Whatever their failings as a community — and the abuse of women and children is always and everywhere a community failing as well as an intimate violence — the Mormon fundamentalists of Short Creek (now Colorado City) have reason to be suspicious of outsiders.
In 1953, fifty state troopers and other assorted state officials conducted what Time called “the largest mass arrest of polygamists in American history” at Short Creek. Authorities jailed more than a hundred men, removed most of the women from the town, and placed children with foster families. Some Short Creek children were placed with foster families and never returned home. The people of this small town retreated further into their insular community, increasingly wary of both Gentiles (that is: non-Mormons) and LDS.
Polygamy, Arizona Governor Howard Pyle insisted at the time, was “the foulest of conspiracies,” a “wicked theory” intent on enslaving women. That same year, Deseret News applauded the governor’s attempt to eradicate the practice before it became “a cancer of a sort that is beyond hope of human repair.”
WHO ARE MORMON FUNDAMENTALISTS?
Mormon fundamentalists trace their spiritual lineage back to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, just like members of the more mainstream Latter-day Saints (LDS) Church. In 1852, President Young revealed Doctrine and Covenants 132, which included “The Principle” celebrating the salvific potential of polygynous, or plural, marriage.
But in the late nineteenth century, a post-Civil War federal government insisted that Mormons abandon the practice of polygyny to reclaim Church property and gain statehood for the Utah Territory. President Woodruff revealed that the Church would no longer consecrate plural marriages. The Woodruff Manifesto caused a series of schisms and led to the formation of numerous Mormon fundamentalist sects. The largest of these sects is the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), led by Warren Steed Jeffs. There are a number of practices that set Mormon fundamentalists apart from LDS, but the American public has been most consistently concerned with the practice of polygyny.
After the 1953 raid, public opinion largely sided with the residents of Short Creek. Plural marriage remained illegal but mostly avoided both legal prosecution and national attention for decades. A few high-profile outlets covered Mormon fundamentalist communities: the New York Times reflected on the “Persistence of Polygamy” in 1999; in 2000 and 2001, several news outlets reported that Jeffs had required FLDS parents to remove their children from public schools. The 2002 kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart drew national attention again, but her fundamentalist abductor’s religious identity remained a confusing detail in most news coverage. Americans — those living outside Colorado, Utah, and Arizona, in any case — remained largely ignorant of Mormon fundamentalists’ practices or existence until Jon Krakauer’s 2003 blockbuster turned the spotlight on FLDS.