Creston, British Columbia, is the small agricultural town beside Bountiful, a Mormon Fundamentalist settlement whose history connects Canadian families to the polygamist community in Colorado City, Arizona. The surrounding valley offered a striking contrast to the arid country to the south, but the border did not separate the communities: people, marriages, and competing claims to religious authority moved across it.

Setting and the Bountiful Community

Several miles outside Creston, houses and farms stood among the hayfields of the Kootenay River bottomlands, below the steep, forested slopes of Mount Thompson in the Purcell Mountains. The rain-soaked landscape was a far cry from the dry surroundings of Colorado City, roughly nine hundred miles to the south. Yet the settlement known as Bountiful was closely linked to that community through the United Effort Plan and its leaders.

Bountiful was home to about seven hundred Mormon Fundamentalists who answered unconditionally to Prophet Rulon Jeffs. Girls regularly traveled south across the international border to marry men in Colorado City, while even more girls traveled north from Colorado City to marry men in Bountiful. The repeated movement made the border a passage within a shared religious and marital system, rather than a firm boundary between separate communities.

Settlement and Family Networks

Debbie Palmer spent most of her life in Bountiful. Her father, Dalmon Oler, moved his family to the Creston Valley in 1957, when Debbie was two, to join a fundamentalist group established there several years earlier. The group was led by Ray Blackmore, who had allied it with the United Effort Plan polygamists in Short Creek under the leadership of LeRoy Johnson.

The Creston community also belonged to a longer history of plural marriage. Like many Canadian Mormons, Ray Blackmore descended from Utah polygamists sent north of the border to continue the practice after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was forced to renounce polygamy in the United States. By the time the Oler family arrived, families headed by Eldon Palmer and Sam Ralston had joined the Blackmore clan and were openly practicing plural marriage.

Dalmon Oler soon acquired multiple wives. He eventually married six women and fathered forty-five children, with Debbie the oldest. To keep track of the large family, he gave children born in the same year names beginning with the same letter. The 1976 births, for example, included Jared, Jeanette, Julia, and Jennifer, all born between June and October. This naming system offers a concrete glimpse of how a religious community’s practice of plural marriage shaped family life on an unusually large scale.

Crossfield and Prophetic Disputes

Creston’s fundamentalist network also drew in Robert Crossfield. After moving from Spruce Grove, Alberta, to Creston to manage a farmer’s cooperative, he learned of the nearby polygamists and began attending their prayer meetings. He recognized them as kindred souls; they followed LeRoy Johnson, whom they regarded as a beloved leader, and their teachings affirmed plural marriage.

Crossfield’s ties to the community deepened as he developed his own prophetic claims. By 1972, he had gathered twenty-three revelations into The First Book of Commandments and arranged for it to be printed and distributed to libraries and religious bookstores across Canada and the western United States. When a copy reached the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Crossfield was excommunicated. The Creston fundamentalists initially treated that rejection as a mark of honor, but his revelations later declared that LeRoy Johnson and the other United Effort Plan leaders had gone astray. Creston thus became more than a setting for a single fundamentalist congregation: it was a meeting ground where shared commitments to plural marriage could coexist with sharp disputes over which prophet spoke for God.