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Show 277 the Mormons prepared to once again retreat to a new location. The plan was a longsbot, desperate, perhaps even naive, but Brigham Young so no other way of preserving the kingdom and defending the Saints from the enemies he saw surrounding them except to move deeper into the unexplored regions of the Territory. Herein lies the birth of the White Mountain Expedition. Their charge was to search out and find the refuge for the Saints. They were to be the vanguard of the new gathering. Had Brigham Young been informed of the true nature of the region where he sent tbe White Mountain companies, his strategy might have been different. He bad not only been deluded by exaggerated reports of troop movements, he had also been misled about the nature of the interior regions of the Great Basin. The entire Utah War was a series of actions based on faulty information on both sides. The writings of John C. Fremont and information received from the mountain man, Barney Ward, undoubtedly influenced Young. Just as an earlier generation of explorers had been fooled by the legend of the Buenaventura, Brigham Young had been duped by the promoters of the "oasis theory." Many others had fallen victim to the same sources. On the eve of the Utah War, in fact, the recently published map of the Territory of Utah by Rogers and Johnston shows a vast yoid west of the southern Utah settlements with only this paraphrase-ment from Fremont's map of 1845: "It is surrounded by lofty mountains and is believed to be filled with rivers and lakes which have no outlet to the sea, deserts and oases which have never been explored...." It is not difficult to understand how Brigham Young became imbued with the idea. As early as 1855 Young had sent a company under David Evans to find the oasis. Now, with a hostile army on the fringes of the Territory, he was compelled to again seek the refuge. With the same misunderstandings that induced the forty-niners to Plunge into Death Valley, and with the same millennial zeal that produced the |