The 2004 national election pivoted on religion. Supreme was the notion of American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States has a special place in the world even beyond its status as the world’s only existing superpower. But while George W. Bush may be the most powerful and prominent proponent of American exceptionalism today, the idea itself is hardly new.

For a time during the nineteenth century, a geographic feature in the Colorado Rockies captured the nation’s attention, clear evidence to some of the divine sanction of the American errand into the western wilderness. Called Mountain of the Holy Cross, the high peak featured perpendicular fissures in its steep, eastern face. After being officially documented by the Hayden Survey in 1873, it became the stuff of poems, paintings and paeans. “To the religious mind of the day,” writes William H. Goetzmann, in his book Exploration and Empire, “it was worth as much as all the moving sermons delivered by Henry Ward Beecher. Nature itself had spoken…”

The mountain’s remoteness undoubtedly added to the mystique. Even today, the cross is no drive-by snapshot. It is located on the White River National Forest about 110 miles west of Denver, near the Vail and Beaver Creek ski areas. The peak, although rising to more than 14,000 feet, is encircled by other peaks that are only marginally lower. Portions of the cross can be glimpsed from various distant places, including the western portals of the Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel on Interstate 70, but the only full view is from the adjacent Notch Mountain, elevation 13,237 feet. That’s where the Hayden Survey’s William Henry Jackson took the first photos of the mountain, photos that vaulted Holy Cross into national prominence.

F.V. Hayden, a geologist, understood the value of paintings and photographs in telling the story of the West, as well as their usefulness in securing funding for his expeditions. In encouraging Congress to set aside Yellowstone for what later became the world’s first national park, Hayden gave each member of Congress a packet of Jackson’s most enticing photographs of geysers, fumaroles and crystalline hot springs from the expedition of 1871. Two years later, the Hayden Survey was chronicling the high peaks of Colorado.

Unlike Yellowstone, Holy Cross was last on the list of that summer’s tasks. Still, it had its own mystique. One rumor that the Hayden men had heard was that as a person approached the cross, it would magically disappear. Many had heard about the mountain, but no one the survey team talked to had actually seen it. Making their way from Leadville, the team slogged around the bogs, over the tangled timber and through the thick underbrush along the Eagle River, past where the Tenth Mountain Division would later train at Camp Hale, and to the Valley of the Roches Moutonnée. Here, among the “sheep rocks”—boulders rounded smooth by glaciers—they struggled with the chaos of deadfall. Finally, one group, led by Hayden, set out to climb Holy Cross in order to take triangulations while Jackson and two assistants began ascending Notch Mountain.

Only thirty years old at the time, Jackson had served in the Civil War and whacked oxen to California before settling into his ambition to photograph the splendors of the frontier. Early photography required not only a bulky camera, but also a portable darkroom that included glass plates that had to be developed on-site, even if that site happened to be atop a mountain. Jackson used a mule called Hypo for most of this heavy lifting, but Notch Mountain was far too rugged even for mules. Setting out with the 100 pounds of gear on their backs, Jackson and his assistants found the going substantially more difficult than anyone had expected. Intermittent rain laced with cold mists and biting wind made their trek even harder.

Jackson summitted first, wrapping himself in his tent while he waited for the arrival of his companions and the departure of the storm. As lightning bolts flashed, something eerie happened. The clouds parted momentarily to reveal the cross on the other side of the chasm, then rapidly closed again.

Retreating to timberline, Jackson and his assistants spent a cold, hungry night gathered around a campfire. Hastening back to the summit at dawn, they were rewarded with clear weather. At last the mystery was at an end. Quickly, Jackson exposed eight glass plates, using water from a depression in a boulder to develop them. Although he returned to the mountain many times during later years, Jackson never saw the cross as clearly as he had on that Sunday morning in late August of 1873.

Jackson’s photographs removed any lingering doubts as to the authenticity of the cross and were reprinted across the nation. Ironically, this scientific expedition’s documentation of the cross only opened the gates for others to romanticize the mountain. Stirred by Jackson’s photos, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote two poems, “Evangeline” and “The Cross of Snow,” that employed the image. More powerful yet than the poetry were the paintings by landscape artist Thomas Moran, who had joined the Hayden Survey in 1871.

Like Jackson’s, Moran’s work from the visit to Yellowstone in 1871 had been used to sell Congress on the worthiness of its preservation. Though devoted to the Grand Canyon for the next two years, Moran turned his attention to Holy Cross in 1874, first studying Jackson’s photographs and then visiting the scene himself. Moran’s pilgrimage was even more daunting than that of the sturdy Jackson.

