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Show 169 entitled Central Route to the Pacific, was widely circulated and certainly overshadowed Fremont's meager article of the same year. It is most likely that Brigham Young was familiar with the ideas advanced in Heap's book. The journal mentions the Walker cutoff saying that Benton had wished them to try the route, as it was believed to be "a more direct way and over a better country. 3 But, as they could get no guide or information about the route, they proceeded to the coast on the Spanish trail. Nevertheless, Heap asserted that "according to the accounts we had received, it conducts over a tolerably .•44 level, well watered, and grassy country. Heap played a great role in the preservation of the Fremont myth by gathering up all of the information he could find about the region which supported his cause for the central route and publishing it in his book. In his appendices Heap made reference to the explorations of Fremont and wholeheartedly concurred with his early assessment of the Great Basin's interior. "This was the belief of Col. Fremont," wrote Heap, who had examined Owen's River and Lake, and laid them down in his map of 1848, and also sketched a mountain running east and west, about latitude 38, along the southern base of which he judged (from tbe nature of the mountains and valleys in the region) there must be a belt of fertile landf with wood, water, and grass, making a valley east and west; which was the course that the route for the road required. His views have been subsequntly verified, and as early as 1849-50, by a party of emigrants, beaded by the Rev. J. W. Brier.... (italics mine.) Instead of dying a natural death, the Fremont myth was being magnified by a special interest group. The fate of the Death Valley company was downplayed by the inclusion of the testimony of the Reverend Brier, a survivor of the party. It seems strange that in light of the disaster experienced by the Death |
