John W. Bryant

John W. Bryant was a self-proclaimed prophet and polygamist leader whose Woodburn, Oregon, commune briefly drew Ron Lafferty into a markedly different religious world. Bryant’s importance in the narrative lies less in a sustained biography than in the unusual community he built and in the encounters it made possible: Ron returned from a visit with new experiences and ideas, and later came back with Dan Lafferty to recruit support for a City of Refuge. Bryant’s influence helps show how competing prophetic communities could shape the course of the brothers’ religious lives without resolving their conflicts over authority.

Identity and Background

Before settling in Woodburn, a farm town just north of Salem, Oregon, Bryant had established polygamist settlements in Utah, California, and Nevada. Like other renegade prophets, he had at times claimed to be the one mighty and strong, a religious title associated with prophetic authority. His community, however, differed from those of many other Mormon Fundamentalists. The book describes Bryant as a libertine whose teachings encouraged experimentation with drugs and group sex, practices rarely acknowledged by other fundamentalist groups.

That contrast is central to Bryant’s characterization. His commune remained within a polygamist religious landscape, but its practices departed from the strict abstinence familiar to Ron. Bryant’s leadership thus represents not a uniform fundamentalist order but a field of rival communities with sharply different teachings and customs. The available account presents him through those contrasts and through his effects on visitors, rather than through details of his early life or the origins of his beliefs.

Ron Lafferty’s Visit

Around Thanksgiving in 1983, after his divorce was finalized and his wife and children had moved to Florida, Ron traveled to Bryant’s community. Despondent at the prospect of Christmas without his family, he sought distance from Utah and from the reminders of their departure. During his extended visit, Bryant’s followers introduced him to experiences that were new to him, including intoxicants. Ron was raised in a strictly abstinent household, and the visit marked his first experience with alcohol.

When one of Bryant’s wives indicated that she found Ron attractive, he felt tempted to pursue the possibility but worried that doing so might provoke Bryant’s jealousy and anger. He left the commune and returned to Utah. The episode establishes both the community’s unconventional social environment and Ron’s hesitation within it: he was drawn to what he encountered, yet remained attentive to the risks of crossing a boundary set by its leader.

The visit also had a consequence that continued after Ron’s return. Bryant’s group used wine as a sacrament, and Ron participated. He found its effects agreeable and came to regard wine as a gift from God. Back in Utah, he pressed the School of the Prophets to replace the juice or water ordinarily served at its meetings with wine. This demand became one of his challenges to Onias’s authority, contributing to the conflict that later ended Ron, Dan, and Watson Lafferty’s association with the school. Bryant’s community did not simply offer Ron an episode of novelty; it supplied a practice that he carried into another religious organization, where it became a point of dispute.

The City of Refuge and a Return to Woodburn

After Ron and Dan broke with the School of the Prophets in April 1984, they continued to promote a City of Refuge they hoped to build on property below the Dream Mine. They had also unsuccessfully sought control of the mine. During a subsequent road trip, the brothers visited prominent polygamists in the West to seek backing for their project. At the beginning of July, after leaving Wichita, Ron and Dan traveled with Ricky Knapp toward Bryant’s commune in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

On their arrival, Ron gave an impromptu sermon about the City of Refuge and its role during the Last Days. Laurene Grant, a mother of four and one of Bryant’s followers, remembered that Ron’s manner affected the people there and that the group responded warmly. Dan, meanwhile, treated members of the commune using his chiropractic skills; Grant viewed him as gentle and loving. The reception suggests that the brothers could attract attention and support in Bryant’s community even after their disputes with Onias and the mine directors.

By the time the visitors left, Dan had taken Grant as his third wife. She and her two youngest children departed with Dan in her car; Ron, her two older sons, and Knapp traveled separately in the Impala. The parties agreed to meet again in two weeks at the compound of Alex Joseph in Big Water, Utah, a polygamist settlement not far from Colorado City. Bryant’s commune therefore became one stop in a wider effort to assemble allies for the brothers’ project, as well as the setting for a consequential new marriage in Dan’s life.

Narrative Role

Bryant connects two stages in Ron’s trajectory. His commune first introduces Ron to wine and other practices outside the disciplined abstinence of his childhood; later, it becomes a place where Ron presents his own prophetic ambitions and appeals for support. The contrast is revealing: the visitor who had once encountered Bryant’s community as an outsider returns as a preacher with a project of his own. Yet the evidence does not show Bryant joining that project or accepting Ron’s authority. His role remains that of a host and fellow religious leader whose community provides a temporary audience and a route into a wider network of polygamist settlements.

The episodes also place Bryant among competing claims to revelation and religious order. His occasional claim to the one mighty and strong and Ron’s sermon about the City of Refuge belong to a setting where prophetic leadership was asserted by more than one figure. The narrative does not resolve those claims through Bryant; instead, it shows how Ron’s encounters with distinct communities informed his choices and how the brothers continued searching for allies after breaking with Onias. Bryant’s significance is therefore both specific and transitional: his teachings altered Ron’s religious practice, while his commune later offered the Laffertys a platform from which to pursue support for their own plans.