The battle Between Mesoamerica and the Great Lakes – Part II

Continuing with the article a reader sent in regarding the “Book of Mormon Wars” website. Numerous comments are being leveled by the Great Lakes website against Mesoamerica, most of which seem legitimate, however, the nature of the attacks are to show that Mesoamerics’s demise allows the Land Great Lakes to become the Land of Promise location. Nothing could be further from the truth. 
    In this post, we will cover some of thee separate and, at times, insignificant points, but points that do cast questions on the Mesoamerican claim:

Deep sea ocean going vessels rarely ventured into unknown rivers for fear of bottoming-out, running aground, or being driven into shores by unknown winds

1. Lehi’s ship could not navigate inland to an interior Great Lakes, such as Lake Erie, to be the Sea West where Lehi is said to have landed, to be called the land of first inheritance (Alma 22:28: “and on the west in the land of Nephi, in the place of their fathers' first inheritance, and thus bordering along by the seashore”). In the early days of the Americas, no inland river was deep enough to sail up in an ocean-going vessel, nor did any river connect to the Great Lakes. That this can be done today is only because the Corps of Engineers have dredged out the Mississippi and the Canadian engineers having built an access canal around Montreal’s Lachine Rapids to allow shipping beyond Montreal to reach the Great Lakes; however Lake Ontario is at 243-feet, and falls 226-feet to Montreal—it took $1 Billion in 1954 building elevation locks to overcome that difference and the overall 557 feet difference between the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. Nor was there any connection between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi or any other inland river that reached the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico.
2. Hagoth’s ships could not navigate from the area of Lake Erie to the ocean, nor would there have been any reason to take Hagoth’s ships northward since the voyage would have been only a few miles to the Niagara River which drops 557 feet to the St. Lawrence River. If Hagoth’s ships sailed west, across Lake Erie, then access into Canada would have been worthwhile, but the scriptural record says they went northward (Alma 63:6-7).
3. From the Great Lakes (Lake Erie), bodies dumped into the Sidon River, to reach the ocean or sea, would have had to travel 1563 miles and it is doubtful they could have gotten past the shallows at Montreal, but even if so, how would the Nephites have known that was where the Sidon River flowed to and that any bodies dumped into it would travel that far?
4. If the Mississippi is claimed to be the Sidon River, how did any bodies get to the Mississippi from Lake Erie, the Great Lakes Sea West? There is no direct waterway to the Mississippi.

The Genesee River. Note how shallow it is, and runs through deep canyons or gorges through shallow valleys. Hardly a sign of a once large lake or sea

5. The Great Lakes uses the Genesee (Zinochasaa) River as their Sea East, but the Genesee is a 67-mile long river and always was a river, and is  a tributary of Ontario Lake. It was the western branch of the preglacial system—after the ice age, the glacial system flowed through the narrow Genesee Valley and diverted into the Susquehanna River system, leaving a small creek today; however, in its heyday, it was not deep, and as it retreated it left rocks and glancial debris along its path, rerouting the river to its present course.
    The sides of the rocky gorge rises as high as 600 feet, suggesting a very deep area at one time, however, it is only 1000-feet wide at its 17-mile long middle showing at one time the river was nothing more than a river in antiquity, and it is referred to by the Senecas as “Casconchiagon” meaning “River of Many Falls,” with three main falls along its course, dropping some 312 feet in the gorge.

Note how narrow the backup is of the Genesee Dam, creating a storage area, but not a lake as almost all dams do

    Since we are dealing with a river and not a lake, let alone a sea, a dam was built across the river beginning in 1948. The Mount Morris Dam created a backup spillway, but not a lake because of the topography, and because of it being a river with confined flow area, the dam had to be engineered with special barriers across the 1028-foot, 238-high dam to withstand the massive loads created with high surface water velocities combine with heavy surface winds and flow.
    It should be noted that the Genesee River flows through three shallow valleys but each is cut deep into the solid rock floor down several feet as the river cut through, some as deep as 200 to 300 feet. This is not indicative of a lake or a large body of water, but of a shallow river moving with great force along its path, cutting downward into the rock.
6. The Land Southward is not completely surrounded by water except for a narrow neck of land (Alma 22:32).
7. There is no narrow neck of land that would cause inhabitants of the area in 600 B.C. to 34 A.D. to actually see it as a narrow neck and call it a narrow neck of land.

Olive’s Land of Promise showing the tiny area of her Land Northward. Yellow arrow points to so-called narrow neck of land, the Batavia moraine
8. The Land Northward is very limited  between the proposed neck area (Lake Tonawanda and Lake Ontario, a distance of less than 25 miles, yet the descriptions of the battles and movement northward ("as far northward" suggesting some distance). If the Land Southward extended for some 200 miles north to south in the Great Lakes Model, why would the Jaredites, with only a land 25 miles north to south want to not enter the Land Southward and preserve it for hunting? After all, Moroni tells us the Land Northward was covered with inhabitants” (Ether 10:21), especially when we consider that the Jaredites had 2,000,000 people in Coriantumr’s army alone killed, and the war continued, suggesting a population at this point of some 5 million or more Jaredites—in a land that was only twenty-five miles north to south?
9. Moroni calls the area of the Jaredites “this north country”  (Ether 1:1). A country that is limited to 25 miles north to south, in a land the scriptural record suggests is far longer north to south than it is wide, east to west, suggests a very tiny area for the Jaredites to have inhabited. Mormon writes that Bountiful “bordered upon the land which they called Desolation, it being so far northward that it came into the land which had been peopled and been destroyed” (Alma 22:30). So far northward? Twenty-five miles is “so far northward”? Evidently, that twenty-five miles was divided, from the narrow neck northward, into the Land of Desolation, the Land of Cumorah, the Land of Many Waters. If these were of equal distance, each was roughly 8 miles north to south.  And if that Land Northward was filled with inhabitants  (Ether 10:21), how could it also be “filled with all manner of wild animals of every kind” and also of domestic animals (Ether 9:18) that the Jaredites brought with them into the Land Northward (Ether 6:4) for “the land was covered with animals of the forest” (Ether 10:19).
    The problem is, as it always is and we point out over and over again, the theorists that are the most outspoken and most controlling of their own models and most outspoken against other models, seem to be those who play very footloose with their interpretation of the scriptures. How can a land so small be considered the Land Northward under the description of the land given us in the scriptural record.
(See the next post, “The battle Between Mesoamerica and the Great Lakes – Part III,”  for more from the Great Lakes theorists who believe by showing how Mesoamerica is not the Land of Promise, that it makes their Great Lakes model the Land of Promise)