God's Hand on America

God's Hand on America

Chapter 1

The Message in the Mountainside

“His Sign, His Seal, His Promise”

Wonders, legends, and mysteries spurred American adventurers of every era to explore dark, remote corners of their continent. On rare occasions, miraculous rumors turned out to be true, shaping the young nation’s mystical sense of itself.

Such discoveries became especially important after the devastation of the Civil War, reassuring the weary populace that America maintained its special place in God’s master plan. Then, as now, a bitterly divided nation, plagued by recent bloodshed and polarizing politics, longed for some unequivocal sign that providential protection still applied to this once favored land.

“Nature Itself Had Spoken”

As early as the 1840s, explorers in the Rocky Mountains heard persistent reports of one such sign—a colossal cross of snow that appeared for a few months each year on the flank of an uncharted Colorado peak. Indians, prospectors, and mountain men spoke in awe of this gleaming vision produced by the late spring thaw on a sheer rock cliff, largely obscured by surrounding pinnacles that equaled or exceeded its commanding height. According to breathless accounts, the magical sight disappeared whenever wanderers approached too close to its sparkling magnificence.

The first credible sighting of this elusive marvel came from a Massachusetts newspaperman who ventured west in an effort to restore his failing health. In August 1868, Samuel Bowles, the respected abolitionist editor of the Springfield Republican and a close friend of the poet Emily Dickinson, set out to tour the sparsely settled Colorado Territory. Like other true believers in the sacred Union cause, he couldn’t shake his postwar funk following the wrenching tragedy of Lincoln’s assassination and the chaotic, disappointing steps toward racial justice and Reconstruction.

In the Rockies, Bowles hoped to rediscover his sense of wonder by climbing to the forbidding, fourteen-thousand-foot summit of Grays Peak. With two companions and a single pack mule, he ascended fifteen miles and camped overnight in the brisk, starry mountain air before the next morning’s final push through snowdrifts fifteen feet high. After struggling over loose, treacherous rocks for the last mile, they came to a viewpoint that stirred their deepest emotions.

“It was not beauty, it was sublimity,” Bowles wrote. “It was not power, nor order, nor color, it was majesty; it was not a part, it was the whole; it was not man but God, that was about, before, in us. Mountains and mountains everywhere . . . Over one of the largest and finest, the snow-fields lay in the form of an immense cross, and by this it is known in all the mountain views of the territory. It is as if God has set His sign, His seal, His promise there,—a beacon upon the very center and height of the Continent to all its people and all its generations.”

Despite this rapturous description, later published in his popular book The Switzerland of America, Bowles left no indication of the mystical mount’s precise location. Without a map or firm coordinates to recall the perilous path to the breathtaking view, travelers who attempted to retrace his steps found only frustration in their attempts to locate the sacred, solemn site the New England journalist had so memorably acclaimed.

Finally, five years later, under the auspices of the United States Geographical and Geological Survey, an expedition secured lavish federal funding to the tune of $75,000 to expose the truth behind the phenomenon already labeled “the Mount of the Holy Cross.” Its intrepid leader, Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, boasted a national reputation as a decorated Civil War doctor, university professor, and “notorious unbeliever” celebrated for his previous exploration of the stunning landscape of Yellowstone. His new probe of the Rockies and its mythic religious symbol involved botanists, fossil collectors, mineralogists, topographical artists, scouts, philologists, cartographers, and geologists like Hayden himself.

It also attracted a pioneer photographer named William Henry Jackson, who had trained as a landscape painter before fighting at the Battle of Gettysburg at age twenty. After the war, he risked his life again to shoot the completion of the transcontinental railroad from the cowcatcher of a moving locomotive, and then accompanied Hayden on his celebrated journey to Yellowstone that inspired Congress to create the first national park. For Jackson, the desire to capture the first images of the Cross in the Mountainside became a professional obsession as well as a spiritual quest.

In this pursuit, he trekked into the Rockies with nearly a hundred pounds of equipment on an aging, overburdened mule. The baggage included three cameras and heavy glass photographic plates of various sizes, some as large as eighteen by twenty-two inches. These fragile panes had to be coated, exposed, and developed on-site, with no light-metering equipment or predetermined emulsion speeds, requiring “inspired guess work” from the explorer and artist.

Breaking apart from the main body of the expedition, Jackson struggled with his bulky equipment and his balky mule for two days of rugged climbing across Tennessee Pass and the Eagle River. Exhausted, he staggered across the shoulder of forbidding Notch Mountain, to approach the fabled but still-undocumented cross that Samuel Bowles had described. For most of the way, mist rising from the valley below blocked his sight lines, but the air began to clear as he continued his climb.

“I emerged above the timber line and the clouds,” Jackson later recalled, “and suddenly, as I clambered over a vast mass of jagged rocks, I discovered the great shining cross dead before me, tilted against the mountainside.” The snow, buried deep in the fissures of the dark gray rock, glistened like polished silver in the midmorning sun, refracting the light toward the slack-jawed photographer. Jackson stood and caught his breath, silently contemplating “the Holy Cross in all its sublime impressiveness . . . the marvelous mountain on which nature had drawn with mighty lines of snow the symbol of the Christian world.”

Jackson’s weary colleagues straggled up behind him and witnessed a sudden signal that served to confirm the cosmic significance of their discovery. As they caught their first view of the spectacle, a gleaming rainbow shot into the cloudy sky, vaulting out of the thick, low-lying fog, framing the great cross and reminding them of God’s covenant with Noah. As Yale professor William H. Goetzmann described the scene in his 1966 book Exploration and Empire, that rainbow’s brief, eerily timed appearance represented “one of those sublime moments so sacred to the nineteenth-century romantic imagination. . . . Trivial though it seems as a discovery per se, the Mount of the Holy Cross had meaning for all the many thousands who saw its various representations. To the religious mind of the day it was worth as much as all the moving sermons delivered by Henry Ward Beecher. . . . Nature itself had spoken.”

But for William Henry Jackson to capture that solemn pronouncement for posterity, he first had to unpack his skittish mule, Hypo, and set up the complicated camera equipment. By that time, the rainbow had dissolved as quickly as it had appeared, and dank mist once more shrouded the face of the mountain. The determined photographer resolved to wait out the forbidding weather, spending a wet, shivering night near his cliff-side perch high on the slopes of Notch Mountain, struggling to keep both his soggy campfire and fading hopes alive.

The next morning dawned clear and crisp: a suitable blessing for Sunday, August 24, 1873—the Lord’s Day, of course. Jackson rose with the sun to seize his opportunity. He once more arranged his camera equipment and prepared the mountainside darkroom he would need to develop the images properly. Somehow, he managed to expose all eight plates he had wrapped protectively for his climb, and with the largest pane of glass generated what his 1988 biographer P. B. Hales anointed “the most famous image ever made of an American mountain.”

The photo of the Mountain of the Holy Cross, formally presented to Congress and to President Ulysses S. Grant, received wide distribution and caused a national sensation. It became the subject of thousands of reproductions, postcards, souvenirs, and even a U.S. postage stamp in 1951. A framed print of the world-famous photo made its way to Rome, placed prominently in the pope’s private apartment in the Vatican.