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

by Jared Farmer

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674036710
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	07/01/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	472
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jared Farmer is Assistant Professor of History at The State University of New York at Stony Brook, and author of Glen Canyon Dammed: Inventing Lake Powell and the Canyon Country.

Table of Contents

Contents List of Illustrations ix The Great Basin xi The eastern Great Basin in the 1850s xii The southern Wasatch Front in the twentieth century xiii Introduction 1 Part I. Liquid Antecedents 1. Ute Genesis, Mormon Exodus 00 2. Brigham Young and the Famine of the Fish-Eaters 00 3. The Desertification of Zion 000 Part II. Making a Mountain: Alpine Play 4. Rocky Mountain Saints 000 5. Hiking into Modern Times 000 6. Sundance and Suburbia 000 Part III. Marking a Mountain: Indian Play 7. Renaming the Land 000 8. The Rise and Fall of a Lover's Leap 000 9. Performing a Remembered Past 000 Notes 000 Acknowledgments 000 Index 000

What People are Saying About This

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.

Clyde A. Milner

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)

David Rich Lewis

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

David Rich

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)

Richard Lyman Bushman

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

Elliott West

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)

Richard Lyman

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)

Alan Taylor

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)

Richard White

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

Francis Parkman Prize Committee

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

Philip Deloria

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)

Virginia Scharff

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)

Clyde A. Milner II

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