A romanticist of the mid-nineteenth-century school, Moran issued four paintings of Holy Cross. The scene they show is fiction. The foreground is chaos, the creek gushing amid tangled timber, the cross distant amid roiling clouds. In fact, only a shoulder of the mountain can be seen from the creek, never the cross itself. Moran never believed in literal transcripts, but a truth of the whole. His paintings tell of struggles to reach the cross, and, as other muralists of the West did, he used light and shadow to evoke a concept called the sublime.

The sublime was something relatively new to observers of mountains and rugged territory. Only decades before, the English and other thinkers of western civilization had seen mountains as “Nature’s Shames,” to cite one of many such descriptions. The Swiss Alps, for example, were grim, fearful places. In less than a century, this philosophy that historian Marjorie Hope Nicolson called “Mountain Gloom” was sharply revised to one of “Mountain Glory” the gloom that had previously clouded the vision of poets and other interpreters of the landscape had dissipated to reveal mountains in full splendor. This shift was due in part to a kick-start from the philosopher René Descartes and new thinking by theologians that Nature, including its mountains, was an extension of God, and something to be viewed with awe, not fear. With his paintings, Moran almost literally portrayed this vision of God amid the tumult of Nature.

If the cross was sublime, it was also a seal of righteousness. To pilgrims believing in Manifest Destiny, the Mount of the Holy Cross was clear evidence of divine ordination. This message is clear in a passage written by Samuel Bowles, editor of Massachusetts’s Springfield Republican. After seeing the cross in the distance in 1868, he concluded that it confirmed America’s history and mission. “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.”

Travel writer Ernest Ingersoll concurred in an 1883 book: “What matters it whether we write ÔGod’ in the Constitution of the United States, when here in the sight of all men is inscribed this marvelous testimony to his sovereignty.”

And sovereignty was indeed the question. What Hayden and the other surveyors were entrusted to do was chart how a garden was to be created of these western lands. But with the message of Manifest Destiny writ large on the wall, the conclusion was clear that those who chose not to use the land as it was divinely intended had no choice but to get out of the way. For the American Indians, this spelled trouble.

Mount of the Holy Cross, as it came to be called, does not figure prominently in the battles of the 1870s. General George Armstrong Custer did not fall at the Little Bighorn with a postcard of Holy Cross in his breast pocket. Nor was Holy Cross specifically cited as justification for routing the Ute Indians from their ancestral lands in the Colorado mountains. But it was another piece in a long line of reasoning that white settlers had God on their side.

In their self-perceived destiny to control and develop the West, settlers had no trouble arguing for the removal, subjugation and even the extermination of the Indians. Bowles, the journalist from Massachusetts, probably spoke for many when he wrote that God had ordained the continent to white Americans for its “improvement and development.” The white settlers, he continued, must tell the Indians, “You are our ward, our child, the victim of our destiny, ours to displace, ours to protect. We want your hunting grounds to dig gold from, to raise grain on, and you must MOVE on.” The Indians, he added, must go to designated reservations—until that land might be needed. “When the march of our empire demands this reservation of yours, we will assign you another, but so long as we choose this is your home, your prison, your playground.”

The mad ranting of one newspaper editor? Hardly. This was essentially policy regarding aboriginals of the West. In Colorado, the Utes were reduced to ever-smaller reservations to allow ever-greater access to the mountains and their mineral wealth. Still, it wasn’t enough. “The Utes Must Go!” became the cry of politicians and newspapermen alike. One Denver editor wrote, “The Utes are actual, practical Communists, and the Government should be ashamed to foster and encourage them in their idleness and wanton waste of property.”

In other words, people who did not mine gold, build roads and grow crops had no right to these mountains and their valleys.

On their White River Reservation, the Utes scorned the plows that federal Indian agent Nathan Meeker demanded they take up. Alarmed by their growing surliness, Meeker summoned the U.S. Cavalry, but the Utes, hearing the news, killed him, driving a stake through what they considered to be his lie-spouting mouth. They ambushed the arriving soldiers at the reservation’s border, and the affair came to be known as the Meeker Massacre. The Indians called it something else: an invasion. The upshot was that the Utes were deported to more distant, smaller reservations that were presumed to be void of mineral wealth. Behind them rushed the miners, the ranchers and the farmers, who knew how to improve and develop this land.

