The story of father Lehi’s family starts suddenly in the land of Jerusalem and abruptly ends some 1,000 years later in the land of Cumorah. As dissensions and population pressures increased, descendants of the small group that landed in the south of Baja California, during periods of their long history, moved towards empty lands to the north. Along the way they merged with the people of Zarahemla (the Mulekites) and then later they settled in the lands left desolate by the destroyed Jaredite civilization. This often-turbulent Nephite history (600 B.C. to A.D. 421), even though mostly chronological in the Book of Mormon account, is not uniformly represented. For example, the pages in the books of Mosiah, Alma, Helaman, and Third Nephi represent some 200 years, or approximately one-fifth of the Nephite history. Yet this short time period occupies nearly two-thirds, or 319 of the total of 531 pages in the Book of Mormon. As a result, fewer geographical details are recorded from the first 400 years when the Nephites were settled in the land of Nephi and the last 400 years when they were primarily located in the northern lands of Bountiful and Desolation and farther north. The loss of the 116 pages of Mormon’s abridgment of the Book of Lehi (see the heading to Doctrine and Covenants 10), which spanned the first 400 years of the Nephite history in the land of Nephi, presumably denies us more geographical details than provided by the less-secular small plates of Nephi covering the same time period (First Nephi to Omni). Likewise the Book of Fourth Nephi records nearly 300 years of the history in only four pages and, understandably, with almost no geographical details.

Because little is recorded about the land of Nephi, the better-known lands are the lands of Zarahemla, Bountiful, and Desolation, the lands progressively located toward the north (see Mormon’s description of these lands in the previous section). In the history of this north-trending migration several geographical benchmarks are described in some detail. These significant features include the route from Jerusalem to the promised land, the land of Nephi, the river Sidon, the narrow neck of land, and the land of Cumorah. These prominent geographical details are known to all readers of the Book of Mormon. The following sections, using the triangulation of global positioning scriptures (GPS), provide proposed locations for each of these five geographical reference points.