Moroni left the land of his birth some
time after beginning to engrave these last chapters. His journey took him from
central Mexico to the hill in New York where he was to bury the abridgement in
a stone box near the top of a glacial mound. One would suppose that the Lord
had shown him the need for placing the record in that particular place. We do
not know how much time was spent in traveling that distance but we do know that
he did not have to walk all the way, carrying the record. We should remember that
shipping in the Gulf had been a way of life from long before Christ’s appearance.
Certainly the people did not lose the art during the peaceful years of the
kingdom period. It was undoubtedly still going on, with some possible
disruptions due to the long-drawn-out war. Settlement up the Mississippi and
Ohio rivers from Mesoamerica is attested to by archaeological evidence. In
fact, travel by water was the one feasible way for Moroni to have reached the
area where he buried the abridgment. (Verneil W. Simmons, Peoples, Places
and Prophecies: A Study of the Book of Mormon [rev ed.; Independence,
Miss.: Zarahemla Research Foundation, Inc., 1986], 232-33)
“The south was much nearer to the
Ohio-Scioto country three thousand years ago then it is now, . . . . because
the Ohio River did not flow directly west and enter the Mississippi at its
present entrance point, at Cairo, Illinois. It turned south much sooner—just before
Louisville—and, using the bed of the present Yazoo River, entered the Mississippi
in the present state of Mississippi, at the already mentioned Poverty Pont
culture settlement at Jaketown. The north-south route was thus more direct,
shorter and a more natural one to follow, an aqueous camino real. The
circumstance is what makes Willey’s view of diffusion of traits out of Mexico
into the Hopewell territory both attractive and convincing.”—Louis A. Brennan, No
Stone Unturned, pp. 288, 289.
Moroni would have found
settlements all the way up the Ohio, He could have traveled by water to within
a very short distance of the hill in western New York. (Ibid., 281 n. 2)