Almost immediately after the departure of the Utes, President William Henry Harrison designated land in the White River Valley near where the hostilities had occurred to be a forest preserve, the first (along with Yellowstone) of its kind. Fourteen years later, President Theodore Roosevelt, who also favored the White River country for hunting cougars, elk and other wildlife, made another withdrawal of high forested lands from the general domain. Sprawling beyond Aspen, the preserve was named after its best-known feature, Holy Cross.

During the 1920s, Holy Cross returned to prominence. First, a newspaper in the nearby town of Red Cliff was purchased by a merchant and former miner, Orion W. Daggett. Among Daggett’s many enthusiasms was Holy Cross itself. Often he advised his readers to “hie to the shrine” to partake of the mountain’s splendor at sunrise. Thin but vigorous well into his sixties, Daggett climbed the staff of the cross several times, a feat that today remains a task demanding competent mountaineering skills. Daggett also passionately campaigned to make the mountain towns more connected to Denver. To that end, he promoted a highway called the Holy Cross Trail (the name he also gave his newspaper) that would plunge directly west from Denver across the great wall of mountains that constitutes the Continental Divide there. His proposed highway follows much the same route as today’s I-70, with one significant deviation: It was to have crossed what he called Shrine Pass, where motorists would linger, inspired by the cross, before descending past his newspaper office and to the foot of Notch Mountain.

Daggett wasn’t alone in his vision of pilgrimages. A Protestant dentist and a Catholic priest enlisted the support of the Denver Post, which promoted the pilgrimages with the same fervor with which it promoted its own circus, operas and cross-country roller skating. The Post even provided money for construction of trails and roads. Those improvements, along with a mountainside lodge and trails constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps, boosted interest in the pilgrimages, which peaked with 3,000 visitors in the 1930s.

The mountain was credited with faith-healing properties. A sixty-six-year-old woman who had been bedridden for eight years was hauled up to see the mountain by wagon and horse. After glimpsing the cross, she was said to have walked back down the trail. Believers sent thousands of handkerchiefs to be carried up Notch Mountain for the services, then taken to the lake at the base of the cross for dipping.

The lake was called Bowl of Tears, and was just one of several dramatic religious names: A snow formation adjacent to the cross that appears to be a kneeling individual during the summer melt is called the Supplicating Angel, and the ridge connecting Holy Cross with Notch Mountain is called Halo Ridge.

Amid the hosannas, President Herbert Hoover designated 1,392 acres encompassing Holy Cross and Notch Mountain as a national monument in 1929. Then came World War II, and Holy Cross was placed inside a military reservation. But even before the hostilities, enthusiasm for the pilgrimages had petered out, owing largely to the evaporating support from the Post. At war’s end in 1945, Holy Cross was folded into the White River National Forest and day-to-day responsibility for the administration of the monument given to the U.S. Forest Service. In 1950, Congress abolished the monument. Too few people had visited to warrant the special attention.

In the half-century since, as echoing themes played out elsewhere in the West, Holy Cross has been a battleground for clashing philosophies that might be called “wilderness as the garden” versus the “gospel of progress.” Those preaching progress saw the creeks gushing from around the mountain as a resource to be used by Colorado’s growing metropolitan areas. Others came to see the untouched land around Holy Cross as valuable for a reprieve from those cities and a testament to the grandeur of creation. To them, the garden already existed in its wilderness state.

In 1980, Congress tried to bridge the gap between these two ideologies by proposing that the land be designated as the Holy Cross Wilderness Area, but specifically allowing tunneling and dams necessary to divert water from within the wilderness. That plan has so far been defeated. If they are to be collected, the waters must come from outside the temple. To seal the defeat, wilderness defenders are now lobbying to have Cross Creek—the one depicted in Moran’s paintings—designated as a wild and scenic river.

Today, Holy Cross has become an altar—one of many—for what High Country News publisher emeritus Ed Marston calls the “Church of 10,000 Feet.” For those of us in the congregation of the higher elevation, as Marston describes us, Sundays are more commonly spent in the cathedral of mountains and valleys. For pilgrims of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the greater value of such places is not to make us appreciate our own insignificance. That’s the glass half-empty. Rather, they help us feel our connection to the world, to marvel at the greater handiwork. The cross itself is a curiosity. But like the Utes and other aboriginals of the West, our sense of the sacred has expanded. God’s seal is still applied, but the sacred grounds are much broader.