Short Creek Raid

The Short Creek Raid was a major 1953 state operation against a Mormon fundamentalist community whose members practiced plural marriage outside the law. Intended to suppress the practice, it brought mass arrests and the removal of children from their families. Yet its aftermath reversed the operation’s apparent purpose: public sympathy for the community helped shield it from sustained government intervention for much of the next half-century.

A Settlement Beyond Easy Reach

Short Creek, later known as Colorado City, had been settled in the 1920s by about half a dozen fundamentalist families seeking a place where they could follow Joseph Smith’s Most Holy Principle without outside interference. The community’s isolation was both a practical condition and part of its appeal. The shortest road from Short Creek to the Mohave County seat of Kingman was 400 miles; cliffs lay to the north, broad dry plateaus stretched east and west, and the Grand Canyon lay to the south. Within this remote setting, the community grew around a religious order that gave plural marriage a central place.

By the early 1950s, Short Creek’s population had passed 400. That growth alarmed Arizona officials and the leadership 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 devised a plan to raid the settlement and suppress polygamy. The conflict was not simply over whether state law applied: the community asserted a religious right to practice its faith, while state authorities treated its scale and persistence as a challenge to their power to enforce the law.

The Predawn Operation

On July 26, 1953, eight months before DeLoy Bateman was born, a force of roughly one hundred state police officers, forty county deputies, and dozens of Arizona National Guard troops entered Short Creek before dawn. They arrested 122 men and women, including Bateman’s father. The children were dealt with separately: 263 were declared wards of the state, transported 400 miles to Kingman, Arizona, and placed in foster care. The raid thus reached beyond its adult targets, separating children from parents as part of the state’s attempt to break the community’s religious practice.

Pyle defended the operation in a multipage public statement, presenting it as a major police action against insurrection within Arizona. His account cast the community’s leaders as having grown so powerful that they openly boasted the state could not interfere. The language made clear how officials understood the dispute: not as a narrow disagreement about marriage law, but as a test of whether a secluded religious community could resist state authority.

Public Backlash and Reunification

The raid drew national attention. The New York Times gave it front-page prominence comparable to its coverage of the armistice ending the Korean War. But extensive coverage did not produce the public support the operation’s backers might have expected. Photographs of children being taken from their mothers helped shift sympathy toward the fundamentalists, who presented themselves as law-abiding Mormons seeking to exercise constitutionally protected religious freedoms. The day after the raid, the Church-owned Deseret News had endorsed the action and hoped the community’s activities would be ended. Much of the wider press, however, questioned the government’s conduct; the Arizona Republic criticized the operation as a misuse of public funds.

The political and financial costs were substantial. Pyle was voted out of office in 1954, largely because of the raid and the damage it did to his standing. Arrests and trials cost taxpayers $600,000. By 1956, every person arrested had been released, and the families had reunited in Short Creek. Members of the United Effort Plan resumed living the Principle as taught by Joseph Smith. With large families and a high birth rate, the town’s population continued to more than double each decade. The operation had imposed a severe, temporary disruption without dissolving the community or ending plural marriage there.

A Reversal in the Longer History

The raid’s most consequential result was the backlash it generated. What officials intended as a demonstration of state power became, in the eyes of many observers, an example of government overreach against a religious minority. That reversal created a political caution around renewed intervention: for most of the next half-century, Mormon fundamentalists were able to practice plural marriage across the Intermountain West with relatively little state interference. In this account, the raid stands as a turning point not because it permanently suppressed the community, but because the spectacle of the state removing children helped strengthen the community’s claim that it was being persecuted.

That protection was not permanent. In May 1998, a battered teenage girl called police from a truck stop in northern Utah, bringing renewed attention to plural marriage and the treatment of young women in fundamentalist communities. The episode marked a change in the public and legal climate after decades in which the memory of Short Creek had made officials wary of intervention. The raid therefore carries a double legacy: it demonstrated the state’s capacity to arrest adults and remove children, while its political failure helped preserve the community and made subsequent efforts to address abuses more fraught.