Geography: The people go to a place called Mormon. This name refers to an entire region: “And now it came to pass that all this was done in Mormon, yea, by the waters of Mormon, in the forest that was near the waters of Mormon; yea, the place of Mormon, the waters of Mormon, the forest of Mormon” (Mosiah 18:30).
This gathering place was not a town. They were leaving their homes and going into the wilderness. They gave up material comfort for the gospel and accepted official condemnation from their ruler, as witnessed by the fact that they went to the “place which was called Mormon” to avoid detection.
The fact that Mormon had “received its name from the king” could mean either that the king declared its name to be Mormon or that the king’s name was Mormon. Mormon can be a man’s name, although our Mormon-the-abridger was named after the land, not a person (3 Ne. 5:12). But if the king were named Mormon, which king was it? No king in the record is named Mormon, and Nephite kings before Mosiah1 were called Nephi (Jacob 1:11), although Mormon might possibly have been a “Nephi’s” birth name. It seems more likely, however, that Mormon was the name of a Lamanite king and that Alma deliberately led his people out of Noah’s realm. Mormon may have been a region unassociated with the ancestral Nephites—in other words, a territory into which Noah was not likely to follow for long, both because of a lesser knowledge of the area and the possibility of angering neighboring Lamanite populations.
It is also important that Mormon was “infested, by times or at seasons, by wild beasts.” The word “infested” suggests that it was not a hunting ground and that these wild beasts did not provide food. In fact, the connotation is of a nuisance, or even dangerous predators who would prey upon human beings. Mesoamerica is home to a number of larger cats, the most powerful of which is the jaguar. The jaguar was sacred in most Mesoamerican cultures. While it would probably not have been common for the jaguar to hunt human beings, it also must have happened at least occasionally. The forests of Mormon might easily have also harbored the smaller ocelot. For these reasons, it may have been an unfavorable location for a settled population, characteristics that would make it ideal for Alma’s purposes.