On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

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

Magnificent historical storytelling, both fun and provocative. Ostensibly framed around the creation of a landmark peak in the American West, On Zion's Mount details the production of memory in the service of forgetting. Transcending the parochial nature of older Utah and Mormon histories, Farmer constructs an intellectual universe around the Mormon-Ute contest for place. He traces the physical and folkloric fallout of that complex history through to twentieth-century raconteurs, promoters, and developers who continued to reinvent the cultural landscape. Farmer is unflinching in his loving but pointed critique of a culture that venerates history and simultaneously clings to historical forgetfulness.
--David Rich Lewis, Utah State University

Few books can match the intellectual pleasure and wonderful writing of this study. Jared Farmer helps us see a world filled with landmarks that we construct in our heads and through our actions. His insights sparkle on every page.
--Clyde A. Milner II, editor, A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American West

Beginning with a striking mountain in Utah, On Zion's Mount opens up a world of connections between landscape, folklore, history, and pop culture. In witty, lucid prose, Jared Farmer illuminates the legends Americans wove to possess Indian land. A great read, this brilliant book will intrigue anyone interested in the past, present, and future of the land we live with and weave stories about.
--Alan Taylor, author of The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution

This multilayered, beautifully written story explains how nature alone does not create landscapes; people are always complicit. There is no better introduction to this region and to the cultural formation of landscapes than Farmer's work.
--Richard Lyman Bushman, author of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling

Jared Farmer has given us a rich, graceful environmental history, all five senses engaged. With the warmth of a native son, the passionate curiosity of a born scholar, and the perfect pitch of the master storyteller, Farmer introduces us to the heart of Utah, a place long inhabited, used, fought over, mystified, stolen, mythologized, and, it seems, deliberately forgotten. On Zion's Mount is riveting, a joy to read and to pass along to devotees of the American West.
--Virginia Scharff, author of Twenty Thousand Roads: Women, Movement, and the West

Farmer's brilliant study of the rise and fall of two linked landmarks--Utah Lake and Mt. Timpanogos--opens up the history and memory of American place-making in exciting new ways.
--Philip Deloria, author of Playing Indian

An intriguing and original book, well written, refreshingly accessible and often entertaining. It is both a history and a meditation on places, memories, and changing identities. I don't know of another book quite like it.
--Elliott West, author of The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado

On Zion’s Mount is a well-researched, thoughtful exploration of how landscape is produced by societies as a result of certain historical conditions. The book deserves praise for challenging memories that are built on first forgetting.
--Tom Harvey (Salt Lake Tribune )

This is not a conventional history of Mormon-Indian relations during the second half of the 19th century. Rather, Farmer offers an intellectual interpretation of the Utah Valley and its most identifiable landmark--Mount Timpanogos, which towers above Provo and Orem. He also explains how white people (mostly Mormons) created pseudo-Indian legends that strengthened white claims while reducing the indigenous Ute attachment to the landscape...[Farmer] compares similar legends throughout the nation and explains how they were created to reflect the prevailing ideologies of the day. As an intellectual and cultural investigation, this book ably weaves diverse fabrics of history and folklore into an understandable whole.
--M. L. Tate (Choice )

This beautifully written book, at once deeply felt and intellectually rigorous, is about what we sacralize and what we destroy. It is a story about how Mormons invented a mountain and made it sacred, and how they degraded, and then ignored, a lake that had been the center of an earlier Ute Indian world. Both events were as much about the relationship between peoples as about the relationship between people and nature, and neither of these paired events could be understood only locally. Jared Farmer makes Mt. Timpanogos a summit from which to survey the long and tangled relations of Americans with nature.
--Richard White, author of "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A History of the American West

Product Description

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.

(20090301)

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 472 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press; First Edition edition (April 30, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674027671
• ISBN-13: 978-0674027671
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #583,711 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An overview of what has largely been forgotten, July 27, 2008

By	T. Holyoak "atariguy" (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

For the past several years, I have lived in a place with Mount Timpanogos practically in my backyard and a great view of Utah Lake close by. I have been aware of some of the recent history of American Fork and Provo canyons and Utah Lake as well as the folklore told about Timpanogos Cave. However, like most people in Utah Valley, I have been unaware of where these places really fit in history. This book was written to inform us of the forgotten history - that Utah Lake was once the dominant feature that this valley was known for, and that Mount Timpanogos (often referred to locally as "Timp") is actually a very recent landmark. The book is made up of a long introduction, which gives a good summary of the entire book, followed by three parts that tell different aspects of the same story.

