Bountiful, British Columbia, is a settlement of about seven hundred United Effort Plan fundamentalists whose connections to Colorado City, Arizona, extend across an international border. The book presents it as both a rural community rooted in a particular landscape and a node in a religious network governed by prophetic authority. Its green farms and mountain setting stand far from the desert around Colorado City, but marriages, leadership, and shared religious history bind the two places closely together.

Setting and religious community

Bountiful lies a few miles outside Creston, British Columbia, in the bottomlands of the Kootenay River. Hayfields and houses occupy the valley beneath the steep, forested slopes of the Purcell Mountains and Mount Thompson. The rain-soaked scenery differs sharply from the dry country of Colorado City, roughly nine hundred miles to the south; the contrast in terrain, however, does not mean separation in religious life. Bountiful’s residents belong to the United Effort Plan and answer to its prophet, Rulon Jeffs.

The relationship between the Canadian settlement and Colorado City is sustained in part through arranged patterns of marriage between the communities. Girls from Bountiful are sent south to marry men in Colorado City, while girls from Colorado City are brought north to marry Bountiful men. The border therefore marks a national boundary but not the limits of the community’s social organization. Family formation links the two settlements, and authority extending from Colorado City reaches into the lives of the Canadian branch.

Bountiful’s fundamentalist community took shape through migration and affiliation. In 1957, when Debbie Oler was two, her father, Dalmon Oler, moved his family to the Creston Valley to join a group that had settled there a few years earlier. The group was led by Ray Blackmore, a charismatic leader who had allied it with the United Effort Plan polygamists at Short Creek, under the leadership of LeRoy Johnson. Other families, including those headed by Eldon Palmer and Sam Ralston, had already joined the Blackmore group and were openly practicing plural marriage.

Family life and competing authority

Bountiful’s religious structure was expressed not only through leadership but through the expectations placed on household members. Dalmon Oler eventually married six women and had forty-five children; Debbie, the eldest, grew up within this large polygamous household. To keep track of so many children, Oler gave those born in a particular year names beginning with the same letter. In 1976, for example, four children born between June and October were named Jared, Jeanette, Julia, and Jennifer. The family’s scale appears in the book as an ordinary feature of the community’s plural-marriage system, while Debbie’s own experience shows how unequal and painful household relationships could be.

Oler’s second wife, Memory Blackmore, was Ray Blackmore’s eldest daughter. Debbie’s early experience of plural marriage was shaped by insecurity and jealousy within the household. Memory treated her harshly, particularly after Debbie’s birth mother died when Debbie was six. Debbie was described as intelligent, questioning, and unwilling to defer automatically to authority—traits the book contrasts with the obedience expected in the fundamentalist community. Her childhood account makes the household more than a demonstration of family size: it shows how the community’s religious arrangements could determine a child’s immediate experience of family and belonging.

The reach of local authority also appears in the story of Kenyon and Annie Blackmore. Kenyon took a teaching job in Bountiful in 1966 and began pressing for plural marriage, although Annie could not accept it. When Kenyon pursued Alaire, the adopted daughter of his uncle Ray Blackmore, Ray—then the community’s presiding bishop—ordered his sons to drive Kenyon out of town. The episode places marital decisions within a hierarchy that included both household relationships and religious leadership. Kenyon’s earlier marriage to Annie and their children did not prevent his ambitions from becoming a source of conflict; Ray’s intervention, in turn, showed the practical force of his local position.

Departure and the limits of belonging

Bountiful is also the place from which Debbie Palmer ultimately left with her children. After her house burned, she gathered her five children, put their belongings into a few garbage bags, and loaded them into a badly deteriorated car. She then drove east over the snowbound Rocky Mountains, leaving Bountiful and the reach of Winston Blackmore, Rulon Jeffs, and the United Effort Plan. The departure turned a household crisis into a break with the community: the car carried little property, but it carried Debbie and her children beyond the authority under which their lives had been organized.

Her escape gives the settlement’s geography a second meaning. The mountain range that frames Bountiful also lay across the route she took away from it. The book does not present departure as a simple change of address: Debbie’s small load of possessions and five children make clear the material circumstances of her exit, while the named authorities she sought to leave behind locate the conflict within the religious order itself. Bountiful is thus represented both as a home and as a community from which leaving could require a decisive rupture.

Leadership, succession, and division

Bountiful’s leadership changed with the succession of prophets in the United Effort Plan. Until 1986, LeRoy Johnson was the prophet; his sermons repeatedly emphasized total obedience, and the community motto, “Keep Sweet, No Matter What,” was displayed in homes on walls and refrigerator doors. Rulon Jeffs then assumed leadership. After Rulon’s death, his son Warren Jeffs took the reins of the church. Although Warren had already been running its affairs while his father was ill, the book distinguishes his authority from the affection earlier leaders had received: residents of Bountiful and Colorado City did not commonly call him “Uncle Warren.”

Warren’s succession had direct consequences in the Canadian branch. He removed Winston Blackmore from his leadership position in Bountiful and threatened to expel him from the religion. Warren installed Jimmy Oler, Debbie Palmer’s half brother, as the new bishop. Yet the transfer did not bring the community into line behind the new appointment: at least half of Bountiful’s residents remained loyal to Blackmore. The possibility that Blackmore might establish an independent sect raised the prospect that Canadian fundamentalists would break their ties with Warren’s church in Colorado City. Leadership at a distance therefore proved powerful but not uncontested; the same cross-border connections that integrated Bountiful into the organization could become channels for division.

The book places this conflict within a longer pattern of fundamentalist schism. In the communities of Colorado City and Bountiful, portraits of eight religious leaders commonly appear together: Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, John Taylor, John W. Woolley, Lorin C. Woolley, John Y. Barlow, LeRoy Johnson, and Rulon Jeffs. Members understand the sequence as a transmission of priesthood authority, continuing through Warren after Rulon’s death. Other fundamentalist communities honor somewhat different prophetic lineages. The portraits make succession visible inside the home, while the competing claims surrounding Warren and Blackmore show that the lineage did not prevent disputes over who possessed authority to lead.

End-times belief and the wider world

Bountiful’s communal life also included an urgent interpretation of events beyond its borders. Warren Jeffs treated the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as a portent of the End Times, even while publicly condemning the terrorists’ violence. In the Bountiful school, photographs clipped from magazines showing the planes striking the World Trade Center were mounted in the halls so students would see them as evidence that the Last Days were near. This use of news images gave a distant event a specific local function: the photographs became part of a lesson in how followers should read the outside world through prophetic expectation.

The scene also clarifies the tension between the community’s separation and its attention to external events. Bountiful’s religious boundaries did not make the wider world irrelevant; rather, events beyond the settlement could be incorporated into an account of imminent divine transformation. Across the book’s portrayals of family, leadership, departure, and prophecy, Bountiful emerges as more than an isolated farming settlement. It is a community whose local routines and divisions are shaped by a larger religious network, and whose claim to spiritual order coexists with contested authority and the possibility of leaving.