Plain Facts: An 1887 Treatise on Book of Mormon Geography (Mesoamerica and the Book of Mormon, Part One)

Tracing the events of Book of Mormon events has long occupied the minds of Latter-day Saints. Joseph Smith never presented a revelation on the subject to the Church and the Church’s stance today is that no location has yet been revealed, but speculation of such locations has never been deterred by any leader of the Church. Joseph himself put his toes in the water on a few occasions, offering remarks towards North and Central America as places where Nephites had at some point lived throughout his life.

Throughout time, however, members of the Church who study the internal geography have tended to shift from the Hemispheric model originally supported by the vast membership of the Church (including its leaders) to a more centralized plot of land. As I hope to show with this series of blog posts that will come at various points throughout the following months, Mesoamerica is most generally the land that fits closest to the text when an internal map is constructed, and many individuals have come to similar and widely varying geographies independent of each other.

This first treatise I will discuss was published sometime in 1887, before John Taylor’s death. A small pamphlet entitled Plain Facts for Students of the Book of Mormon, with a Map of the Promised Land made its way through the Church in a limited run. The pamphlet contained four pages of text and one page with a proposed map presenting the unknown author’s ideas that the Book of Mormon took place somewhere between the northernmost parts of South America to Southern Mexico, the Land Desolation being in that area.

This pamphlet was previously discussed by John L. Sorenson and Matthew Roper. John Sorenson stated that while various geographic features were explicitly named and stated in the pamphlet in conjunction with real-world locations, the Hill Cumorah where the Nephites and Jaredites were destroyed (who called the Hill Ramah) remained “unclear.”[1] Sorenson agrees, speculating that “perhaps the final battleground was considered to be there [in Mesoamerica]”[2] according to the views of the anonymous author.

Matthew Roper likewise discussed the location of the Hill Cumorah and final battlegrounds of the Nephites and Jaredites, accurately stating that “All  nineteenth-century  writers  on  Book  of  Mormon  geography  apparently  assumed  that  the  place  where  Joseph  Smith  found the  plates  and  the  hill  where  the  Nephites  met  their  destruction were  identical.”[3] Indeed, as will be seen below, such a reading is entirely possible due to the ambiguous language of this pamphlet that the author likewise viewed the Cumorah of the Book of Mormon (that is, where the Nephites were destroyed) as being in New York while separating it from Ramah, where the Jaredites were destroyed, as being some hill in Mesoamerica.

Overall, I believe that the writer of the pamphlet may have been attempting to place the final battles in Honduras for both the Nephites and Jaredites, but faced a dilemma of overcoming cognitive dissonance wherein tradition conflicted with his overarching viewpoints and he attempted to place Cumorah in New York at the same time.

Regarding Cumorah, the author states on page 3 that

The Book of Mormon tells us that before the year 400, some Nephites made their escape south from Cumorah and some dissenters joined the Lamanite army, and that about the year 400 the Lamanites destroyed the total body of the Nephites. Central America is south of Cumorah and there they must have gone.[4]

Here, the author clearly presents the main lands of the Book of Mormon as being south of the Hill Cumorah, as the book itself describes.

Later, on the same page, the author writes:

And when Omer, the fifth representative of Jared’s dynasty had been warned by the Lord in a dream he departed with his family and did travel many days, and came over and passed by the Hill Shim, and came over by the place where the Nephites were destroyed, and from thence eastward, and came to a place which was called Ablom, near the sea.

Moroni and his father Mormon, the son of Mormon, had lived near this land of Moron, or were born in it… Before the departure of Mormon and Moroni as officers for Cumorah, they were living in said land.[5]

Here, the author clearly links the destruction of the Nephites to being near the Hill Shim and near the land of Moron, as described by the Book of Mormon. In fact, a footnote states that “Desolation is west from hill Shim; Destruction east,” [6] showing that the location where the Nephites were destroyed is seen as immediately east of the Hill Shim, according to the author’s reading of the ambiguous phraseology.

