How Theorists Think Regarding Their Predetermined Models – Part III

In trying to limit the location of the Lamanite people in the early days of the Church in order to justify his land of promise model, Rod L. Meldrum, as reported in our last post, was quoted as writing on his website:

7. D&C 54:8 states “And thus you [Newel Knight] shall take your journey into the regions westward, unto the land of Missouri, unto the borders of the Lamanites.” Even if Joseph was confused (which he wasn’t) do you think that GOD is confused about where the remnants of the Lamanites are located?”

It is always interesting when someone today tries to limit the scope of what was generally known and understood throughout the realm of the early church and the directions the Lord gave to his early Saints.
Orson Pratt, in a talk in the new Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, on July 18, 1875 (Journal of Discourses, vol 18, pp 166-167) said:

“…and the voice of warning went forth to the Gentile nations, that God, in his mercy and power, should commence a work among this remnant of the house of Joseph, that wander as a multitude of nations upon the face of this continent. Recollect what Jacob said, concerning the seed of Joseph, in the 48th chapter of Genesis—they were to become a multitude of nations. They never were a multitude of nations in Palestine, neither in Asia, Europe, nor Africa, and if the prophecy is not fulfilled upon the great western continent, it will not be fulfilled at all. But it has been fulfilled on the continent of America; and we behold throughout the whole of its vast extent, from the frozen regions of the north, to Cape Horn in the south, a multitude of nations. Who are they? They are principally the remnants of one tribe, the remnants of the tribe of Joseph, and they are a multitude of nations in the midst of the earth.”

Elder Pratt goes on in this talk to name “The Indians, the Lamanites, who will take hold in this great latter-day work” and refers to Moses who saw this continent in a vision and called it “the ends of the earth” and “the land of everlasting hills” which was promised to Joseph—to Ephraim and Menasseh for Joseph’s portion of the blessings pronounced upon the tribes. He also quoted Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, who referred to this land as “a land afar off” and a land of “the everlasting hills” which, by the way, refers to the longest cordillera of a continuous mountain chain in the world that begins in the southern tip of South America, moves northward through the Andes, through Central America and Mexico, up across the United States and Canada in the Rocky Mountains, and to the Aleutians in the tip of Alaska—truly, a “land of everlasting hills.”
Note that Elder Pratt refers to both North and South America (“western hemisphere”) as the American continent—a word that, in the 19th century, was used as Noah Webster describes it: ”a great extent of land, not disjoined or interrupted by a sea; a connected tract of land of great extent; as the Eastern and Western continent.” A continent, then, meant the entire western hemisphere, that is, North, Central and South America, which is “a great extent of land not disjoined or interrupted by a sea.” The western hemisphere, at the time was called the Western Continent. Thus, it can only be concluded that the Lamanites, as understood in the early days of the Church, as now, occupied the entire western hemisphere—what is now referred to as the North American and the South American continents, but in the 1800s as the Western continent as Elder Pratt called it.

(See the next post on How Theorists Think - Part IV)