Austin, Mary Hunter (1868-1934). American author and critic. Born in Carlinville, IL, Mary Hunter received a BS from Blackburn College in 1888, the same year she moved with her mother and siblings to California’s San Joaquin Valley. In 1891 she married Stafford Wallace Austin. In 1903, they separated (they divorced in 1915) and her collection of California desert stories, The Land of Little Rain, appeared. Between 1903 and 1924, Austin spent periods of time in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City; London, England; and Carmel, CA; however, most of her literary output continued to focus on the deserts of California and the Southwest. Cather may have met Austin as early as 1910, and Austin’s poetry appeared in McClure’s Magazine in 1911 and 1912. In February 1919 Austin wrote Ferris Greenslet of Houghton Mifflin, their mutual publisher, praising My Ántonia (1918) and asking for additional information and materials to write an appreciation of Cather for El Palacio, a magazine published in Santa Fe, NM; her essay appeared in 1920. When Cather and Edith Lewis travelled to the Southwest in 1925, they saw Austin in New Mexico, where she had built Casa Querida in Santa Fe in 1924. When Cather returned in 1926 to continue research and writing of Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Austin offered her the use of her empty house to work in. Cather inscribed a copy of Archbishop “For Mary Austin, in whose lovely study I wrote the last chapters of this book,” but she began denying that she had written any part of the novel in Casa Querida after Austin published Earth Horizon (1932), in which she called Cather’s celebration of French missionary priests a “calamity” for Southwestern culture. Austin died at home two years later.

Applegate, Frank G. (1881-1931) American author, painter, potter, woodcarver, and preservationist. Born in Atlanta, IL, Frank Applegate trained as an architect at the University of Illinois and as a painter at the Académie Julian in Paris, France. He resigned a teaching position at the School of Industrial Arts in Trenton, NJ, to live and work in Santa Fe, NM, where he resided from 1921 until his death. He advocated for the value of local art forms and culture, including Indian crafts and Penitente carvings, and for the preservation of historic structures. As a painter, he recorded Pueblo Indian life and affiliated himself with Los Cinto Pintores and the New Mexico Painters Society. It is possible that Cather met Applegate during one of her trips to Santa Fe, and Mary Austin wrote her concerning the fate of his collection when he died.