LeRoy Johnson

LeRoy Johnson, known to his followers as Uncle Roy, was a central leader of Mormon Fundamentalism and the prophet of the larger fundamentalist faction based in Short Creek. His rise followed a disputed succession that split the movement; his death, at the age of ninety-eight, produced another struggle over leadership and the departure of a large part of the community. Remembered as a warm and beloved prophet, Johnson also left a legacy of uncompromising obedience that remained visible in the culture of Colorado City long after he was gone.

Identity and Early Life

Johnson was born LeRoy Sunderland Johnson on June 12, 1888, at Lee's Ferry, a remote crossing of the Colorado River. His birth took place within a landscape already shaped by the movement's history. After John D. Lee was captured and jailed in 1874, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sent Warren M. Johnson, with his wives and children, to settle on the river's north bank and help Lee's wife maintain the ferry. One of Warren's wives gave birth there to the child who would become Uncle Roy.

Lee's Ferry served travelers moving between Utah and Mormon settlements in Arizona and Mexico, and its isolation later made it attractive to people continuing plural marriage after the Manifesto. Short Creek, founded on the Arizona Strip in 1911, offered another remote refuge. As outside access to Lee's Ferry increased, Johnson and members of the Johnson family moved to Short Creek in 1928, where the community was less exposed to authorities searching for people practicing plural marriage. His life and later authority thus grew from settlements whose distance from the outside world was both practical protection and part of their identity.

The Succession Dispute

By the mid-1930s, John Y. Barlow had become a leading figure in the fundamentalist movement. Though based in northern Utah, he cultivated close ties with Short Creek and with Johnson in particular. Barlow moved some of his own families to the settlement in 1940, and one of his daughters later married Johnson. Their association placed Johnson within a network of leaders and families that would help define the movement's claims to religious authority.

When Barlow died in 1949, leadership passed to Joseph Musser, a respected follower. Musser soon suffered a series of debilitating strokes and became dependent on Rulon Allred, a naturopath and fellow polygamist who treated him. In 1951, while gravely ill, Musser appointed Allred his second elder and heir apparent. This decision directly challenged the expectations of those who believed Johnson should succeed Musser, as Barlow had specified before his death. The dispute was not simply over personal preference: it concerned which leader could claim continuity with the movement's earlier prophets and direct the faithful.

The conflict between Johnson's supporters and Allred's camp fractured the fundamentalists into rival groups. After Musser died in 1954, Johnson took leadership of the larger faction, which remained in Short Creek and became known as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or the United Effort Plan. Allred led the other splinter, the Apostolic United Brethren, based in the Salt Lake Valley. The separation established a durable division: the Short Creek group and the Allred group thereafter had little involvement with one another.

Prophet and Community Legacy

Johnson's authority was remembered through a strong emphasis on submission to religious leadership. Many of his sermons, in the account of the community's history, returned to the principle that “The path to heaven is through total obedience.” The motto later displayed throughout Bountiful, British Columbia, “Keep Sweet, No Matter What,” was described as a visible inheritance of Johnson's teaching. These phrases locate his legacy not only in his position as prophet but in a culture that treated obedience as a route to salvation and dissent as a threat to religious order.

His memory also remained prominent in the community's account of its own prophetic succession. Portraits in homes in Colorado City and Bountiful commonly depicted a line of leaders beginning with Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, continuing through John Taylor, John W. Woolley, Lorin C. Woolley, and John Y. Barlow, and ending with Johnson and Rulon Jeffs. Followers understood this succession as the transmission of priesthood keys, the divinely authorized power to lead the righteous. Other fundamentalist communities honored somewhat different lines of leaders, underscoring that claims of continuity were themselves contested.

Johnson's standing was personal as well as institutional. He was remembered as much adored, and as a warm, loving prophet. DeLoy Bateman, who was born and raised in the faith, identified Johnson as his adoptive grandfather and as the leader of Colorado City immediately before Rulon Jeffs. That familial and communal remembrance contrasts with the later image of leadership as distant command: under Rulon, the prophet's authority extended through city employees, the police force, and the schools, while the community enforced bans on outside media and contact with people who had left. Those later practices should not be mistaken for particular acts by Johnson, but they show the tightly controlled religious world in which his successors exercised power and his legacy endured.

Death and the Next Schism

Johnson died in 1986 at the age of ninety-eight. His followers had believed he would live forever, and his death brought apprehension about who could inherit his authority. Rulon Jeffs assumed leadership, but Johnson's succession had not settled the deeper question of how prophetic authority should be recognized. Those loyal to Marion Hammon, a prominent bishop, rejected the transition. Nearly a third of the community left the fold, settled on desert land across the highway, and established the Second Ward, while the original congregation became known as the First Ward.

Each congregation denounced the other as apostate and warned of the other's eternal damnation. The split echoed the earlier rupture between Johnson's followers and Allred's faction: every transfer of authority could renew arguments about who held the true priesthood and who had departed from it. Johnson had led the larger Short Creek branch through one such crisis; after his death, the succession he left behind became the occasion for another. His reputation as a beloved prophet endured, but neither affection nor a revered lineage prevented the community from dividing over the right to speak for God.