1953 Short Creek raid

The 1953 Short Creek raid was a large-scale state intervention into a remote polygamous community, intended to suppress a religious practice that local leaders believed had grown beyond Arizona’s control. On July 26, 1953, officers and National Guard troops entered the town before dawn, arrested 122 men and women, and placed 263 children in state custody. The operation broke up families, but its public aftermath reversed much of its intended effect: images of children separated from their mothers drew sympathy for the fundamentalists, and the backlash helped the community resume its way of life with little state interference for decades.

A community beyond easy reach

Short Creek, the town’s name at the time, had been settled in the 1920s by a small group of fundamentalist families seeking to follow Joseph Smith’s plural-marriage principle without outside interference. By the early 1950s, its population had risen to more than four hundred. The community’s isolation was both a choice and a practical obstacle for officials. Short Creek lay about 400 miles by the shortest road from the county seat of Kingman, beyond the Grand Canyon in the Arizona Strip. Cliffs rose to its north; broad, largely barren plateaus stretched to the east and west. The distance and terrain reinforced the residents’ sense that they could live apart from ordinary oversight.

The growth of Short Creek alarmed Arizona officials and leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City. With encouragement and financial backing from the Church, Arizona governor Howard Pyle developed a plan to raid the settlement and suppress polygamy. Pyle presented the operation as a response to a community whose leaders, he said, boasted that its expansion had made the state powerless to intervene. That justification gave the raid the language of restoring public authority; the geography that had helped the settlement remain secluded also became part of the case for acting against it.

The predawn operation and family separation

On July 26, about one hundred state police officers, forty county deputies, and dozens of Arizona National Guard troops drove into Short Creek in the predawn darkness. They arrested 122 polygamous men and women, among them DeLoy Bateman’s father. The action reached beyond the adults charged with violating the law: authorities declared 263 children wards of the state, transported them by bus 400 miles to Kingman, Arizona, and placed them in foster care.

The removal of children became the raid’s defining public image. One day afterward, the Deseret News, a newspaper owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, endorsed the operation and expressed hope that Short Creek’s activities would be ended. Yet the raid was soon reported nationally, including on the front page of the New York Times, alongside news of the armistice ending the Korean War. Rather than presenting the polygamists simply as lawbreakers, much of the press showed crying children being taken from their mothers. The families’ claim that they were law-abiding Mormons exercising constitutionally protected religious freedom consequently gained a sympathetic hearing.

Backlash and reversal

The intervention came to be widely regarded as religious persecution carried out by overzealous government agencies. The Arizona Republic criticized it as a misuse of public funds, while the expense and disruption made the operation harder to defend. Arrests and trials cost taxpayers $600,000. In 1954, Howard Pyle lost the governorship, largely because of the raid and its political fallout. By 1956, all those arrested had been released and reunited with their families in Short Creek.

The outcome was not the suppression its planners intended. Members of the United Effort Plan resumed living the plural-marriage principle, and the town’s population continued to more than double each decade, sustained by large families and a high birth rate. In this reversal, coercive state action became an organizing memory for the community: an attempted enforcement of law that instead strengthened the fundamentalists’ claim that their religious freedoms were under attack.

A lasting consequence

The raid’s significance extended beyond the immediate release of those arrested. Its public backlash discouraged state interference with fundamentalist polygamy across the Intermountain West for most of the next half-century. The book presents this as a paradox: an operation meant to dismantle Short Creek helped create conditions in which fundamentalists could continue practicing polygamy with comparatively little government intervention. That relative latitude lasted until May 1998, when a teenage girl’s call to police from a northern Utah truck stop again brought the treatment of girls and women in polygamous communities into public view.

The raid also exposes the collision between competing claims of authority. Arizona invoked state law and public order; Short Creek’s residents asserted religious liberty and their right to follow Joseph Smith’s principle. In later accounts of fundamentalist communities, religious leaders’ control over marriage, family, and local institutions sits alongside the state’s power to arrest adults and take children into custody. The 1953 operation did not resolve that conflict. Its most immediate and visible consequence—the separation of children from their families—helped shift public sympathy toward the people the state had set out to subdue, leaving the community diminished neither in its convictions nor, over time, in its numbers.