The Arizona Strip is the remote northwestern corner of Arizona, cut off from the rest of the state by the Grand Canyon and marked by broad plateaus, arid country, and long distances between settlements. Its isolation shapes the lives and histories described in the book: the region shelters Colorado City, Arizona, a major center of Mormon Fundamentalism, while also serving as the setting for accounts of exploration, the aftermath of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and the pursuit of a family’s buried history.

Geography and Isolation

The Grand Canyon runs diagonally across the top of Arizona, forming a formidable natural barrier that effectively separates the Strip from the rest of the state. At 277 miles long, the canyon is not simply a landmark in this account; it is the geographical fact that gives the region its unusual position. The Strip is almost as large as New Jersey, yet has only one paved highway traversing it, and its population density is among the lowest in the contiguous United States.

The landscape shifts across high plateaus, forests, gorges, rolling drylands, and vividly colored rock. It is squeezed between Utah’s higher plateaus and the Grand Canyon, a configuration that makes travel and communication difficult. The distance is concrete as well as symbolic: the Short Creek community was 400 miles by the shortest road from the Mohave County seat of Kingman, Arizona. In the governor’s defense of the 1953 raid on Short Creek, this remoteness was presented as a reason the community had been able to evade state oversight. The geography that offered distance from authorities could therefore also become part of the state’s case for intervention.

Colorado City and the Fundamentalist Community

The region’s largest municipality is Colorado City, Arizona, whose population of about nine thousand was more than five times that of any other town in the district. Driving west on Highway 389 across the dry Uinkaret Plateau, a traveler passed Fredonia, Arizona, and then, twenty-eight miles farther on, encountered Colorado City amid the open country. The town’s businesses and unusually large homes lie beneath Canaan Mountain, a high escarpment of red sandstone. The contrast between the isolated setting and the settlement’s size makes the town appear as a concentrated community set apart from its surroundings.

Nearly all of Colorado City’s residents were Mormon Fundamentalists. They lived in the desert in the hope of following plural marriage without interference from government authorities or the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At least three Fundamentalist sects were based in the town, including the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, commonly associated in the account with the United Effort Plan. Its members were expected to follow the commandments of Rulon Jeffs, a former tax accountant who led the community as its prophet. His followers traced his authority through an unbroken line back to Joseph Smith and regarded him as the figure described in Joseph Smith’s prophecy of a “one mighty and strong.”

The Strip’s distance from other population centers thus carried religious meaning as well as practical consequences. It provided a place where adherents hoped to maintain a distinctive way of life beyond the reach of both state officials and the larger church. Yet the region was not sealed off: roads, state action, and the attention of outsiders repeatedly connected its communities to institutions beyond the desert. Isolation shaped the community’s claims to independence without preventing conflict over who had authority there.

A Route Through Earlier History

The Strip also links the present-day community to older episodes whose accounts cross the region’s rugged terrain. During an expedition down the Colorado River, Seneca Howland, Oramel Howland, and William Dunn left the main party near the lower Grand Canyon. They climbed out of the canyon and crossed the Shivwits Plateau, carrying rifles, expedition papers, and a silver watch that Jack Sumner had entrusted to them for his sister in case he drowned. At Mount Dellenbaugh, an extinct volcano rising 6,990 feet, Dunn scratched his name on a boulder. The three men then set out toward Mormon settlements in southern Utah and never reappeared.

The mountain became a landmark in the later search for what had happened to them. Major John Wesley Powell returned to the region the following year, after the Howland family asked him to investigate their disappearance. Brigham Young supplied Jacob Hamblin as a guide, and Powell’s party traveled with local Latter-day Saints to Pipe Spring before crossing the Strip. Near Mount Dellenbaugh, Hamblin arranged a meeting with members of the Shivwit tribe. Powell’s account records a confession that the tribe had killed three white men; a further explanation relayed through Hamblin said that Dunn and the Howlands had first received food and help, then were pursued after misinformation inflamed the villagers. The route across the Strip therefore appears both as a path of attempted escape and as the ground on which accounts of the men’s deaths were assembled.

Memory, Land, and Narrative Significance

The Strip’s history is also carried forward through descendants and through contested memory. DeLoy Bateman, born and raised in the Fundamentalist faith, was a descendant of people connected to its founding and the adoptive grandson of LeRoy Johnson, the prophet who preceded Rulon Jeffs. One of his great-great-great-uncles had a notorious role in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. DeLoy did not want that history hidden; his interest in learning about the past led him and his family on a camping trip to Mount Dellenbaugh to search for the old signature attributed to Dunn. The climb joined a present-day family outing to an unresolved episode in the region’s history, with the mountain’s geography holding the possibility of evidence but not a guaranteed answer.

The land’s significance extends beyond the journeys that cross it. Two decades after the meeting with Powell and Hamblin, Mormon settlers forced the Shivwits from their ancestral range because the land was wanted for grazing cattle, relocating them to a small reservation near St. George, Utah. The Strip’s remoteness was therefore never simply empty space between better-known places. It was homeland, refuge, contested territory, and a corridor for travel. In the book, these meanings accumulate: the canyon and desert help explain how communities could remain apart, while the routes across them reveal the histories, power struggles, and losses that connected them to the wider world.