Those Who Went North in Hagoth’s Ships – Part VI

Continued from the previous post, regarding those who set sail in the ships that Hagoth built as is recorded in Alma 63:5-7, and where these immigrants landed and where are they today?

Nephite Immigrants grateful for a safe landing in “the land which was northward”

As shown in the last post, and found in Alma 63, at least three ships went north with men, women and children immigrants along with their supplies. These would have been traveling a long distance for it have been worthwhile for Hagoth to have extended the cost of building “extremely large ships” and launch them into the West Sea. In addition, since Hagoth built several large ships, and people were boarding them to immigrate to a”land which was northward,” and “were never heard from again,” it should be concluded that these immigrant were traveling some distance, to a land which was disconnected to the Land Northward, but far enough away to:
1. Make Hagoth’s investment in building extremely large ships worthwhile;
2. Make the cost of traveling by ship rather than merely going overland into the Land Northward;
3. Never being heard from again.
    It should also be understood and extremely large ships are not ones that sail up rivers, but across seas and oceans. Thus, we can understand that these ships landed somewhere along coasts where the people settled. If these Nephite immigrants were just heading into the Land Northward, going overland would allow them to move into any place within the open land; however, going by extremely large ships would limit their location to just along the coast—areas where no doubt Nephites already in the Land Northward would have gone. Thus, the coast of the Land Northward would have been limiting the places where immigrants could settle in the Land Northward—a high cost of ship transportation for limited opportunity.
    All of this suggests that these immigrants were not just going into the Land Northward, but to a far off land, disconnected from the large island that was the Land of Promise. This means that somewhere to the north of the Land of Promise should be evidence of large Nephite settlements similar to those in the Land of Promise. After all, these Nephites had been in the Land of Promise for nearly 600 years; had been building temples, synagogues, cities and roads for hundreds of years.
    So, to find the location of the Nephite settlements to the north of the Land of Promise, we need to find two areas where advanced buildings of temples and cities of stone or similar material, such as found in the area of origin for Lehi and Nephi, the latter having taught his people how “to build buildings, and to work in all manner of wood, and of iron, and of copper, and of brass, and of steel, and of gold, and of silver, and of precious ores, which were in great abundance” (2 Nephi 5:15). It is highly unlikely that such a statement would have been made if Nephi and his people built stick huts with thatched roofs like those found anciently in North America. After all, Nephi “did build a temple; and I did construct it after the manner of the temple of Solomon save it were not built of so many precious things; for they were not to be found upon the land, wherefore, it could not be built like unto Solomon's temple. But the manner of the construction was like unto the temple of Solomon; and the workmanship thereof was exceedingly fine” (2 Nephi 5:16, emphasis added).

Left: Stick frame of an Iroquois Long House; Solomon’s Temple

Now, Solomon’s temple was built of cut and dressed stone, not sticks, or poles set in the ground and covered with animal hide as the Iroquois long houses were, or did the temple or ancient houses there have fire pits with holes cut in the roof as did the Iroquois long houses and other huts, which all had very dark interiors, through which rain and snow would enter the enclosure as in the Iroquois longhouses.
    We might also look at the North American indigenous peoples, to whom the Heartland and Great Lakes theorists attribute to the Nephite people. First, is the aforementioned Iroquois, which label applied to any member of the North American Indian tribes speaking a language of the Iroquoian family—mostly the Cayuga, Cherokee, Huron, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. Those who spoke these languages occupied a continuous territory around Lakes Ontario, Huron, and Erie in present-day New York state and Pennsylvania as well as southern Ontario and Quebec in Canada. That larger group should be differentiated from the Five Nations (later Six Nations) better known as the Iroquois Confederacy, whom they referred to themselves as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. As was typical of Northeast Indians before colonization, the Iroquois were semi-sedentary agriculturists who palisaded their villages in time of need.

Map of the major Indigenous Tribes of the Eastern U.S.

Of this group, the Cherokee, of Iroquoian lineage, were one of the largest politically integrated tribes at the time of European colonization of the Americas. Their name is derived from a Creek word meaning “people of different speech,” but many preferred to be known as Keetoowah or Tsalagi. They are believed to have numbered some 22,500 individuals in 1650, and they controlled approximately 40,000 square miles of the Appalachian Mountains in parts of present-day Georgia, eastern Tennessee, and the western parts of what are now North Carolina and South Carolina. There was also the Mohawk, part of the Iroquois Federation, with their visionary chief, Dekanawide, who preached principles of peace and was instrumental in founding the Iroquois Confederacy
    In the Heartland, there were the Arikara, who were also called Sahnish, Plains Indians of the Caddoan-speaking peoples who established the prehistoric mound-building societies of the lower Mississippi River valley. The Arikara were culturally related to the Pawnee, from whom they broke away and moved gradually northward, becoming the northernmost Caddoan tribe. Before American colonization of the Plains, the Arikara lived along the Missouri River between Cannonball and Cheyenne rivers in what are now the Dakotas. These Arikara traditionally lived in substantial semi-permanent villages of domed earth-berm lodges, growing maize, beans, squash, sunflowers, and tobacco, to trade for meat and processed hides.
    There were also the Northeast Indians, who occupied the territory bounded in the north by the Canadian forests, the east by the Atlantic Ocean, and west by the Mississippi Valley, and the south by an arc from the present day North Carolina coast northwest to the Ohio River and to its confluence with the Mississippi River.

Top Left: Iroquois Longhouse; Top Right: Arikara earth-berm lodge; Lower Left: Traditional Ojibway Wigwam; Lower Right: Huron longhouse

Scholars and anthropologists assure us that the types of housing these tribes in the Heartland and Great Lakes areas were building when the Europeans arrived, were the same style and type of houses built as far back as any record of these tribes covers. It should be noted then that the style of housing built by the numerous tribes of the Heartland, Great Lakes and Eastern indigenous Indians were far from anything that would have been found among the Nephites.