Mosiah 21:33-36; 22 (about 121 B.C.)

After observing the plight of king Limhi’s people living in bondage in the land of Nephi, Gideon, a leader among the people, devised a plan to “deliver this people out of bondage” from the Lamanites (Mosiah 22:4). The exact route they followed northward to the land of Zarahemla is not known, but we can logically extrapolate some possibilities.

The search party that king Limhi had previously sent to find the land of Zarahemla returned to the land of Nephi just days before the arrival of Ammon’s group from the land of Zarahemla. The search party’s newly-acquired knowledge of the eastern route could have helped to determine the escape route planned by Gideon, especially if the route were unknown to the Lamanites. The returning search party would have known about locations of water, potential areas for camps and sites for the grazing of animals. This information could have been compared with the knowledge of the difficult route Ammon’s group followed through the center of wilderness. Ammon and his group’s first-hand knowledge of the general area surrounding the land of Zarahemla, would have made it possible for king Limhi and his escaping people to know exactly where to cross the mountainous divide to the west of the eastern coast and eventually arrive at the land of Zarahemla. Not knowing the location of this east to west route through the divide—or even not knowing the need to cross the divide—had caused Limhi’s search party to completely miss the land of Zarahemla located on the west. Highway 1 in Baja California today crosses this same divide from the centre of the peninsula at San Ignacio (the head of the river Sidon in the land of Zarahemla) to the copper-mining town of Santa Rosalia on the coast of the Sea of Cortez.

Using a stratagem of getting the Lamanite guards drunk, the people of king Limhi, with the Lord’s help, were able to “depart by night into the wilderness with their flocks and their herds, and they went round about the land of Shilom in the wilderness, and bent their course towards the land of Zarahemla, being led by Ammon and his brethren” (Mosiah 22:11). A “bent” course appears to describe their rather sharp change of direction after first traveling eastward from the land of Nephi and then “bending” northward. This change of direction is required by the rugged and elevated terrain in this particular location of Baja California. The people took “all their gold, and silver, and their precious things, which they could carry, and also their provisions with them, into the wilderness; and they pursued their journey” through the night to obtain a head start along their route to safety in the land of Zarahemla (Mosiah 22:12). There must have been hundreds of people and potentially numerous flocks and herds of animals that would have embarked on this journey.

After traveling many days in the wilderness, king Limhi’s people successfully “arrived in the land of Zarahemla, and joined Mosiah’s people, and became his subjects” (Mosiah 22:13). King Mosiah received them with joy, and “also received their records, and also the records which had been found by the people of Limhi” (Mosiah 22:14).