Mount of the Holy Cross
I wonder how my great grandmother felt the day she stood at the top of Notch Mountain and saw the Mount of the Holy Cross with her own eyes for the first time.
To see the Mount of the Holy Cross – the vision of the snowy cross in the sky with the white figure praying beside it – you have to make a steep five mile hike and, even then, it may not be there. Rain or sun can melt it, or snow and clouds can cover it. There is no guarantee.
I grew up in the middle of Alaska, so I know a little about the unpredictability of natural phenomena. To see the Northern Lights, you make a journey to an arctic region and go out in the cold dark while everyone else is sleeping, away from any light pollution, and wait and hope, and even then, you may not see it.
You have to decide if you want to go to the great effort and cost when you may not achieve your goal. Most worthwhile things are difficult, ephemeral, unpredictable, and may never be achieved. Do you decide not to try and avoid disappointment? Or do you try, hope, and enjoy the journey regardless of the result?
It’s likely that my great grandmother, Pansy Stockton, had heard about journalist Samuel Bowles from Springfield, Massachusetts, who went on long treks throughout the West with Speaker of the House turned Vice President Colfax. Pansy’s parents probably had a copy of the travel book Bowles published from his descriptive letters printed in the Springfield Daily Republican. At a camp on the Snake River in Colorado on August 23, 1868, Bowles wrote: “The scene before us was ample recompense for double the toil. It was the great sight in all our Colorado travel. In impressiveness – in overcomingness, it takes rank with the three or four great natural wonders of the world – with Niagara Falls from the Tower, with Yosemite Valley from Inspiration Point. No Swiss mountain view carries such majestic sweep of distance, such sublime combination of highth and breadth and depth; such uplifting into the presence of God; such dwarfing of the mortal sense, such welcome to the immortal thought…. On 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 hight of the continent to all its people and all its generations.” (The Springfield Daily Republican, November 11, 1868).
Pioneer photographer William Henry Jackson was part of the survey expeditions of the West led by geologist Dr. Ferdinand Vandiveer Hayden (“what a name for a pioneer!” Jackson wrote) in the early 1870s. Jackson’s photographs helped make the case to establish Yellowstone as the first national park in the world. In 1873, Hayden assigned Jackson to photograph a mountain. As Jackson wrote in his autobiography Time Exposure:
“In the Middle Ages there was the legend of the Holy Grail. Sixty-seven years ago in Colorado there was the legend of a snowy cross upon a mountain. No man we talked with had ever seen the Mountain of the Holy Cross. But everyone knew that somewhere in the far reaches of the western highlands such a wonder might exist. Hadn’t a certain hunter once caught a glimpse of it – only to have it vanish as he approached? Didn’t a wrinkled Indian here and there narrow his eyes and slowly nod his head when questioned? Wasn’t this man’s grandfather, and that man’s uncle, and old so-and-so’s brother the first white man ever to lay eyes on the Holy Cross – many, many, many years ago?” (Time Exposure, p. 216).
In August 1873, the survey party split into two groups. One team climbed to the top of the Mount of the Holy Cross and the other, Jackson’s team, searched for the best viewpoint for photographs from a nearby peak. In the habit of pushing ahead to scout out photographic vantage points, Jackson was the first of his party to view the snow-filled cross. “Near the top of the ridge I emerged above timber line and the clouds, 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. It was worth all the labor of the past three months just to see it for a moment.” (Time Exposure, p. 217).
Clouds obscured the view by the time the rest of the team arrived and before photographs could be made. Jackson’s first soul-stirring view was for his eyes alone and shaped his perception of the holy mountain, forever giving it a sacred quality. As with most powerful things of nature, like Northern Lights and bioluminescent beaches and bears at Denali, they are ephemeral. You can’t count on them being visible just because you happen to be there and want to see them.
It may not be the case, but perhaps, such glorious natural wonders reveal themselves to those in need of renewal. Just the year previously, young Jackson suddenly lost his wife and their newborn baby. It was an unfathomable loss that left Jackson bereft of words and able only to numbly continue his work with Hayden and the U.S. Geological Survey. Perhaps the apparition of the snow-filled cross suddenly appearing in the sky for Jackson’s eyes alone was meant as a form of spiritual comfort.
Evening came and there was still no clear view for photographs. Without food, blankets, and coats, they decided to build a fire and spend the night on the top of Notch Mountain at just over 13,000 feet. The photographing party could see the fire of the climbing party at their camp near the top of the Mount of the Holy Cross. The teams were close enough to hear each other’s “halloos” when they called out into the night.
The morning of August 24, 1873, the team awoke. “At dawn we were cold, stiff, hungry – and elated. The day, or at least the morning, promised to be magnificently clear and sunny.”
