1 Nephi 18:23-EoC

In verse 23, we find our family sailing toward the promised land. After many days, they did arrive there. They went forth upon the land and pitched their tents and they called it the promised land. At the end of this verse, we can see that Nephi, and whoever else constitutes "we," were still drawing parallels to the Israelites and their journeyings in the wilderness to their own travels in the wilderness and the ocean. It is good to apply the scriptures to the present day.

Once they were there, they began to till the earth and plant seeds that they had brought from Jerusalem. Nephi shares that their crops grew abundantly and that they were blessed. This sentence shows his gratitude to the Lord for the things He had done for them at that time.

Nephi has also shared with us that they had found many useful things on this promised land. They had found (in verse 25) "that there were ^abeasts in the forests of every kind, both the cow and the ox, and the ass and the horse, and the goat and the wild goat, and all manner of wild animals, which were for the use of men. And we did find all manner of ^bore, both of ^cgold, and of silver, and of copper." They found these animals on explorations of their land.

They had landed on the promised land in about 589 B.C. Thus, it had been about 11 years since they left Jerusalem.

One of the curious animals named in the last verse of this chapter is horses. It has been contested that there were no horses in America at the time of the Book of Mormon. This comes from the idea that when the Spanish brought horses to the indigenous peoples of the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries, they had never seen them before. The article "Evolution of Horses" from Wikipedia shows that about 50 years after Book of Mormon was translated to English, horse fossils and other remains were being discovered in the Americas.

Here is another excerpt from the Book of Mormon Institute Manual:

1 Nephi 18:24–25. Horses Before Columbus’s Time

“If Joseph Smith had been writing the Book of Mormon instead of translating it from ancient records, he would have been very foolish to have included references to horses on the American continent in Book of Mormon times. (1 Nephi 18:25; Enos [1:]21.) In 1830, nearly all the historians and scholars were convinced there had been no horses on the American continent before the coming of Columbus. After the Book of Mormon was published, however, archaeological discoveries were made that clearly indicate that horses were in the Americas before Columbus arrived. In the asphalt deposits of Rancho LaBrea in southern California, numerous fossil remains of horses have been found that antedate Book of Mormon times. Although these discoveries do not absolutely prove horses were in the Americas in the time period covered by the Book of Mormon (about 2600 B.C. to A.D. 421), they do prove horses were there before the coming of Columbus” (Daniel H. Ludlow, A Companion to Your Study of the Book of Mormon, p. 117).