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I explore how moral orders, regional identity, and regional space were simultaneously reconstructed in the Mormon culture region during a period of great social change. Careful attention to the concept of moral orders helps us understand how regions are culturally constructed. In addition, I urge more attention to the spatial form of such regional cultural constructions. In recent years, scholars have been prone to disregard contiguity as deserving of spatial theorizing. I argue, to the contrary, that we need to understand how, where and why contiguities arise. I use the example of the Mormon culture region's reworked moral orders that utilize cultural visions of particular natural environments to demonstrate this point. prominent figure in the fictional literature for Mormon youth from a century ago was the pure and innocent Latter-day Saint young woman. 1 This figure typically worked hard and was unselfish. She was mostly unfamiliar with the vices that tempt young women who had more time on their hands. But in spite of her innocence, she had a solid education and an appreciation for civilization's niceties. She typically lived on the edge of poverty and knew that her own hard work made the difference between her family's comfort (if minimal) and desperation. She was eminently capable as a housewife and possessed a sweet, undemanding personality, making her attractive to young men seeking a wife. If she had a weakness, it invariably lay in her attraction to non-Mormon city boys, who possessed smooth public manners and promised her a life of greater sophistication and comfort than she had hitherto enjoyed. The point of stories with such a figure was to show how she overcame, or occasionally was destroyed by, her attraction to such characters. With many slight variations, authors of literature for Mormon (especially female) youth repeated this general story over and over.As such, this figure is important, if not especially remarkable geographically. These

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