray a novena to Saint Joseph over the problem of the missing staircase, while the bishop also says he has prayed and acknowledges that the community expects him to perform miracles he cannot perform. His practical response is to give a hungry carpenter the chance to inspect the problem. In this scene, New Mexico’s religious atmosphere does not exclude ordinary need or work: prayer, uncertainty, hunger, and a building’s unfinished requirements meet in the same decision.

The author’s note also connects the novel’s chapel to the history behind its legend. It describes the Chapel of Loretto as completed in 1878 without a way to reach its choir loft, and says that the Sisters of Loretto, brought from Kentucky to Santa Fe in 1852 by Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy, ran the Academy of Our Lady of Light attached to the chapel. The historical account reports that builders and architects considered a conventional staircase too space-consuming, while rebuilding the loft would have been costly and a ladder was another proposed solution. This background locates the story’s supernatural question in a specific architectural predicament.

The Staircase and Competing Explanations

Within the novel’s Santa Fe, the staircase becomes a focal point for communal interpretation. When the carpenter’s work is discovered complete, the girls and nuns gather at the back of the church and look up at a polished, circular staircase rising to the choir loft. Its thirty-three carefully finished steps make the result tangible before anyone explains it. Mother Magdalena then declares that the carpenter must have been Saint Joseph, and the nuns kneel to pray.

Lizzy does not accept that conclusion. She knows the carpenter as a person who spoke with her, listened to her troubles, held her kitten, and advised her about her father. She remembers, too, that he had been hurt by the girls’ rejection and sad at leaving his own family. Those recollections make the saintly explanation difficult for her to accept, even as the nuns’ response shows how readily the completed staircase can enter the region’s religious imagination. The author’s note preserves rather than settles the uncertainty: it says that Lizzy must retain a small opening for belief because the carpenter held a blind cat that was no longer blind, while leaving the question of the historical staircase-builder’s identity to the reader.

Lizzy’s Experience and the Meaning of Place

New Mexico shapes Lizzy through contrasts rather than through a single conversion. She enters the convent as a Protestant outsider in a Catholic household, grieving her mother and hurt by her father’s absence. The author characterizes her as wary of Catholic mysteries and inclined to take miracles in small doses. In this setting, her skepticism is not simply an abstract disagreement about doctrine; it is part of how a young person protects herself after loss and displacement.

The author also identifies people, rather than supernatural certainty, as the miracles Lizzy can recognize: Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy, Sister Roberta, and, eventually, Elinora. Most important is the possibility that her father will want her again. New Mexico therefore holds both the frightening distance from the life she lost and the relationships that make a new life imaginable. Lizzy eventually leaves the convent for Texas, not by way of the railroad tracks that have reached the plains to within sixty-five miles of Santa Fe, but as part of an arranged wagon journey. Her departure does not resolve whether she has encountered Saint Joseph. It leaves the territory’s central mystery open while showing that, for Lizzy, human care can be meaningful even where belief remains unsettled.