In part, On Zion's Mount is the story of how Mormons made a mountain out of a ridgeline. Mount Timpanogos, a granite massif overlooking the town of Provo, Utah, never used to be a mountain. In fact, as Farmer shows, the conspicuousness of the landform is a relatively recent phenomenon. To the peoples who first inhabited the area below the massif, the lake—now known as Utah Lake—and its associated rivers were far more important. The lake supplied the people's sustenance and their names—including Timpanogos, a name that referred to the “rocky river” now known as the Provo River, in which some groups of people fished (26). This aquatic orientation is striking partly because it is so different from the montane orientation now common in the region, and it leads Jared Farmer to ask, “What caused a mountainous space to become the mountain-place called ‘Timp’?” (3). Farmer begins with the geologic history of the Great Basin, beginning in the Pleistocene epoch when Lake Bonneville covered much of the region. As Lake Bonneville receded, it left a number of smaller lakes—including the Great Salt Lake and the freshwater Utah Lake.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, inhabitants of the Great Basin were gradually drawn into trade relationships with the Spanish, exchanging pelts and slaves for horses. These trade relationships encouraged modifications in the Indians' social systems, creating the ethnic groups we now know as Utes, Paiutes, Shoshones, and Goshutes. However, Farmer writes, most groups “modified but did not abandon their place-based economy” (35). When Anglo-Americans came to what is now known as Utah Valley, they (like the Indians) saw the lake as the most prominent geographical feature. The water source supplied Mormon settlers with food in the form of fish and irrigated their crops—and it became a point of contention with the local Indians. Farmer includes a detailed and unflinching account of the bloody conflicts that ensued in the Utah Valley, laying out the tangled web of Mormon, federal, and tribal entities that negotiated for control of the land and its resources. The end result was removal of the Indian people from the valley. The final step was what Farmer calls the “desertification of Zion,” in which “post-pioneer Mormons reimagined Utah's land of lakes as a desert, a place where life-giving aquatic resources—and the natives who once used them—did not belong” (105).

Various cultural shifts over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries combined to effect this erasure of the once-massive lake from the cultural map and its replacement with a once-indistinct mountain. One man figures most prominently in the emergence of Mount Timpanogos: The circus had P. T. Barnum, baseball had Bill Veeck, and Mount Timpanogos had Eugene Roberts. Roberts, who eventually became the athletics director at Brigham Young University, was a tireless promoter of “Timp.” As Farmer points out, Roberts could not have accomplished the feat of making Mount Timpanogos a landmark without help from various American cultural trends: after the Civil War, a “European vogue of alpine aesthetics” took hold in America (141), and in 1878 Timpanogos was (erroneously) determined to be the highest mountain in the Wasatch Range (169–170). Roberts capitalized on these and other cultural currents, promoting the “Big Hike,” in which BYU students and community members ascended the peak en masse; composing a fake legend of an Indian hunter and his thwarted rescue of the maiden Utahna, who willingly sacrificed herself to the (invented) mountain god Timpanogos; and encouraging residents of the Utah Valley to “see” Timpanogos and make it the defining feature of their landscape. As he interprets the history of Timpanogos, Farmer tells the stories of the Americanization of the LDS Church; the rise of hiking in the United States; the economic transition of the Wasatch Front from rural to urban and production to consumption; and the increasing popularity of “Indianist” (as opposed to authentically Indian) place names, narratives, and performances.

While Farmer's story is mostly about Mormons, that religious fact is largely incidental to the narrative. Farmer argues that the Latter-day Saints' “symbolic tradition of mountain veneration” (141) contributed to their idiosyncratic perception of the landscape and that “through [the Mount Timpanogos Temple], local Mormon residents began to invest the landform with sacredness” (210). While it may be true that the Latter-day Saints have been more likely than other Americans to sacralize the physical landscape, Euro-Americans have a long tradition of reading the land through a spiritual lens and finding in it messages of both good and evil. Had the accidents of history been different, Farmer might have found himself writing about Methodists, or Baptists, or Mennonites.

In a subtler way, however, On Zion's Mount is shot through with religion. As Keith Basso wrote in Wisdom Sits in Places (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), “sense of place—or, as I would prefer to say, sensing of place—is a form of cultural activity[,] a kind of imaginative experience, a species of involvement with the natural and social environment, a way of appropriating portions of the earth. … Experienced … as … a ‘mode of communion with a total way of living[,]’ sense of place may gather unto itself a potent religious force” (143, 145). It is this sense of place—its creation and change over time—that Farmer traces in On Zion's Mount. As Farmer puts it, “In the end, this book is about understanding home. It shows how settlers gave meaning to the lands they settled, and how their progeny developed an attachment to place—in other words, how nonnatives became neonatives” (16).

Farmer's incisive cultural analysis will make this book an interesting read for many scholars, and a useful model for those interested in cultural understandings of place. While it offers little that is new about Mormonism per se, the book provides a novel angle of vision on the ways in which Mormons came to experience the Utah Valley as “home.”