In the first part, the book tells about the Indians that inhabited the valley (not the mountains) and depended on the lake and rivers for trout and other food fish. When the Mormon pioneers came, they coexisted with the Indians in both the Salt Lake and Utah valleys for a time, sharing the hot and warm springs near the Great Salt Lake as well as the fishing places at and near Utah Lake. At that time, the mountains to the east were simply that - "the mountains." The Indians were eventually forced out to reservations, and the settlers continued using Utah Lake until the 20th century when it was polluted and forgotten, except as a shallow lake mostly populated with trash fish, and the site of Geneva Steel.

Part two explains that as the lake vanished from prominence, Mount Timpanogos was turned into a landmark in the 1910s and 20s in a campaign spearheaded by a BYU faculty member, Eugene Roberts, who led hikes to the top and made up the legend of the Indian princess that is still retold to visitors of Timpanogos Cave. The book goes into great detail about how the hike became an institutionalized yearly event which was repeated into the 1960s before being discontinued, although individuals and smaller groups still continue to make it today. It also traces the history of hiking from Europe to the United States to fit the Timp hike into context, as well as giving a brief history of places such as Sundance, Mutual Dell, Aspen Grove, and Timpanogos Cave.

The third part discusses the history of naming places throughout the United States in memory of the original inhabitants, often creating legends to go along with them. It shows that what has happened in Utah is similar to what has happened in the rest of the country - as the Native Americans were forced out of the land, Indian-sounding names and legends were created to commemorate them, so that what we tend to know about them was largely fabricated. Ironically, some of these legends have now been picked up and retold by Indians living today as authentic - including the one that is retold about Timpanogos Cave, even though the particular formation mentioned is in a part of the cave that was not accessible until a passage was made between the original two caves.

I found most of the book to be very interesting, although parts of it were very tedious to get through. In putting everything in perspective in history, it seemed as if the author was continually going off on tangents, although I'm sure others may find these parts more interesting than I did (there were over 45 pages devoted entirely to "Lover's Leaps," for instance). I also found that a dictionary was often a handy accessory.

The author tends to write very long paragraphs with a single footnote at the end, so it is difficult to pin down many of the sources, and for some of the material which should have had sources cited, there were none. Near the beginning of the notes the author states that many secondary sources regarding LDS history aren't cited because there is a great bibliography available for them, but it would have been much more helpful to not leave the reader wondering where some of the information came from.

The history of the LDS Church is recited in varying degrees of detail from its founding to the settlement of Utah, dealings with the Indians (although they were considered to be descendants of the Lamanites, there was limited success in coexisting peacefully), and then up through the present day in relationship with the subject of the book. However, there are some dubious claims made, some exaggerations, and some things that are arguably untrue. In some cases this is a result of using questionable theories from secondary sources and stating them as facts.

For instance, it is stated that "A reluctant pragmatist, Woodruff meant his 1890 edict (popularly known as the Manifesto) to be a delaying tactic. On the basis of a revelation given to Joseph Smith, many Mormons expected the Millennium to begin in 1891." While there is evidence that some members expected the Second Coming to happen at about that time, due largely to a revelation given to Joseph Smith that is contained in Doctrine and Covenants section 130 (at the end of which Joseph notes that he's unsure of the actual meaning), it seems unlikely that the Manifesto would have even been issued if Wilford Woodruff expected it to be that imminent.

Another example is the statement that "In 1981 the Church quietly revised the Book of Mormon passage relating to the promise of the Lamanites: they would become `pure and delightsome' instead of `white and delightsome.'" The implication is that the text was changed to try to make the Book of Mormon less racist. This change was actually made in the 1840 edition of the Book of Mormon, but was then forgotten (because later editions were based on the 1837 edition) until it was restored in the 1981 edition, where it is noted that "Some minor errors in the text have been perpetuated in past editions of the Book of Mormon. This edition contains corrections that seem appropriate to bring the material into conformity with prepublication manuscripts and early editions edited by the Prophet Joseph Smith." It's doubtful that Joseph Smith had racism in mind when the change was made or other similar verses would have been changed as well.

To Farmer's credit, when he discusses the recent studies that show no relationship between the DNA of "contemporary native peoples of Israel and the Palestinian territories and of contemporary native peoples of the Americas," he states that it's possible that the Lamanites were absorbed by other population groups, and that "The science of historical genetics is young; the evidence is sure to change." However, in the footnotes he only cites the works of those that claim the DNA issue to be problematic.

For anyone interested in the history of Utah, the West, Native Americans, place names, hiking, environmentalism, or any of the other topics covered, there should be something of interest in this book. Even the casual reader can read the parts of the book they find to be of most interest and learn some of the history that has largely been forgotten. It seems that the author has met his goal in writing it - I have a new appreciation for and a renewed interest in the landmarks that make up my surroundings, both the lake and the mountain.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mount Timpanogos, July 20, 2009

By	Brenda Svendsen (Provo, Utah) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I enjoyed this book very much. I have always loved Mount Timpanogos and appreciated the old and newer folklore and fact about it. Thanks Jared!