Losing a Lake, Making a Mountain Matthew J. Grow (bio) Jared Farmer . On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. 455 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $29.95. In this engaging book, Jared Farmer writes a biography of two linked landforms, Utah Lake and Mount Timpanogos. To the nineteenth-century Native Americans and Mormon pioneers who briefly coexisted in Utah Valley (home to Provo, about forty miles south of Salt Lake City), Utah Lake was of prime importance. Mount Timpanogos was, at the time, an undistinguished part of the Wasatch Mountains, the westernmost range of the Rocky Mountains. By contrast, contemporary residents avert their eyes from Utah Lake and define their regional identity through Mount Timpanogos. Landmark creation, Farmer suggests, was a zero-sum game; as the mountain rose into prominence, the lake (along with the Native Americans who once lived on its shores) receded from view. On Zion's Mount, recipient of the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, uses the cultural displacement of the lake by the mountain, as well as the literal replacement of Native Americans by Mormons, to examine the interaction of religion, identity, place, and memory. Farmer's central achievement is his persuasive and careful demonstration of the process by which cultural needs and values shape how people visualize, give meaning to, and relate to the natural world. Farmer's imaginative and idiosyncratic study is difficult to categorize. It fits into the genre, for instance, of recent micro-histories that use specific landmarks (such as W. Barksdale Maynard's Walden Pond) to investigate broader themes in environmental and cultural history.1 His book also contributes to scholarly debates on the history of Native American-white conflicts and place-making in the American West and to the literature on the relationship between Mormons and American culture. Lamenting that American historians have largely ignored—"whether through prejudice or indifference"—both Utah and Mormon history, Farmer justifies his choice of landmarks by arguing that Mormons represent a unique vantage point because they were simultaneously "typical and exceptional" (p. 14). Jan Shipps, a prominent scholar of Mormonism, has used the metaphor of a donut to explain the missing place of Utah and Mormonism [End Page 289] in Western historiography. Farmer prefers a geographic metaphor: "The Great Basin is that large piece of North America that has no outlet to the sea. Its runoff flows inward, where it pools and evaporates. So it is with Utah history" (p. 14). He convincingly demonstrates that it need not be so, as his study constantly spins outward not only to place local events in regional and national contexts but also to use the local to reshape larger narratives. Farmer divides his book into three primary parts, telling different components of the same story from regional, local, and national perspectives. Section one, "Liquid Antecedents," describes the geographic terrain and traces the interactions between Mormons and Native Americans in nineteenth-century Utah. He richly portrays the arid Great Basin and Utah Lake, the only freshwater lake in the Basin's lowlands, where fishing drew to its shores Native Americans who referred to themselves as Fish-Eaters, Lake People, or the Timpanogos, and later became known as the Utes. The Timpanogos established semi-permanent villages at the lake and imbued it with spiritual and cultural meaning. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, they became integrated into Spanish trading networks in pelts and Indian slaves. The Spanish introduction of the horse further transformed Indian culture, allowing some native groups to prey on others. While horses expanded the Timpanogos Indians' geographic reach, most continued to define themselves, at least in part, by their relationship to Utah Lake. Like the Utes, Mormons developed an unusual emphasis on place, as they sacralized America as the historical site of the Garden of Eden and the Israelite civilizations described in the Book of Mormon, as well as the future place of Jesus Christ's Second Coming. After their trek west, beginning in 1847, they settled in the Great Basin, which Brigham Young and other leaders lauded not only for its spiritual benefits, but also for its salubrious environment of dry...
Read full abstract
Jul 1, 2018
Gary Topping 
Open Access
