Following Fact and Fiction Into a Colonial City

IN the late summer of 1880, Susan and Oliver Ward traveled by steamship to Veracruz, Mexico. They then boarded a train and finally a stagecoach, heading 450 miles inland to the state of Michoacán. Along the way, the couple passed through towns and cities that had been built soon after the Spanish conquest — with tiled domes, terraced roofs and bell towers that looked as if they might have been exported whole from Seville.

To Susan, a writer and illustrator who had been living, not so happily, in mining settlements of American West, Mexico looked “like something rubbed up out of a lamp, as different from the false fronts, cowhide boots, flapping vests and harsh disappointments of Leadville as anything could possibly have been.”

“Oh!” she told her husband on the night they finally arrived at the Hotel Michoacán, “I have never been anywhere till now!”

The scene is from “Angle of Repose,” Wallace Stegner’s masterpiece, which is set mostly in American mining towns and on the banks of Idaho’s Boise River. Mainly, the novel — winner of the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for fiction — is an epic tale of frontier life, the story of a long marriage, challenged by disappointment and lost hope and wounded by betrayal and compromise.

But halfway through, in one thin chapter in the very center, Mr. Stegner offers this sunny interlude in Mexico, where Oliver Ward, an engineer, has been sent to inspect an old silver mine. Susan Ward makes the most of the trip — and treasures its memory the rest of her life. “Mexico,” she tells her grandson decades later, “was my Paris and my Rome.”

Paris and Rome: not usually what Americans imagine when they think of Mexico. Yet Susan’s impressions are as sharply detailed as a photograph.

That is in part because Mr. Stegner did not entirely make them up. His Susan Burling Ward was closely modeled after a real American writer and illustrator, Mary Hallock Foote, also married to a mining engineer, who published her impressions of traveling to Michoacán in 1881. Mr. Stegner unabashedly borrowed Mrs. Foote’s experiences and impressions — but rendered them in his own artful prose and placed them in the context of the Wards’ complicated marriage.

The result is a travelogue so romantic and full of enthusiasm, it recommends a trip to Mexico’s colonial interior. This past spring, using both “Angle of Repose” and Mary Foote’s reminiscences as a guide, I traveled in the 19th-century women’s footsteps.

I had seen other parts of Mexico that Americans more often see: the beach towns of the west coast and Baha, teeming Mexico City, even a few of the better-known colonial cities like San Miguel de Allende and Guanajuato. But I had never heard of Morelia — the little stone capital of Michoacán, high in a mountain valley — or known anyone who had traveled there.

Passenger trains no longer run from Veracruz to Mexico City, but I and my 16-year-old son (and translator) found a luxurious alternative in the form of the UNO bus line. The five-and-a-half-hour journey lifts you from sea level to Mexico City (7,300 feet) on a road that provides, as Susan Ward’s train window must have provided her, a leisurely look at the snowcapped Pico de Orizaba, Mexico’s highest mountain.

The Wards’ stagecoach gave Susan ample chance to observe and sketch the architecture and the people. “She had a heart as well as an eye,” Mr. Stegner wrote, “and they were sometimes at war. Patient Indian women with their babies slung in rebozos, men bowed under their burdens, looked to her like people waiting for their souls. A cathedral rising out of a huddle of huts ... made her ashamed of the delight she took in a picturesqueness created out of so much driven human labor.”

Susan notices, and admires, every detail. “Even the way an Indian woman hands you a tortilla on her flat palm is like a movement in a dance,” she tells her husband.

Our taxi from the bus station, like the Wards’ coach, took us past Morelia’s forested city park, alongside the soaring antique aqueduct and into the stone-paved city center. There, we settled into the Hotel de la Soledad, a 250-year-old Spanish inn made of the same pink stone used in all the streets and buildings of Morelia. And in the morning, I went in search of Casa Walkenhorst (Casa Gravenhorst in Mrs. Foote’s account), the great house in the center of the city where Susan was a guest for all but the first night of her stay in Morelia.

Neither description of the trip, fiction nor nonfiction, identifies the house, except to say that the couple’s bedroom looked down on the Plaza of the Martyrs, Morelia’s central square. I could see only one structure, now offices, that might have been the house — fronted by a row of nine arches. The double doors to the courtyard were open that morning, so I could see the half-dozen shiny cars parked inside.