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

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 Mt. Timpanogos with “Indian” meaning.

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

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.

Review :
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 20080628 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 20090301 Just as Mt. Timpanogos is more than a simple landmark, this book is far more than the history of a mountain peak...Farmer weaves together multiple historical narratives to produce a book that is both intellectually rigorous and pleasurably accessible...This work is a study in American and Mormon pioneering and Mormon-Indian relations even as it serves to explicate the intricate relationship among geography, memory, and societal construction in the years following that initial pioneering...He has written a book that will engage historians of multiple fields and will make significant contributions to multiple historiographies. -- John P. Bowes American Historical Review 20081201 This splendid volume is a tour-de-force of historical scholarship that all lovers of Utah history will want to read...Ambitious, imaginative, theoretically sophisticated, and highly engaging, this volume tells the story of the creation of Mount Timpanogos as a cultural landmark and the concomitant fading of Utah Lake and the Lake Utes from most Utahns' historical memory...This book's breadth, wit, eloquence, and creative reinterpretation of local history in light of key developments in American cultural history make it a must-read. -- Brian Q. Cannon Utah Historical Quarterly 20090101 On Zion's Mount is an important book for historians of the American West and the nation as a whole. It offers an engaging look at how twentieth-century American popular culture configures, and then reconfigures, place as the stage upon which all history takes place. -- Richard G. Francaviglia Journal of American History 20090301