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Datum: Sonntag, den 7. März 2004, um 16:06 Uhr

Betrifft: Suche nach Oz und Zarahemla

Salt Lake Tribune
7.3.2004

Zarahemla expedition proved a perilous adventure

Will Bagley
HISTORY MATTERS

Visiting Central America to search for lost "Book of Mormon Lands" recently turned deadly when thugs murdered a prominent Ogden architect in the highlands of Guatemala. Until that tragic event, such tourism seemed harmless, somewhat akin to going to Kansas to look for Oz, but the history of the search for Zarahemla, the long-lost Nephite capital, shows it’s a lot more perilous than you might think.
Latter-day Saints believe that the Book of Mormon is the ancient historical record of Semitic bands that began migrating from the Middle East to the Americas in submarines and ships not long after the fall of the Tower of Babel. They became a variety of peoples including the Jaredites, Nephites, Mulekites, Jacobites, Josephites, Zoramites, Lemuelites, Ishmaelites, Zeniffites, Amlicites, Amalekites and, of course, the Lamanites, whom Mormons said were the ancestors of America’s Indians last time I checked.
Joseph Smith, the American prophet who brought forth the Book of Mormon in upstate New York in 1830, said he translated it from a set of gold plates inscribed with a language called Reformed Egyptian. He found the plates not far from his family’s farm, where they had been buried after a great battle in which the Lamanites killed off the last of the Nephites.
Both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young thought these ancient cultures ranged all over the Western Hemisphere, but the actual geography in the Book of Mormon is, well, downright confusing. The general descriptions of lakes, forests, cities, wildernesses and narrow necks of land often make it seem like all the action is happening in upstate New York, but modern Mormon experts now argue it all took place on a couple of acres in the old Mayan kingdoms of today’s Mexico and Guatemala.
But where?
That’s what Benjamin Cluff Jr. proposed finding out in 1900.
Cluff became principal of what was known as Brigham Young Academy in 1892, the day the school moved into the magnificent building that now houses the Provo Library. Charismatic and strikingly handsome at 34, Cluff was the only member of the faculty with a college degree, having graduated from the University of Michigan in mathematics, a fact that made Utah Valley mogul Jesse Knight suspect he might be "one of those eastern intellectuals."
Local zealots feared Cluff was "dangerous" when he hired several non-Mormons and encouraged graduates to attend Harvard, Michigan and Stanford, but Gordon B. Hinckley’s father thought he was a man to be reckoned with -- "a good organizer, fearless, and aggressive."
Cluff was also a devoted believer in the Book of Mormon, and after the academy sponsored a symposium on the book’s geography in 1899, he began organizing an expedition to Colombia to seek the land of the Nephites.
The next spring, Cluff set out on a 4,000-mile wagon trek with almost two dozen students and teachers. The "Zarahemla Expedition" started out with parades and banquets at Spanish Fork, Santaquin, Payson, Nephi and Fountain Green.
But at the Mexican border the expedition began to unravel.
While waiting for permission from Mexican officials, Cluff married a teacher at the church’s Juarez Academy in Colonia Diaz, making her his third wife at a time when the LDS Church was pretending it had abandoned polygamy. Students resented the harsh discipline Cluff imposed, and one professorial assistant went on a three-day drunk in Nogales and sold his mule to buy liquor.
Apostle Heber J. Grant got wind of these shenanigans, investigated and reported to Salt Lake that Cluff was claiming he was on a "special mission" that would discover and translate more gold plates. Though Cluff and a few others continued on to Colombia, that was basically the end of the quest for Zarahemla.
It was also pretty much the end of Cluff’s career, though he did persuade church officials to rename the school Brigham Young University before he retired to a Mexican rubber plantation with his three brides.
Next week: True Book of Mormon geography revealed!

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