A Dictionary of the Book of Mormon/Mormon (II)
MORMON. The last great prophet-general of the Nephite race, but better known to us as the custodian and compiler of the records of his people, and the writer of the greater portion of the work named after him, and known as the Book of Mormon. The father of Mormon, who was a descendant of Nephi, bore the same name, and his illustrious son was born on the northern continent (A. C. 311), but when the latter was eleven years of age they both traveled south to Zarahemla. Before his departure south, Mormon formed the acquaintance of Ammaron, the keeper of the sacred records, which, because of the iniquity of the people, he had hidden in a hill in the land Antum. After he had hidden them up, he informed Mormon, then a child ten years old, of what he had done, and placed the buried treasures in his charge. He instructed Mormon to go, when he was about twenty-four years old, to the hill where they were hid, and take the plates of Nephi and record thereon what he had observed concerning the people. The remainder of the records, etc., he was to leave where they were.
It was in the year 322 A. C. that actual war broke out between the Nephites and Lamanites for the first time since the Redeemer's appearing. A number of battles were fought, in which the armies of the former were victorious. Four years later the savage contest was renewed. In the interim, iniquity had greatly increased. As foretold by the prophets, men's property became slippery, things movable were subject to unaccountable disappearances, and dread and distrust filled the hearts of the disobedient. When the war recommenced, the youthful Mormon, then fifteen years old, was chosen to lead the armies of his nation.
The next year saw disaster follow the Nephite cause. That people retreated before the Lamanites to the north countries. The year following they met with still further reverses, and by A. C. 329, rapine, revolution and carnage prevailed throughout all the land.
In A. C. 330, the Lamanite king, Aaron, with an army of forty-four thousand men, was defeated by Mormon, who had forty-two thousand warriors under his command.
Five years later the Lamanites drove the degenerate Nephites to the land of Jashon,and thence yet farther northward to the land of Shem. But in the year following the tide of victory changed, and Mormon, with thirty thousand troops, defeated fifty thousand of the enemy in the land of Shem; this he followed up with such energetic measures that by the year A. C. 349 the Nephites had again taken possession of the lands of their inheritance.
These successes resulted in a treaty between the Nephites as one party, and the Lamanites and Gadianton robbers as the other. By its provisions the Nephites possessed the country north of the Isthmus, while the Lamanites held the regions south. A peace of ten years followed this treaty.
In the year A. C. 360, the king of the Lamanites again declared war. To repel the expected invasion, the people of Nephi gathered at the land of Desolation. There the Lamanites attacked them, were defeated, and returned home. Not content with this repulse, the succeeding year they made another inroad into the northern country, and were again repulsed. The Nephites then took the initiative and invaded the southern continent, but being unsuccessful, were driven back to their frontier at Desolation (A. C. 363). The same season, the city of Desolation was captured by the Lamanitish warriors, but was wrested from them the year following.
This state of things continued another twenty years; war, contention, rapine, pillage, and all the horrors incident to the letting loose of men's most depraved and brutal passions, filled the land. Sometimes one army conquered, sometimes the other. Now it was the Nephites who were pouring their forces into the south; then the Lamanites who were overflowing the north. Whichever side triumphed, that triumph was of short duration, but to all it meant sacrifice, cruelty, bloodshed and woe. At last, when every nerve had been strained for conquest, every man enlisted who could be found, the two vast hosts, with unquenchable hatred and unrelenting obstinacy, met at the hill Cumorah to decide the destiny of half the world. It was the final struggle, which was to end in the extermination of one or both of the races that had conjointly inhabited America for nearly a thousand years (A. C. 385). When the days of that last fearful struggle were ended, all but twenty-four of the Nephite race had been, by the hand of violence, swept into untimely graves, save a few, a very few, who had fled into the south country. Two of that twenty-four were Mormon and his son Moroni, but the latter tells us (A. C. 400) that his father had been killed by the Lamanites, who hunted and slew every solitary fugitive of the house of Nephi that they could find. The horrors of this war are graphically told by Mormon in his second epistle to his son Moroni. Mormon was as great a religious teacher as he was a soldier. His annotations throughout his compilation of the sacred records show this, as do also his instructions and epistles to his son. Shortly before the great final struggle near Cumorah, Mormon hid all the records entrusted to his care in that hill, save the abridged records which he gave to his son Moroni.