<p>Shrouded in the lore of legendary Indians, Mt. Timpanogos beckons the urban populace of Utah. And yet, no &amp;#x201C;Indian&amp;#x201D; legend graced the mount until Mormon settlers conjured it-once they had displaced the local Indians, the Utes, from their actual landmark, Utah Lake. <i>On Zion&amp;#x2019;s Mount</i> tells the story of this curious shift. It is a quintessentially American story about the fraught process of making oneself &amp;#x201C;native&amp;#x201D; in a strange land. But it is also a complex tale of how cultures confer meaning on the environment-how they create homelands.</p> <p>Only in Utah did Euro-American settlers conceive of having a homeland in the Native American sense-an endemic spiritual geography. They called it &amp;#x201C;Zion.&amp;#x201D; Mormonism, a religion indigenous to the United States, originally embraced Indians as &amp;#x201C;Lamanites,&amp;#x201D; or spiritual kin. <i>On Zion&amp;#x2019;s Mount</i> 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 &amp;#x201C;Indian&amp;#x201D; meaning.</p> <p>This same pattern was repeated across the United States. Jared Farmer reveals how settlers and their descendants (the new natives) bestowed &amp;#x201C;Indian&amp;#x201D; 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.</p>