On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians & the American Landscape - History Book Exploring Mormon-Indian Relations & Western Landscapes | Perfect for American History Studies & Cultural Research

As a history teacher and a Mormon and a voracious reader, I love discovering new books that overlay religion and tradition and history. Even when the “new book” came out in 2008. One of my favorite history professors recommended this book in passing. The professor was using his book as an example of how our views of geography change according to our own perspectives and needs, even when the land itself doesn't. As a longtime resident of Utah and a history teacher myself, I was interested in the subject and checked the book out.

What I found was a fascinating look at how we create the landscape around us, based on our culture, philosophy, and needs. It's also about how legends are created and passed on from generation to generation, including some that I had heard growing up, and even passed on to my own sons. The book is focused on the Utah Valley—the valley just to the south of my home in Salt Lake City—where the city of Provo and the Mormon Church-owned Brigham Young University is located. Utah Valley was historically the home of bands of Ute Indians, who used the ample fishing grounds of Utah Lake and the Provo River to build up their food supplies. The valley was visited in 1776 by Fathers Dominguez and Escalante, who were trying to find a convenient route from Santa Fe to Monterrey, and is described as a an oasis in the desert of the Great Basin by Farmer.The focus of the Indians, of the Mountain Men, and of the early Mormon settlers in the 1840s, was always on Utah Lake. For food, for the streams that fed into it (which could be diverted for irrigation), for the center of civilization. Despite that focus, Brigham Young (president of the Mormon Church, and first territorial governor) didn't want his people to settle in Utah Valley, fearing it would provoke violence with the Utes. Not all of Brigham's flock were sheep however, and soon enough there were Mormons settling along the shores of Utah Lake, and a war erupted between the Utes and the trespassers.The other two sections of the book document a tectonic shift (almost literally) in the thinking about Utah Valley, as the focus slides away from Utah Lake, and to a mountain located to the east, Mount Timpanogos. Mount Timpanogos is a mountain I've known since I was a child, and has always been one of my dad's favorite mountains along the Wasatch Front—the last range of the Rocky Mountains before entering the Great Basin. 90 percent of Utah's population lives in a strip of cities clustered along the Wasatch Front, including Utah Valley and Mount Timpanogos. The intriguing thing according to Farmer is that early maps of the area don't even show Mount Timpanogos as a distinct mountain, and in fact it may not even be one—but a "massif," an area of uplift that includes a lot of rock and several peaks, but isn't necessarily its own landform like a mountain. In fact, Mount Nebo, a mountain looming at the south end of Utah Valley is taller than Timpanogos, and more impressive in most ways—but has mostly retreated from memory as Timpanogos has received better PR over the last century.So how did Timpanogos become the mountain so revered by so many Utahns? Why, in a region so arid and so dependent on water as the source of life, did attention and devotion shift from the waters of Utah Lake to the barren rock of Mount Timpanogos? That's the real story, and where Farmer spends the other 200 pages of the book. The answer is complicated, but includes the religious refuge that the Mormons were seeking in the Rocky Mountains; it includes a promoter who "sold" Timpanogos as a destination for hikers from across the country; it includes Robert Redford discovering the lush canyon behind Timpanogos and creating the Sundance Resort (and eventually, the film festival); and it includes creating a Native American legend that would raise the profile of this previously unnoticed mountain to timeless status.

This was a fascinating read, and I learned much more than I thought I would. I have a love for Utah's geography and history, and as a resident this may be more interesting for me than readers outside of Utah—but the larger part of the book is really about how we construct our own ideas about where we live. Our homes, our landscapes, and how we view our own history as Americans. If you've ever given a second thought to how you ended up where you are today, On Zion's Mount is an excellent place to start.