And yet, Jackson still had to wait. In order to make the photographs in the very old school way of the times, he had to have water. To have water, the sun needed to be high enough to melt snow.
“By the time I had enough to develop and wash a few plates the long flamelike shadows on Holy Cross were rapidly sweeping down into the valley, and, using two cameras, I had made just eight exposures when they were gone. But, with the early sun, those shadows had already helped me to take the finest pictures I have ever made of Holy Cross. Since 1873 I have been back four or five times. I have used the best cameras and the most sensitive emulsions on the market. I have snapped my shutter morning, noon, and afternoon. And I have never come close to matching those first plates.” (Time Exposure, p. 218).
When poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow saw Jackson’s photograph in 1879, he wrote a poem about his love for his late wife.
In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face – the face of one long dead –
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died: and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That sun-defying, in its deep ravines,
Displays a cross of snow upon its side,
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes,
And seasons changeless since the day she died.
The Mount of the Holy Cross became famous around the country thanks to the postcards made from William Henry Jackson’s photograph and Thomas Moran’s paintings.
Thomas Moran was a friend and colleague of Jackson. Although Jackson, Wyoming is not named after William Henry Jackson, Mount Moran is named for Thomas Moran. Jackson and Moran were both on Hayden’s geological survey of Yellowstone in 1871. Jackson wrote that Moran’s paintings of Yellowstone Falls were the great pictures of the 1871 expedition. “Neither picture, however, could hold a candle to the man himself….That ability instantly to make people like him was, I am convinced, one key to his genius. He had so much to give and he gave so unstintingly that even a mountain or a waterfall must have responded to his charm. Prior to 1871 Moran had never known a true wilderness, and he was as poorly equipped for rough life as anyone I have ever known. But it made no difference – he had a solution for every problem.” (Time Exposure, p. 200).
Jackson said that Moran took an interest in photography and helped Jackson out with problems in composition.
Moran was not with Jackson when he made his photographs of the Mount of the Holy Cross. Moran saw them, though, and decided to make the climb to see the cross himself in 1874.
Moran knew what the scene looked like, but decided to take liberties in his painting, putting a waterfall in the foreground. Moran made many more paintings of the Mount of the Holy Cross. Each time the scene became more and more stylized and less realistic and the mountain cross more faded and misty.
Jackson and Moran couldn’t have known just how many postcards would be made of their images of the Mount of the Holy Cross. Nor that people would respond by deciding to go on a pilgrimage in order to see the same fantastic view.
Although Eagle dentist O.W. Randall’s Boy Scout and Girl Guide trek to the top of Notch Mountain in 1927 was noted as the first organized trip, there were pilgrimages to the Mount of the Holy Cross in the 1910s.
Randall collaborated with Frederick G. Bonfils, publisher of The Denver Post, in an effort to make the Mount of the Holy Cross a tourist destination. They organized the first official pilgrimage in the summer of 1928.
In May 1929, President Herbert Hoover signed papers designating the Mount of the Holy Cross as a National Monument.
In 1930, the Rio Grande Railroad offered special fares for pilgrims.
In the early 1930s, a New Deal program brought hundreds of Civilian Conservation Corps (C.C.C.) workers into the Rocky Mountains to develop hiking trails, horse paths, roads, and to construct buildings.
First, the C.C.C. improved Tigiwon Road and built a pilgrim trail from the end of Tigiwon Road (now Half Moon Campground) to the Notch Mountain viewing point.
In 1933, the C.C.C. team completed the Notch Mountain shelter, a rock house with a fireplace at one end that faces the snow-filled cross not far from where Jackson made his iconic photograph and where pilgrims gathered for services in the early summer.
In 1934, the Tigiwon Community House, a large assembly hall at Tigiwon Camp, was built. Tigiwon means “meeting place of friends” in the Ute language.
Annual pilgrimages continued for the next decade. Handkerchiefs were sent up the mountain for the healing of those who couldn’t make the arduous trek. O.W. Randall of Eagle continued to be in charge of the annual pilgrimages that initially brought hundreds of people from around the world, but began to dwindle.
Kansas State University cultural geographer Kevin Blake postulated that perhaps the reason people stopped coming to the Mount of the Holy Cross was because “thousands of re-touched lithographs, woodcuts, postcards, paintings and photographs ensured that no matter what image a visitor had in mind of the cross, it was unlikely to be faithfully duplicated on site.”
The scene that Thomas Moran painted could not be found. Further, the snow-filled cross was not always visible due to weather and the cyclical nature of the year. In winter, snow covered the cross. In summer, if it rained too much or there had not been enough snow in the winter, it would melt away. Pilgrims came to see the vision Moran presented to them and it simply just wasn’t there.
“There has not been enough snowfall in recent winters to fill the cross outline,” wrote The Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction, Colorado on November 6, 1940, “and therefore there has been a good deal of complaint about the Holy Cross monument.”
