Kingman, Arizona, is identified in the account chiefly as the destination for children taken from Short Creek during the 1953 raid. As the seat of Mohave County, it stood roughly 400 miles by the shortest road from the community; the removal of the children made the distant county center a point of contact between state authority and the isolated settlement.

Distance and Setting

Governor Howard Pyle described Short Creek as a remote community beyond the Grand Canyon, separated from Kingman by a long journey. That distance formed part of his explanation for why officials believed the settlement had evaded state interference. The book’s account thus places Kingman in relation to Short Creek less as a scene of local life than as the administrative center toward which the raid’s consequences were carried.

The Children Taken to Kingman

On July 26, 1953, state police, county deputies, and Arizona National Guard troops entered Short Creek and arrested 122 polygamous men and women, including DeLoy Bateman’s father. The 263 children in the affected families were declared wards of the state, transported 400 miles to Kingman, and placed in foster care. Their removal made the operation a family rupture as well as a series of arrests, and photographs of children separated from their mothers helped prompt public sympathy for the community.

Aftermath and Significance

The arrests and subsequent trials cost taxpayers $600,000. By 1956, all those arrested had been released and reunited with their families in Short Creek. Kingman’s role in the episode was therefore brief but consequential: it was the distant destination to which children were taken under state authority, within a crackdown that was later widely regarded as religious persecution and that ultimately strengthened public support for the fundamentalists.