Skip to main content
Harvard University Press - home
On Zion’s Mount

On Zion’s Mount

Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape

Jared Farmer

ISBN 9780674047433

Publication date: 04/10/2010

Shrouded in the lore of legendary Indians, Mt. Timpanogos beckons the urban populace of Utah. And yet, no “Indian” 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 “native” 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 “Zion.” Mormonism, a religion indigenous to the United States, originally embraced Indians as “Lamanites,” 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 “Indian” meaning.

This same pattern was repeated across the United States. Jared Farmer reveals how settlers and their descendants (the new natives) bestowed “Indian” 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.

Praise

  • This stunningly original book proves that geography and our sense of place are mere creations of history, and with it Jared Farmer has proven himself a brilliant trailblazer of the past in the Wallace Stegner tradition.

    —Francis Parkman Prize Committee, Society of American Historians

Awards

  • 2009, Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize

Author

  • Jared Farmer is Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University and author of Glen Canyon Dammed: Inventing Lake Powell and the Canyon Country.

Book Details

  • 472 pages
  • 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
  • Harvard University Press

Recommendations