THE ORIGIN OF THE "BOOK OF MORMON" By PERRY BENJAMIN PIERCE
The Palmyra upon the title-page of the original Book of Mormon (plate XXX), of which an edition of five hundred copies was printed, was not that great and ancient city of Syria, the elder sister of Damascus, " Tadmor in the Wilderness," but, at the time of the publication of the work, in 1830, a small village in western New York, in the midst of the Indian country of the Six Nations, then recently opened to white settlement by peo- ple from the eastern states, and from the nearer settlements in the eastern part of the state of New York itself. It was one of the new stations on the popular trail to the famous garden spot of the west, the wonderful Genesee country, the western Eldo- rado of that day and time. Only thirty years had elapsed since the beginning of the century. The wonder tales of productive soil and amazing crops had stirred all New England. The sterile acres and scanty crops of that land of the Pilgrim and the Puri- tan did not attract their descendants to abide at home and starve, when a few weeks or months of travel would give them possession of such fertile valleys and sun-kissed slopes as report located in the wilds of the beautiful Genesee country.
The old Surveyor General of the state of New York, who, happening to carry in his camp-outfit a copy of Lempri&re's Classical Dictionary ', bestowed out of it upon his daily work the names of all the old-world worthies, heroes, cities, towns, and countries, — Rome, Utica, Syracuse, Pompey, Homer, Manlius, Camillus, Tully, Cicero, Athens, Sparta, Troy, Ilion, — little knew when he left the name " Palmyra " upon the cross-roads on the Genesee trail that he was giving name to the locality
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