The hill Cumorah is in the land of Cumorah. Book of Mormon lands are typically named or associated with a city in that land, but we have no indication of a city of Cumorah. Even if there is a city, the location for Mormon’s final defensive position is not a city, but rather a hill. The selection of this site tells us something of the nature of the expected battle. If Mormon had expected a siege, he would want to be in a city where there were resources for daily life while the siege was in place. If he were expecting a protracted active battle, the ability to have stored provisions inside a defended city would have been helpful. Mormon is not anticipating that kind of battle. Defended cities have not been an effective deterrent against this now “extremely powerful” enemy, whose numbers are now greater than they have ever been.
Mormon does not select a location because it would provide a good defensive position for a long struggle, but a position which can be defended and give the greatest possible advantage to the defender. On a hill, all attack from the enemy is uphill until the end. There is no point at which a breach in the wall shifts the advantage to equal the odds. Mormon puts his people in a position where they must have any advantage that terrain could possibly give.
Nevertheless, with the length of time allowed for preparation, one would expect some cities nearby. Palmer indicates that the site of El Meson is near to the proposed Cumorah hill, and had an occupation during Nephite as well as Olmec times (David A. Palmer. In Search of Cumorah. Horizon Publishers. 1981, p. 107).
Geographic: The most important fixed aspect of the geographical location of the Hill Cumorah is that it is the same hill as the Hill Ramah from the Jaredite record. In that record we find Moroni noting:
Ether 15:11
11 And it came to pass that the army of Coriantumr did pitch their tents by the hill Ramah; and it was that same hill where my father Mormon did hide up the records unto the Lord, which were sacred.
Moroni tells us very specifically that the two hills are one and the same. Thus the Hill Cumorah is in ancient Jaredite lands. All of these descriptions fit with the rest of the geographic data from the Book of Mormon text. Palmer studied all of the requirements for the Book of Mormon Hill Cumorah and amassed the following list of criteria:
Using these criteria, an acceptable candidate for the Hill Cumorah/Hill Ramah is Cerro Vigia in modern Veracruz (David A. Palmer. In Search of Cumorah. Horizon Publishers. 1981, p. 91 see pp. 96-101 for the specific ways in which Cerro Vigia fits the requirements noted).
One of the enduring controversies in Book of Mormon geography is laid precisely upon the location of the Hill Cumorah. Since there is a hill in New York that is traditionally called by that name and since it was the hill from which the records were retrieved, it has long been assumed to be the very hill where the records were deposited. Thus the hypothesis is that the Hill Cumorah of the Book of Mormon must be the Hill Cumorah of tradition in New York.
Sorenson’s answer to this issue has been:
“A question many readers will have been asking themselves is a sound and necessary one: how did Joseph Smith obtain the gold plates in upstate New York if the final battleground of the Nephites was in Mesoamerica?
Let’s review where the final battle took place. The Book of Mormon makes clear that the demise of both Jaredites and Nephites took place near the narrow neck of land. Yet New York is thousands of miles away from any plausible configuration that could be described as this narrow neck. Thus the scripture itself rules out the idea that the Nephites perished near Palmyra.
Then how did the plates get from the battleground to New York? We have no definitive answer, but we can construct a plausible picture. Mormon reports that he buried all the records in his custody at the Hill Cumorah of the final battle except for certain key golden plates (Mormon 6:6). Those from which Joseph Smith translated, he entrusted to his son Moroni. As late as 35 years afterward, Moroni was still adding to those records (Moroni 10:1). He never does tell us where he intended to deposit them, nor where he was when he sealed them up (Moroni 10:34). The most obvious way to get the plates to New York state would have been for somebody to carry them there. Moroni could have done so himself during those final, lonely decades.
Would Moroni have been able to survive a trip of several thousand miles through strange peoples and lands, if he did transport the record? Such a journey would be no more surprising than the trip by Lehi’s party over land and by sea halfway around the globe. As a matter of fact, we do have a striking case of a trip much like the one Moroni may have made. In the mid-sixteenth century, David Ingram, a shipwrecked English sailor, walked in 11 months through completely strange Indian territory from Tampico, Mexico, to the St. John River, at the present border between Maine and Canada. His remarkable journey would have been about the same distance as Moroni’s and over essentially the same route. So Moroni’s getting the plates to New York even under his own power seems feasible.” (John L. Sorenson, An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon [Salt Lake City and Provo: Deseret Book Co., Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1985], 44.)