This is the second of three essays by the author about nature and the art of the Far West, corresponding with a current show at the Seattle Art Museum, "Beauty and Bounty."

From the beginning, people who have visited the West’s iconic places have tended to see more than has met their eyes. “Much of the California landscape has tended to present itself as metaphoric,” Joan Didion writes in Where I Was From, “even as litany: the redwoods (for a thousand years in my sight are but as yesterday), the Mojave (in the midst of life we are in death), the coast at Big Sur, Mono Lake, the great vistas of the Sierra, especially those of the Yosemite Valley, which, [California historian] Kevin Starr has pointed out, ‘offered Californians an objective correlative for their ideal sense of themselves: a people animated by heroic imperatives.’ Thomas Starr King saw Yosemite in 1860 and went back to the First Unitarian Church of San Francisco determined to inspire 'Yosemites in the soul.’ "

“Upon the heights, Clarence King [a New England-born, Yale-educated geologist and mountain climber, who first visited California in the 1860s, more than a decade before he became the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey] conceived of himself as poised above chaos, as having defied chasms without and chasms within,” Starr writes in Americans and the California Dream. “On the same and even more lofty peaks, [John] Muir saw himself as soaring over a singing creation, hearing the music which the ages had prepared.”

A century later, people were less likely to use religious metaphors but just as likely to invoke religious places, fighting to preserve the West’s last unprotected "cathedral forests." In those forests, over which many recent environmental battles have been fought, the architectural metaphors really work. You find the upward sweep of the trunks, like the soaring of Gothic arches; the sense of vertical space; the glowing color of a backlit branch, like illuminated stained glass; the silence.

The historian Simon Schama points out in Landscape and Memory that just as we see the Gothic in living forests, we can see living forests in the Gothic: the characteristic pointed arch of Gothic architecture mirrors — and may be patterned on — the shape made by branches that have been bent into archways. Schama also discusses the widespread and pervasive place of sacred trees in pre-Christian religions and the persistence of tree imagery in early and not-so-early Christianity. As he notes, Americans in the mid-19th century saw the newly discovered groves of redwoods and sequoias as holy places, and subscribed fully to the idea of forests as natural places of worship. Why should a forest need an architectural metaphor? It doesn't. But the memory of cathedrals adds resonance; it enhances the experience — although it may diminish the direct perception of trees.

In the late 19th century, when the nation thought of Washington at all, it may not have envisioned cathedrals, but it clearly thought in terms of trees. J.W. Robinson was appointed to take the proposed state constitution to Washington D.C. for approval in 1889, and secure from President Benjamin Harrison a formal proclamation of statehood. Thirty years later, he recalled meeting with Harrison, Congressman John L. Wilson, and Secretary of State James G. Blaine, from the old lumbering state of Maine. Blaine “asked me what was the greatest quantity of merchantable timber I had ever known to be on, say, 160 acres in Washington,” Robinson wrote, “and I answered him by saying that in the Land Court I [had] represented a timber claimant as against an agricultural claimant in [a case in] which the issue was whether the land was chiefly valuable for timber or agriculture, in which the witnesses testified, after examination of the timber, that it contained 36,000,000 board feet of first-class merchantable timber, and President Harrison said, ‘Well, that much timber could hardly grow on 160 acres,’ and Secretary Blaine, with [a] twinkle in his eye, said: ‘Mr. President, that would depend upon how high it grew.’”

A century later, people christened the remnants of those great forests “old growth” — trees that had started growing before European-Americans arrived and started cutting the forests. In 1889, no one would have bothered using the term. Not all the trees growing in 19th-century Western forests were old; some had sprouted just recently, after swathes of forest had been mowed down by windstorms or avalanches or burned up by fire. But the old trees were the only ones anyone bothered sending to the sawmills.

In 1876, the management of the Port Blakely Mill on Bainbridge Island wrote to Dan Turner, farther south on Puget Sound, asking him to “get us out all you possibly can of good nice, clear [i.e., knot-free] sticks from 50 to 70 feet long. . . . We will want 100 of the sticks.” In the 1970s, a friend of mine was a contractor renovating some of the historic late-19th-century buildings around Pioneer Square. One building on which he worked had obviously been a whorehouse, with floor space divided into cribs by hastily-built walls. Despite the fact that those separating walls had obviously been thrown up as cheaply as possible, he found that the lumber used in them was far better than anything he could buy at any price 90 years later.

From the perspective of the late 20th century, though, “old growth” had become rare enough to merit its own name — and to become the focus of bitter conflicts. Everyone on all sides of the late-20th-century political and legal battle over preserving the Northern Spotted Owl and other old-growth-dependent species in the Pacific Northwest realized that the owl itself was just a legal surrogate for those old forests in which it lived. The fight to save the owl was really a fight to save the Northwest’s last remaining unprotected old forests and the ecosystems they supported on federal land.

But during the years of legal and political maneuvering, the term “old growth” fell into some disfavor. The various plans for saving the owls and other species tended to speak, more technically, of “late successional” forests — i.e., to focus less on age per se than on a stage of development. Activists, on the other hand, spoke increasingly of “ancient forests” — not “old” and in decline but “ancient,” and therefore parallel to the monuments of Greece and Rome.

This wasn’t the first time nature in the West had offered parallels to the icons of European culture. For many educated 19th-century Americans, the echoes of cathedrals and other European monuments found in the Western landscape were anything but subliminal. Those places evoked not only the spiritual but also the aesthetic values — and the cultural cachet — of European art. “The United States agonized in the shadow of European standards,” Alfred Runte, the environmental historian who has taught at the University of Washington and who lost to Greg Nickels in the Seattle mayoral election of 2005, writes in National Parks: The American Experience. “Unlike the Old World, the new nation lacked an established past, particularly as expressed in art, architecture, and literature. In the Romantic tradition nationalists looked to scenery as one form of compensation.”