On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape

Shrouded in the lore of legendary Indians, Mt. Timpanogos beckons the urban populace of Utah. And yet, no €œIndian€ legend graced the mount until Mormon settlers conjured it€•once they had displaced the local Indians, the Utes, from their actual landmark, Utah Lake. On Zion€s Mount tells the story of this curious shift. It is a quintessentially American story about the fraught process of making oneself €œnative€ in a strange land. But it is also a complex tale of how cultures confer meaning on the environment€•how they create homelands.

Only in Utah did Euro-American settlers conceive of having a homeland in the Native American sense€•an endemic spiritual geography. They called it €œZion.€ Mormonism, a religion indigenous to the United States, originally embraced Indians as €œLamanites,€ or spiritual kin. On Zion€s Mount shows how, paradoxically, the Mormons created their homeland at the expense of the local Indians€•and how they expressed their sense of belonging by investing Timpanogos with €œIndian€ meaning.

This same pattern was repeated across the United States. Jared Farmer reveals how settlers and their descendants (the new natives) bestowed €œIndian€ place names and recited pseudo-Indian legends about those places€•cultural acts that still affect the way we think about American Indians and American landscapes.