Colorado City, Arizona

Colorado City, Arizona, formerly known as Short Creek, is an isolated settlement on the Arizona Strip whose history is inseparable from the struggle over plural marriage and religious authority. Founded by families seeking distance from outside interference, it became a major center of Mormon Fundamentalism. Under the authority of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the United Effort Plan, religious leadership reached into civic administration, education, family life, and the community’s dealings with state and federal government.## Setting and founding The Arizona Strip is a sparsely populated wedge of backcountry cut off from the rest of Arizona by the Grand Canyon, with a single paved highway crossing the region. Colorado City, Arizona, is its largest municipality: the account describes roughly nine thousand residents, more than five times the population of any other town in the district. Traveling west on Highway 389 across the Uinkaret Plateau, a visitor reaches it twenty-eight miles beyond Fredonia. The settlement appears beneath the red sandstone escarpment of Canaan Mountain, among unusually large houses and small businesses. Nearly all its residents are Mormon Fundamentalists.

The community’s relative isolation was intentional. In the 1920s, a handful of fundamentalist families settled in Short Creek to practice what they understood as Joseph Smith’s sacred principle of plural marriage without interference from the government or the mainline Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The community grew, but its distance from population centers did not shield it from public scrutiny. By the early 1950s, Short Creek had more than four hundred residents, and the practice of plural marriage had drawn the attention of Arizona officials and church leaders in Salt Lake City.## Religious authority and civic life Colorado City, Arizona, straddles the Arizona–Utah border and is home to at least three Mormon Fundamentalist sects, including the world’s largest, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Its members’ property and community life are organized through the United Effort Plan. At the time described, the sect’s leader was Rulon Jeffs, a former tax accountant who claimed a line of religious authority reaching back to Joseph Smith. Followers regarded him as the prophesied “one mighty and strong” and were taught to obey his commandments.

That authority extended well beyond sermons. The mayor, other city employees, the police force, and the public-school superintendent answered to Rulon Jeffs. The account illustrates the reach of his rule with a ban on dogs imposed after a Rottweiler killed a child: young men were sent to collect the town’s dogs, which were then killed outside the city. Members were also forbidden to watch television or read magazines and newspapers. The prohibition did not eliminate access to television. Residents sometimes bought satellite dishes in nearby St. George or Cedar City and watched secretly; after Rulon Jeffs warned from the pulpit that he knew who had televisions, dishes would be discarded in the desert. They reappeared gradually until another crackdown.

The restrictions also governed contact with outsiders, including relatives who had left the faith. This separation made apostasy a family as well as a religious rupture. DeLoy Bateman, a former member who had been raised in the community, described how his brother lived only a few yards away, across a fence, but was prohibited from speaking to him. DeLoy’s 16,000-square-foot house, which he had built himself, stood on land owned by the United Effort Plan. After he left the faith, the organization sought to take possession of the house and evict him from Colorado City, Arizona.## Plural marriage, law, and public resources Plural marriage was illegal in both Arizona and Utah. In practice, men in the community typically entered a legal marriage with one wife while other wives were married to them religiously by Rulon Jeffs. Those wives were treated as single mothers by the state, a status that could make large households eligible for welfare and other assistance. The book describes a sharp contrast between the community’s rejection of governments as hostile to the United Effort Plan and its receipt of public funds: its members received more than six million dollars a year in government assistance.

A substantial share of that support went to public institutions and infrastructure. More than four million dollars annually flowed to the Colorado City, Arizona, public-school district. The Phoenix New Times reported that the district primarily benefited the church and its leaders; its investigation described personal expenses on district credit cards, vehicles for administrators’ use, extensive travel, and the district’s 2000 purchase of a $220,000 Cessna 210. The town also received $1.9 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for street paving, fire services, and water improvements. A federally built airport just south of the town cost $2.8 million and served few people beyond the fundamentalist community. The account reports that 33 percent of residents received food stamps, compared with 4.7 percent statewide, and that Colorado City, Arizona, received eight dollars in government services for every dollar its residents paid in taxes.

Community leaders explained the use of government assistance as a way for God to provide for his chosen people through a hostile system. Fundamentalists called defrauding the government “bleeding the beast” and treated it as virtuous. The arrangement exposes a persistent conflict between two orders of authority: state law and public institutions operated alongside religious rules that claimed precedence over them.## The 1953 raid and its aftermath On July 26, 1953, eight months before DeLoy Bateman was born, Arizona carried out a predawn raid on Short Creek. About one hundred state police officers, forty county deputies, and dozens of Arizona National Guard troops entered the settlement. They arrested 122 polygamous men and women, including DeLoy’s father, and declared 263 children wards of the state. The children were taken by bus roughly four hundred miles to Kingman and placed in foster care.

Arizona Governor Howard Pyle defended the operation as action against insurrection within the state’s borders. The images of children separated from their mothers, however, drew national attention and sympathy for the fundamentalists, who presented themselves as law-abiding Mormons exercising religious freedom. The raid was widely viewed as religious persecution. Pyle lost office in 1954, and the arrests and trials cost taxpayers $600,000. By 1956, all those arrested had left jail and reunited with their families in Short Creek; the community resumed plural marriage. Its population then more than doubled each decade, a pattern attributed to large families and a high birth rate.

The raid’s reversal had consequences well beyond the town. Rather than ending fundamentalist plural marriage, the public backlash helped the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and related communities practice it with comparatively little state interference across the Intermountain West for much of the following half-century. Colorado City, Arizona, thus became both a refuge built around separation from outside control and a focal point in an enduring dispute over the limits of religious freedom and state authority.## Dissent and the cost of leaving The distance that helped sustain the community also magnified the consequences of leaving it. DeLoy Bateman’s departure illustrates how religious discipline could be enforced through family ties and property. When he stopped attending the weekly priesthood meeting, Rulon Jeffs sent someone to claim his wives and children for another, supposedly worthier man. Under the community’s doctrine, wives and children belonged to the priesthood rather than to a husband or parent. Both of DeLoy’s wives refused to leave him; most of their children followed them into apostasy, while the three oldest did not.

The family’s choice challenged the expected authority of the priesthood, but it did not end the community’s power over them. Relatives who remained in the faith were forbidden to speak to DeLoy, his wives, or their apostate children, and the United Effort Plan sought legal possession of the house he had built. This conflict gives Colorado City, Arizona, a significance beyond its isolation or its role as a settlement founded around plural marriage: it shows how control of land, family relationships, public institutions, and religious belonging could reinforce one another—and how a person’s exit could place all of them in dispute.