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Show 7 some of the last virgin territory in the continental United States. Disappointingly, few historians of the Utah War have.given more than a passing mention of the White Mountain Expedition, and some do not even mention it at all. Historians of the early exploration of the Great Basin have likewise overlooked the important contributions of the Mormons in 1858. Although the expedition was clearly one of the largest and most thorough examinations of the uncharted central regions of the Great Basin, it has remained unrecognized by most historians. This is probably the result of the clandestine nature of Brigham Young's probe into the southwest desert, which, in great measure, prohibited information from reaching the public. For some time, however, this material has been available to historians, but either through ignorance or neglect, it has rarely been commented on in any depth. Typical of this oversight is Houghton's recent summarization of exploration in the central valleys of the Great Basin: Certainly he [jedediah S. Smith] was the first white man to make the Great Basin transit.... The 1830s did not constitute a time of discovery. The Walker and Bartleson-Bidwell parties skirted these valleys to the north, and it was not until 1845 that the inquisitive John C. Fremont...came this way..., but his was a very 'swift and limited observation, and it added very little to the public knowledge of this terra incognita. I Thereafter, the land fromjthe Walker Lake to the Utah deserts lay undisturbed while emigrants and Forty-niners passed it by, either to the north along the Humboldt River or far to the south. Its mineral wealth was not to be sought or exploited until the 1860s.... But one man was to change all this-in I859 the Army sent Capt. James H. Simpson of the Topographical Engineers on an expedition to find a wagon road across |