In 1950, Congress abolished its status as a national monument.
Ironically, the Mount of the Holy Cross was featured in the Colorado 7th Anniversary of Statehood postage stamp in 1951.
Blake wrote, “more than a symbol of diminished religious significance, the changing appearance of the snow-filled couloir is a testament to dynamic geographical imaginations and natural processes, and to the uncertainty that occasionally pervades our understanding of each.” (Journal of Cultural Geography, 2008).
In 1924, my great grandmother created The Mount of the Holy Cross. She was experimenting with a new artform and didn’t have a name for it yet, but said it was painted by the sun. It was 22 x 30 inches and made of around 4,000 different pieces of leaves, moss, lichen, bark, and twigs. Pansy said it was the best picture she’d ever made. Viewers were fascinated. The piece traveled around the state. A smaller version of The Mount of the Holy Cross, 15.5 x 21.5 inches, ended up at the Colorado Natural History Museum.
“There is nothing too small to be used,” said Pansy, “and after one has trained one’s self to be observant, it is not hard to find a whole sky or a waterfall in a piece of material that the untrained person would unthinkingly step on and pass by as utterly useless.” (The Rocky Mountain News, May 7, 1924).
“So cleverly has the work been done,” wrote Colorado Magazine in May 1924, “that at a distance the picture cannot be distinguished from an oil painting….The Denver Tourist Bureau has thought so highly of Mrs. Stockton’s work that they have exhibited an entire window of her pictures for several weeks, this one among them.”
The fascination never wore off. Three years later, “Colorado Artist Discovers a New Medium” appeared in the May-June 1927 edition of the City and County of Denver’s Municipal Facts publication.
When The Denver Post exhibited a sun painting of The Mount of the Holy Cross in its window in 1929, publisher Frederick G. Bonfils had a question and an idea. It’s likely Bonfils knew that Pansy had never been to the Mount of the Holy Cross just by looking at her sun painting, which was heavily influenced by Thomas Moran’s stylized version. Had Pansy ever gone on one of the annual pilgrimages to the Mount of the Holy Cross? When she said, as he expected, that she had not, Bonfils proposed that she make the trek with The Denver Post following along to create full page spreads of captioned photographs detailing her experience. As always, Pansy was game.
“Mrs. Stockton for a number of years has been making beautiful ‘sun paintings’ of the Mount of the Holy Cross. These, instead of being done with paint, are composed of bits of bark, moss, down, leaves, pine needles and the like – nature’s own products in their natural colors. Her paintings of the cross have mostly been copies of Moran’s world-famous painting of the Mount.
One of these recently was exhibited in the window of The Denver Post, and attracted widespread attention. Frederick G. Bonfils, publisher of The Post, asked Mrs. Stockton if she had ever attended one of the annual pilgrimages to the Mount of the Holy Cross, and when she replied that she had not, and never had seen the mount itself, he persuaded her to go on this year’s pilgrimage.”(The Denver Post, July 13, 1929).
Pansy and her husband Roscoe went on the pilgrimage together. It was at a rocky time in their relationship. Perhaps they viewed it as a chance for renewal. So many people came to the Mount of the Holy Cross for healing. Maybe their love for each other could be healed, too.
Pansy and Roscoe rode horses to the starting point for the pilgrimage, Camp Tigiwon, and immediately heard something familiar.
“Mr. Stockton, author of the Mile High Colorado Song, was quite agreeably surprised to ride into camp a stranger to everyone almost, just at the moment when some of the pilgrims were singing his song,” reported The Eagle Valley Enterprise on July 19, 1929. The article indicated that Roscoe got involved in storytelling around the campfire in the evenings. “He was a most entertaining reader and some of his productions were enjoyed immensely, being called for repeatedly. His wife, Mrs. Pansy Stockton, is a talented painter and artist. The Stocktons were most satisfactory members of the Pilgrimage program.”
Gathered around the campfire, did they tell the legends of the Mount of the Holy Cross? Evangeline’s Monument was up at the top, so they must have told of the young woman from Arcadia (now Nova Scotia) who wandered the country in search of her lover Gabriel. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem about Evangeline’s travels that begins “This is the forest primeval.” Legend tells that Evangeline followed Gabriel to the fur trading post of John Jacob Astor and was told that Gabriel had gone farther west with the Ute Chief Ouray and that Gabriel had married an Indian Princess. Evangeline lost faith in God and in human love. A priest came to her aid and said that God had placed a sign of His eternal faithfulness on the side of a mountain. The priest said he would take her there, and so they went and reached the summit of Notch Mountain and there were clouds around the mountain and the cross. Evangeline, exhausted from the steep uphill climb over rugged terrain, could do nothing but collapse to her knees, and the old priest knelt in prayer beside her. The wind shifted and the clouds cleared so perfectly over the cross that it was as if an omnipotent hand had lifted a veil. Evangeline looked up and there was the white cross. Not just a little cross. It was huge. At least a mile in length. And the mists from the clouds created a rainbow that circled the mountain and the Bowl of Tears below. “My faith is restored,” said Evangeline. She returned to civilization, to Philadelphia, where she ministered to the sick and afflicted, and never gave up hope that she would one day see Gabriel again. Gabriel did find her just before he died. They were buried together in Philadelphia.
