Two Cumorahs?

A question many readers will have been asking themselves is a sound and necessary one: how did Joseph Smith obtain the gold plates in upstate New York if the final battleground of the Nephites was in Mesoamerica?

Let's review where the final battle took place. The Book of Mormon makes clear that the demise of both Jaredites and Nephites took place near the narrow neck of land. Yet New York is thousands of miles away from any plausible configuration that could be described as this narrow neck. Thus the scripture itself rules out the idea that the Nephites perished near Palmyra.

Then how did the plates get from the battleground to New York? We have no definitive answer, but we can construct a plausible picture. Mormon reports that he buried all the records in his custody at the Hill Cumorah of the final battle except for certain key golden plates (Mormon 6:6). Those from which Joseph Smith translated, he entrusted to his son Moroni. As late as 35 years afterward, Moroni was still adding to those records (Moroni 10:1). He never does tell us where he intended to deposit them, nor where he was when he sealed then, up (Moroni 10:34). The most obvious way to get the plates to New York state would have been for somebody to carry them there. Moroni could have done so himself during those final, lonely decades.

WouId Moroni have been able to survive a trip of several thousand miles through strange peoples and lands, if he did transport the record? Such a journey would be no more surprising than the trip by Lehi's party over land and by sea halfway around the globe. As a matter of fact, we do have a striking case of a trip much like the one Moroni may have made. In the mid-sixteenth century, David Ingram, a shipwrecked English sailor, walked in 11 months through completely strange Indian territory from Tampico, Mexico, to the St. John River, at the present border between Maine and Canada. His remarkable journey would have been about the same distance as Moroni's and over essentially the same route. So Moroni's getting the plates to New York even under his own power seems feasible.

. . .

Cumorah must be part of the northern or western extremity of the Tuxtla Mountains, some 90 miles from the narrow pass and near the huge site of Tres Zapotes. The Tuxtla ("place of the macaws") region has been described by artist-author Miguel Covarrubias as "a land of unprecedented fertility, watered in all directions by streams, water falls, and lakes." Mormon called it "a land of many waters, rivers, and fountains" (Mormon 6:4). A thousand years before, that area had been key in the late Olmec settlement system, stem, no doubt for the same reason. This zone, exceedingly fertile because of rich volcanic soil and abundant rainfall, could probably supply by itself the food needs of the concentrated Nephite forces. (Food was an increasing problem, due to the social and military turmoil, Moroni 9:16 tells us.) The "advantage" the Nephites thought they might enjoy there could have been due to the broken terrain, when Mormon must have known intimately. Or possibly the Nephites thought the place would be fateful for the Lamanites because of superstitious beliefs or traditions concerning the end of the Jaredites on that very spot. But why would the Lamanites allow a period of years for the Nephites to get ready? In the first place, they would understand from their knowledge of regional geography that the Nephites had no place to retreat beyond Cumorah, for behind them lay only the huge estuary of Alvarado (the Ripliancum of the Jaredites) and the tangle of rivers and swamps known in modem times as "La Mixtequilla." So both sides knew this wouId be a decisive battle between the ancient rivals. Another reason the Lamanites would be agreeable to this place and appointed time may have been that they needed a period to build up their own forces for the climactic dash, for they were a long distance from their home base. ln any case, the agreed site was deeper into the now-limited territory under Nephite control, so the Lamanites had nothing to lose.

. . .

Could Mesoamerica have been the scene for a war on the impressive scale the Book of Mormon relates? The central Mexican chronicler, lxtlilxochitl, reported of the Tultecas around AD 1060 that in a three-year war, 5,600,000 were slain on both sides. Even allowing him considerable room for exaggeration, we are left with little doubt that the battle at Cumorah was within the realm of the plausible in Mesoamerican terms.

Two dozen Nephite stragglers survived among the corpses. In the night they made their way to the top of nearby hill Cumorah, from which they could look down on the slaughter-ground. Upwards of 600,000 must have lain dead there (counting the women and children of the Nephites, plus Lamanite casualties). The most likely candidate for that hill is Cerro El Vigia, over 3,000 feet high, which lies at the northwestern extremity of the Tuxtlas Mountains.