How a remote desert town became the base of America's most notorious polygamist church
On the morning of July 26, 1953, 102 police officers and National Guard soldiers descended on Short Creek, Arizona, and arrested the entire town, including 236 children. No American roundup of polygamists before or since has been bigger. The community endured, renamed itself Colorado City, and became the heart of the FLDS Church.
The group's story begins with a split. In 1904 the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a Second Manifesto renouncing polygamy and eventually excommunicated members who kept taking plural wives. Many gathered in Short Creek, on the Arizona border, trusting a purported 1886 revelation to church president John Taylor that Lorin Woolley published in 1912. Woolley and John Y. Barlow formed a Council of Friends of seven high priests to lead them, and the settlers cherished a remark attributed to Brigham Young that the place would one day be the head of the church rather than the tail.
After the 1953 raid, 150 of the children were kept from their parents for more than two years, and some families never regained custody. Leadership hardened into One Man Rule under Leroy S. Johnson, and Rulon Jeffs incorporated the church as the FLDS in 1984. When his son Warren Jeffs took over, he excommunicated rivals, including Canada's Winston Blackmore, whom about 700 members followed, and in 2004 expelled Colorado City's mayor and some 20 other men, reassigning their wives and children.
Scrutiny intensified from the mid-2000s, with allegations of child marriage, sexual abuse, welfare fraud and the casting out of so-called Lost Boys to reduce competition for wives. The FBI put Warren Jeffs on its Ten Most Wanted list on May 7, 2006, and he was caught that August after a routine traffic stop near Las Vegas. His 2007 Utah conviction was overturned, but a later conviction for sexual assault brought a sentence of life plus 20 years.
In 2008 authorities raided the church's 1,700-acre YFZ Ranch near Eldorado, Texas, thrusting the group into national headlines. Polygamy remains illegal across the United States, Canada and Mexico.
Source: Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