At least, that’s how journalist O.W. Daggett would tell it if he were around that campfire. And he would say that the Utes have the companion legend about meeting Gabriel and taking him in among their people.
He would also tell about the Franciscan monk who lost faith in his own integrity. He’d made mistakes that he couldn’t forgive, so he went in search of a sign of divine mercy. He had a dream that if he saw a cross in the air, he would know he was forgiven. Years of restless travel through Mexico followed. One day, the monk, hair now frosted with age, came north. In a moment of confession and prayer high in the mountains, suddenly the clouds cleared, and he saw a cross in the air. Full of joy, assured of forgiveness, he died on the spot.
I imagine Pansy listening to these stories and poems and thinking about her own crisis of faith. True love had not turned out like she thought it would. She was the poet of paint and he was the word painter. Together they were going to make the world a more beautiful place. They had been so idealistic when they moved to Denver and all the realities of jobs, influenza, children, death, the jaded side of the artworld, the endless research of the radioworld, all came crashing down around them and their life was not at all what she thought it would be. She thought they would love each other forever. Instead, they fought. Instead, they said terrible things to each other, some things that could not be taken back. Was it possible that here, away from all those realities in Denver, in the Nature they both loved so much, was it possible that here they could renew their love?
Caption from The Denver Post, Sunday Morning, July 14, 1929: “Inspiration Everywhere. This is what Mrs. Pansy Stockton, Denver woman who is one of the members of the pilgrimage to the Mount of the Holy Cross, says of the glorious region around and about the peak. Her hobby is representing the scenic wonders of the west in creations resembling paintings but contrived from its moss, wood, and various other materials. She is shown on a trek over the hills near the Mount of the Holy Cross.”
The Denver Post, July 13, 1929, “Woman Artist Thrills at Sight of Holy Cross, Originator of ‘Sun Paintings’ Makes Pictures of Sacred Emblem.”
“Mrs. Stockton and her husband have been here since the start of the present pilgrimage. She has now seen the cross with her own eyes. On her second visit to the summit of Notch mountain, where the best view of the cross is had, she took her ‘painting’ materials and spent a day making two pictures of the great emblem. These have been great attractions in camp. She now works just outside her tent every day, making other pictures of this region.”
What did she see? Was it a glorious sudden view of a white-filled cross? Was she surprised that there wasn’t a waterfall flowing down from the mountain and creating a canyon as depicted by Thomas Moran? Was she disappointed? She made the climb, she made the effort, she gave what she had, and now?
The myth of certainty. Imbedded there on the mountain. Things do not turn out the way you think they are going to. Not with mountains. Not with natural phenomena. And not with love.
SOURCES:
“A New Art.” The Colorado Magazine. Vol. 1. No. 5. Denver, Colorado: The State Historical and Natural History Society of Colorado. July 1924.
“A Thing of Beauty.” The Denver Post. Denver, Colorado. July 3, 1929.
Blake, Kevin. “Imagining heaven and earth at Mount of the Holy Cross, Colorado.” Journal of Cultural Geography. Vol. 25, 2008. Published online February 12, 2008.
Bowles, Samuel. “A Summer Vacation in the Rocky Mountains. A Tour With Vice President Colfax. Letters From Mr. Bowles – 7. Out of Middle Park and Over Gray’s Peak.” The Springfield Daily Republican. Springfield, Massachusetts. November 11, 1868.
“Colorado Artist Discovers a New Medium.” Municipal Facts. Vol 10, Nos. 5 and 6. City and County of Denver. May-June 1927. p. 19.
“Denver Artist Discards Water Colors and Oils and Lets Sun Paint Pictures.” The Rocky Mountain News. Denver, Colorado. May 7, 1924.
“Inspiration Everywhere.” The Denver Post, Sunday Morning. Denver, Colorado. July 14, 1929.
Jackson, William Henry. Time Exposure. 1940. New York: GP Putnam’s Sons. pp. 186, 200, 204-205, 216-218.
“Notes of the Second Annual Pilgrimage.” Eagle Valley Enterprise. Eagle, CO. July 19, 1929.
“Woman Artist Thrills at Sight of Holy Cross, Originator of ‘Sun Paintings’ Makes Pictures of Sacred Emblem.” The Denver Post. Denver, Colorado. July 13, 1929.