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

by Farmer, Jared

• ISBN13: 9780674027671
• ISBN10: 0674027671
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-04-30
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

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 Zionrs"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 Zionrs"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.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
The Great Basin	p. xi
The eastern Great Basin in the 1850s	p. xii
The southern Wasatch Front in the twentieth century	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
Liquid Antecedents
Ute Genesis, Mormon Exodus	p. 19
Brigham Young and the Famine of the Fish-Eaters	p. 54
The Desertification of Zion	p. 105
Making a Mountain: Alpine Play
Rocky Mountain Saints	p. 141
Hiking into Modern Times	p. 175
Sundance and Suburbia	p. 210
Marking a Mountain: Indian Play
Renaming the Land	p. 241
The Rise and Fall of a Lover's Leap	p. 282
Performing a Remembered Past	p. 328
Notes	p. 381
Acknowledgments	p. 441
Index	p. 445
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