The two men stood trial, but during the noon recess, they made a dramatic escape from Blanding with the sheriff in hot pursuit. Oliver failed to apprehend his charges, and so he returned to town and deputized a large body of men anxious to find a solution to the "Indian problem." The posse went to the Ute community of Westwater next to Blanding and rounded up forty men, women, and children, first placing them in the basement of the school and later in a one-hundred-foot-square barbed-wire stockade in the center of town. Others from the Ute community fled toward Navajo Mountain, a traditional sanctuary during times of trouble. Within a few days, however, the posse apprehended them, loaded them on cattle trucks, and placed them in the compound.