“& it came to pass that we did find upon the land of promise as we journied in the Wilderness that there was beasts in the forest of every kind both the cow & the Ox & the ass & the Horse & the goat & the wild goat & all manner of wild animels which were for the use of man & we did find all manner of ore both of Gold & of silver & of copper”

The Handwritten Book of Mormon (West Valley, UT: Dan Wees, 2017), 59 (see 1 Nephi 18:25).

According to this verse, the Lehites set foot in the New World and stumbled into nothing short of an Old-World petting zoo: cows, oxen, asses, horses, goats, and wild goats all waiting faithfully in the American wilderness, apparently having crossed the Atlantic long before Columbus bothered with it.

The minerals—gold, silver, and copper—at least have some archaeological backing. But the animal roster? Pure fantasy. Not one of these creatures existed in the Americas in 589 BCE. They wouldn’t arrive until Spanish ships unloaded them two thousand years later.

So why do they graze so naturally in Nephi’s story? Because Joseph Smith wasn’t describing ancient America—he was describing the barnyard outside his window in 1829 New York. The “land of promise,” rather than offering historical accuracy, ends up looking suspiciously like a 19th-century farm dressed up as scripture.