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

Product Description: Published for the first time, these early writings of renowned anthropologist Frances Leon Quintana boldly detail the exploitation and the gradual present day recovery of the Southern Utes Indians following the American conquest of their ancestral lands in 1877 and their subsequent treatment at the hands of the U...read more

Product Description: Using government documents, archives, and local histories, Simmons has painstakingly separated the often repeated and often incorrect hearsay from more accurate accounts of the Ute Indians. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: During the nineteenth century, Americans looked to the eventual civilization and assimilation of Native Americans through a process of removal, reservation, and directed culture change. Neither Wolf Nor Dog explores the experiences of three groups--Northern Utes, Hupas, and Tohono O'odhams--with settled reservation and allotted agriculture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries...read more

Product Description: The story of the Meeker Massacre and Thornburgh battle.

Product Description: Massacre is a highly readable and well-researched account of a violent outbreak of a party of White River Utes on the western slope of the Rockies during the autumn of 1879. . . . Written in an exciting narrative style which rivals that of a good novel."—Kliatt

Product Description: "Massacre is a highly readable and well-researched account of a violent outbreak of a party of White River Utes on the western slope of the Rockies during the autumn of 1879. . . . Written in an exciting narrative style which rivals that of a good novel."—Kliatt