The conquest of a territory and making it into a homeland is much more than the occupation of that stretch of earth. The creation of a homeland includes removal of the original inhabitants, settling new colonists, renaming significant geographic features, granting importance to different features for specific reasons, and remythologizing the landscape. Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape is an exhaustive study of how Mormons were able to accomplish that task. Farmer’s story takes place in Utah Valley’s culturally rich Mount Timpanogos and Utah Lake. Essentially, his book is a cultural and environmental history of these two Utah landmarks. He tells his readers from the first line of the book that his story is a creation story of a particular landmark, Mount Timpanogos, and he eloquently tells it.
When the Mormons arrived in Utah they blessed their Zion with a strange new spiritual folklore which allowed them to justify their existence in this new land. Farmer details how early Mormons were able to place new values upon the aboriginal populations while simultaneously displacing them. As Farmer makes us aware of this irony, he also demonstrates how local Indian lore about Mount Timpanogos did not exist until the Mormons arrived in Utah. Throughout the book he shows these mythological replacements were repeated across the U.S. landscape, and almost always in the same pattern of settler colonization, government hegemony, Indian displacement, and population replacement.
On Zion’s Mount is broken up into three sections. Each section deconstructs the history and reality of the mountain and loss of the lake. The first section begins with local Indian inhabitation and the first long-term European settlement of the region. The importance of the section is not so much the history of the landmarks, but how systematically Native Americans were removed from the landscape and eventually from the history of the region and subsequently reinserted through the white man’s legends. Through Farmer’s research one can identify some of his dilemmas in tracing the history. One also realizes how Utah Lake had much more of an importance for the Utes, the original inhabitants of the region, and for early Mormons, whose initial survival and later industrial expansion depended upon on the lake. However, by the early twentieth century Utah Lake was no longer a cultural or subsistence focal point for Utes, who were now removed, or for the established Mormons. From this loss of reverence for the lake the new inhabitants shifted their focus to Mount Timpanogos. In the following two sections Farmer elucidates how Timpanogos transforms from a scenic view into a regional site of cultural and symbolic value. Despite the contentious reality of the peak it is amazing to see how Mount Timpanogos continues to serve as a majestic pinnacle for the inhabitants of Utah Valley.
What Farmer does with this book is demonstrate how much of the Native American landscape has nothing to do with actual First Nations cultures, but how European-Americans invented varying forms of culture and landscape based on how they understood First Nations peoples. Throughout European-American societies colorful tales of symbolic deaths of last Indians or forbidden indigenous love affairs tend to obscure the decimation of thousands of indigenous people. Also, these seemingly novel, forlorn tales that countless North American regions incorporate into their landscapes appear to have dubitable origins. The detailed histories that Farmer employs make readers reconsider the Indians’ legends and myths we cherish. Another irony is how many modern tribal entities have come to embrace these legends as their own and, at times, employ them as a way to reassert claims to a specific long-lost space.
This book is interesting on many levels. Primarily, as a future educator and researcher, I feel that it attains a high level of research that we all should strive to achieve in all of our endeavors. Secondarily, the “truths” that we learn throughout life are not necessarily truths, nor are they lies, but they are actually something else all together. Additionally, Farmer duly notes that the LDS Church’s meticulous history collection also made it possible for him to dissect and trace this mythological lineage of Mount Timpanogos, Utah Lake, and LDS Church presence in the region. As a result of this information he describes his book as a counter-memorial (13). Though the book is well researched I feel that Farmer left some of his discussion unresolved concerning the Church and its racialist views of First Nations peoples. I kept hoping that Farmer would take it a step further in making the descendants of these settler populations aware of this shameful past. Needless to say, the complexity of Mormon-Indian relations is so vast and entwined that a paragraph here would not do it justice. My advice is to read the book.
The gem in this book is that the story of Mount Timpanogos is not unique, but rather one that has occurred numerous times throughout every settled region of the Americas. The story is a typical one of settlers colonizing someone else’s land, organizing a territory, displacing the original populations, attaining statehood, and remythologizing the land. But, what is impressive is how Farmer is able to join seemingly disparate histories and academic disciplines to effectively tell this story. As a result this story becomes important to folklore studies. I find On Zion’s Mount one of the most effective interdisciplinary uses of folklore in recent years. For Farmer, folklore is an invaluable set of tools in his research. This book should get students and researchers excited about what they can do with folklore and/or landscape studies. This book would best serve classes on fakelore, history, landscape studies, and contemporary interdisciplinary applications of folklore coupled with other spheres of research in North American universities.
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[Review length: 952 words • Review posted on November 10, 2009]