Book Review

Sequoia: The Heralded Tree in American Art and Culture. By Lori Vermaas. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003. xvi + 271 pp. Illustrations, photographs, map, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.
For much of the nineteenth century, insecure Americans struggled to define the dis- tinguishing cultural traits of their republic. Not surprisingly, many citizens looked to Europe for tradition, but efforts to emulate European society often led to frustration. In the Enlightenment gauge of success, American achievement in the arts, sciences, and literature paled before that of the Old World. Europeans, for their part, continued to remind their New World cousins that America, ever rough and boorish, lacked the credentials of proper society. Even the designation "New World" became something of an epithet—a label that suggested a lack of history and accomplishment. Yet as the century wore on, intensely nationalistic Americans would link their identity to the bounty of the natural world that surrounded them. The vastness of nature provided Americans with a cultural past and as part of the larger promotion of national growth, boosters celebrated their heritage by claiming scenic superiority. In the physical world, nature's aesthetic features—ruggedness, openness, rawness—once considered signs of American immaturity, became evidence of American virtue.	1
Within this context, cultural historian Lori Vermaas argues that like big mountains and big rivers, big trees are integral to the powerful narrative of American destiny. Through her investigation of how Americans understood (and continue to understand) these landmark trees she finds ample evidence that the citizens who gazed upon these tall wonders were quick to link the strength of the sequoia to the vitality of their nation. Americans looked to these natural objects, Vermaas explains, "as the apotheosis of [their] identity, an exceptional nation divinely blessed because of a remarkable natural inheritance" (p. 3). For Americans who watched with distress as the country was consumed by the Civil War, for instance, these trees stood as evidence of the sanctity and serenity of the western garden. When the region developed and industrialized later in the century, the harvesting of these big trees armed only with strong backs and sharp axes enlarged the human dominion over the physical world and by the beginning of the next century, the stately sequoia morphed into an icon of the preservation cause. Within these evolving representations, sometimes celebratory, at other times anxious, Vermaas argues that sequoias became "organic symbols whose vitality or degradation could augur America's future" (p. 5).	2
Vermaas's sources include well-known Albert Bierstadt paintings and Ansel Adams photographs, but also lesser-known stereographic images, promotional literature, travel journals, even John Steinbeck novels and an Alfred Hitchcock film. In all of it, she illustrates how surprisingly embedded these big trees—themselves characters in the national narrative—are within American life and culture.	3
John Herron is an assistant professor of environmental history at the University of Missouri in Kansas City.

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