Elias Boudinot’s A Star in the West was published in 1816, and it pulled together a wide range of claims meant to show that Native Americans were descended from the lost tribes of Israel. Reports from missionaries, travelers, and colonial officials were quoted to support the idea that certain customs, words, and traditions pointed back to an Israelite origin. The book treated the American continent as a stage where scattered Israel might one day be gathered and restored, and it framed Native history through a mixture of biblical interpretation and early national speculation.
Its relevance to the Book of Mormon is usually tied to those shared assumptions. An Israelite ancestry for Indigenous peoples was presented as plausible. A migration across the ocean was imagined. Themes of division, warfare, scattering, and eventual renewal were emphasized. These same patterns appear in the Book of Mormon, so A Star in the West has been viewed as part of the environment that made such a narrative feel possible. The parallels don’t prove direct borrowing, but they show how common these ideas were in the decades before Joseph Smith dictated the text.