In a previous paragraph, quoting the Book of Mormon, the author similarly puts the land of Moron as being near the land “which is called Desolation by the Nephites,”[7] clearly marked on his included map as being in Honduras (see Ether 7:6). Thus, Desolation, Moron, Shim, and presumably the city of Ablom (being further east) are all linked in close proximity.

However, the most ambiguity appears to come from a later statement made in the pamphlet:

[When Mosiah I was made king in Zarahemla circa 320 B.C.,] Coriantumr was still living. Therefore, the destruction of the Jaredites was recent and had happened not by the hill of Cumorah as generally reported, but over 1500 miles southward: Not far from the hill Shim.[8]

Here, the author appears to be distancing the Hill Ramah (where the Jaredites were destroyed according to Ether 15) from the Hill Cumorah in New York. However, because the Book of Mormon explicitly labels that Ramah and Cumorah are indeed one and the same hill (see Ether 15:11, cf. Mormon 6:6), I personally find it odd that the author of this pamphlet would claim that Ramah was in Honduras, by the Hill Shim and the Land of Moron, while Cumorah was in New York while still being near the Hill Shim and the Land of Moron. Hence, the conflicted reports can be seen in light of the author’s potential cognitive dissonance as he attempted to wed tradition and his new findings.

It could also be true that the author is distancing the hill where the gold plates were buried by Moroni to later be found by Joseph Smith from the hill where the Nephites and Jaredites had been destroyed (the Ramah-Cumorah of the Book of Mormon text); the author’s conflicting statements regarding Cumorah – such as his explicitly linking of both Ramah and Cumorah through their geographic connection to Shim and Moron compared to his latter statement that Cumorah was in New York – could be explained in this context, but there is simply no way to know if the author did indeed have two separate Cumorah hills in mind that he attempted to describe clearly (his text is, after all, still ambiguous).

Table 1 – Geographic References to Three Sites

	Ramah	Cumorah	Nephite Extinction
Near Shim?	Yes	No	Yes (East)
Near Moron?	Yes	No	Yes
Near Desolation?	Yes	Unclear	Yes (East)
North of Central America?	Assumed	Yes (by over 1,500 miles)	Yes

 

If the latter is true, this pamphlet is, perhaps, the earliest published statement regarding the location of the Nephite and Jaredite destruction being south of the hill in New York now called Cumorah.

However, because the latter cannot be verified (at least at the present time), the first published reference for a Cumorah south of New York appeared in 1917 by a man named  Louis E. Hills in Independence, Missouri. Hills, a member of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now Community of Christ), published his own findings in response to a hemispheric map published by his Church that he found to be less than convincing. While he likely had no idea that Plain Facts had even been published, his work drew more attention throughout the years (though not likely from members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose scholars were coming to similar conclusions as Hills independently during the same time period), leaving Plain Facts in the shadows of library and university archives.

While the map presented in Plain Facts differs greatly from L. E. Hills, John Sorenson, V. Garth Norman, and others, it presents one of the earliest maps based on the Book of Mormon text. It remains unclear to what extent cognitive dissonance played on the author’s locating the Hill Cumorah, however. Because the Church’s official stance is that no Book of Mormon location has been revealed (not even excepting Cumorah),[9] separating tradition from Book of Mormon geography continues to be an important step in locating the events of the Book of Mormon, and doing so can help solve issues that the author may have faced in trying to find the location that best fits the text of the Book of Mormon.

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[1] John L. Sorenson, The Geography of Book of Mormon Events: A Source Book (Provo, UT: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1990), 135.

[2] Sorenson, 137.

[3] Matthew Roper, "Limited Geography and the Book of Mormon: Historical Antecedents and Early Interpretations," Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 16, no. 2 (2004) , 254.

[4] Plain Facts for Students of the Book of Mormon, with a Map of the Promised Land (n.p., [ca. 1887]), 3. Emphasis added.

[5] Plain Facts, 3. Emphasis added.

[6] Plain Facts, 3, note ||.

[7] Plain Facts, 3; see also his attached map, point D.

[8] Plain Facts, 4. Emphasis added.

[9] See “Book of Mormon Geography,” Gospel Topics Essays.