On Zion's Mount

Shrouded in the lore of legendary Indians, Mt. Timpanogos beckons the urban populace of Utah. And yet, no &quote;Indian&quote; 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 &quote;native&quote; 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 &quote;Zion.&quote; Mormonism, a religion indigenous to the United States, originally embraced Indians as &quote;Lamanites,&quote; 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 &quote;Indian&quote; meaning.This same pattern was repeated across the United States. Jared Farmer reveals how settlers and their descendants (the new natives) bestowed &quote;Indian&quote; 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.