Our primary goal has been to analyze and map the journey of Jared and his brother and their friends from the great tower to the promised land. In the last half of the Book of Ether, however, Moroni provides a concisely abridged sweep of some 1,500 years of Jaredite history, an average of 150 years per chapter (Ether 15:33). This part of the record—from the arrival of Jared’s family in the promised land to Ether’s account of the final events leading to the demise of their descendants—contains a number of geographical topics that help clarify the Jaredite story and broaden the analysis.

The record indicates that the Jaredites made “all manner of tools with which they did work their beasts” and made “all manner of tools to till the earth, both to plow and to sow, to reap and to hoe, and also to thrash” (Ether 10:25-26). Thrash is an older English word for thresh, as in threshing grain, the separating of grain from a plant by flailing. The Jaredites grew “all manner of fruit, and of grain,” and produced “silks” and “fine linen” (Ether 9:17). “Fruit” in old English referred to fruit as we use the term today, as well as vegetables and nuts. Linen production requires the growing of flax. The producing of “silks” (note the plural) could refer to the lustrous fiber created by silkworms and made into thread and fabric, as historically developed in China, or the “silks” in an old English usage, that referred to any high quality cloth woven from cotton or wool or similar fibers. The climate of Baja California would allow the abundant growing of all the crops mentioned in the Jaredite record.