Omni 1:5-19 (about 200 B.C.)

After living nearly 400 years in the land of Nephi, “the more wicked part of the Nephites were destroyed” (Omni 1:5), and the more righteous Nephites left their homeland under the direction of king Mosiah (the first), the father of king Benjamin, and departed into the wilderness (Omni 1:12). During this migration the people “were admonished continually by the word of God; and they were led by the power of his arm, through the wilderness until theycame down into the land which [was] called the land of Zarahemla” (Omni 1:13). This is the first recorded journey through the narrow strip of wilderness and apparently the first encounter of the Nephites with the people of Zarahemla (the Mulekites). The loss of the 116 pages of Mormon’s abridgment of the Book of Lehi (see the heading to Doctrine and Covenants 10), which spanned the first 400 years of the Nephite history in the land of Nephi, presumably denies us more geographical details than provided by the less-secular small plates of Nephi covering the same time period (First Nephi to Omni), including possible accounts of earlier journeys through the narrow strip of wilderness.

The route of this northward migration is not explicitly recorded. But based on the fact the Lamanites later pursued the Nephites to the land of Zarahemla along this same route (Omni 1:24), and Lamanites eventually occupied the western coastal area of this same wilderness, it would suggest a western route. Mormon states that the idle Lamanites “lived in the wilderness, and dwelt in tents; and they were spread through the wilderness on the west, in the land of Nephi; yea, and also on the west of the land of Zarahemla, in the borders by the seashore” (Alma 22:28). Mormon also indicates that the land of Nephi “was bordering even to the sea, on the east and on the west, and which was divided from the land of Zarahemla by a narrow strip of wilderness,” (Alma 22:27). This suggests that the Nephites, led by the “voice of the Lord” (Omni 1:12-13), would have taken a route that followed the lowlands near the sea on the west of the peninsula through the narrow strip of wilderness, the same area later occupied by the idle Lamanites. Because the narrow strip of wilderness divided the land of Zarahemla from the land of Nephi (Alma 22:27), the people would have had to travel the entire length of this rugged and challenging wilderness area until they could find a sustainable location with water and fertile soil for growing food. This location was on the west of the river Sidon, in an area the people of Zarahemla (Mulekites) called the land of Zarahemla. This also would suggest that the land of Zarahemla was on the western side of the watershed divide of the peninsula of Baja California.