Short Creek, Utah, was founded in 1911 as an isolated refuge for polygamists and grew into a tightly governed religious community later associated with Colorado City, Arizona. Its remoteness offered protection from outside scrutiny, but the community’s history was not one of unbroken unity: disputes over prophetic authority repeatedly divided its members, while church rules reached into civic administration, marriage, and family life.

An isolated settlement and its religious roots

Short Creek’s location on the Arizona Strip made it appealing to people seeking distance from authorities enforcing restrictions on plural marriage. The settlement’s remoteness mattered especially after the 1890 Manifesto, when isolated communities offered polygamists a place to continue their practice. Short Creek also developed close ties with the polygamous families at Lee’s Ferry. As outsiders began arriving in greater numbers at Lee’s Ferry, members of the Johnson family, including LeRoy Johnson, moved to Short Creek in 1928, where they expected less attention from officials searching for plural-marriage households.

By the mid-1930s, John Y. Barlow had become a leading figure in the fundamentalist movement. Though he lived in northern Utah, he cultivated close ties with Short Creek and with LeRoy Johnson. In 1940 Barlow moved some of his own families there, and one of his daughters later married Johnson. Short Creek thus became part of a wider network of families and leaders who understood priesthood authority as passing from prophet to prophet. In the community’s account of that succession, the line ran from Joseph Smith through Brigham Young, John Taylor, John W. Woolley, Lorin C. Woolley, Barlow, LeRoy Johnson, and Rulon Jeffs, and then to Warren Jeffs.

Prophetic rule in community life

Under Rulon Jeffs, the prophet’s authority extended beyond religious teaching. The mayor, city employees, police force, and public-school superintendent answered to him, and his directives could govern ordinary matters of community life. The local prohibition on television and newspapers, for example, did not prevent residents from secretly obtaining satellite dishes. After Rulon preached against television and warned that he knew who was watching, people would discard their dishes in the desert; after a period without televisions, the practice gradually returned until the next crackdown. The cycle made the reach and limits of enforcement visible in the landscape around town.

Restrictions also governed contact beyond the community. Residents were forbidden to associate with people outside the United Effort Plan, including relatives who had left the religion. DeLoy Bateman, himself an apostate, described his brother David living only a few yards away, separated by a fence, yet unable to speak freely with him. In this order, leaving the faith could threaten not only a person’s standing but also the continuity of family relationships.

The community’s marriage practices brought religious rules into conflict with state law. Polygamy was illegal in Utah and Arizona, so men typically legally married only their first wife; later wives were spiritually married but legally treated as single mothers. That arrangement also allowed large families to qualify for public assistance. Although Rulon and his followers regarded state and federal governments as hostile to their religious community, Short Creek received substantial public funding. The resulting tension between competing legal orders was also voiced by its police chief, who argued that private religious practice should not be government business, even as police officers were bound to uphold the law.

Succession, schism, and the community’s future

The death of LeRoy Johnson in 1986 reopened the question of who could claim the prophet’s authority. Rulon Jeffs succeeded him, but supporters of the prominent bishop Marion Hammon disputed the succession. Nearly a third of the community left together, settled in the desert across the highway, and formed the Second Ward; the original congregation became known as the First Ward. Each side condemned the other as apostate, and the division endured.

Rulon’s death raised the same question again. Warren Jeffs, Rulon’s second son by his fourth wife, moved swiftly to take control. Because Rulon had been ill for several years, Warren had already been running the church and functioning as its leader in practice. His succession nevertheless lacked the affection that members had shown Rulon and LeRoy. Some had hoped that the respected patriarch Fred Jessop would become prophet, and there was speculation that Jessop’s followers might leave the First Ward. For the moment, they held back in the belief that Warren’s leadership would not last.

Short Creek’s history therefore links geographic isolation to institutional authority without making either a guarantee of stability. The settlement provided a haven for polygamous families, but it also became a place where church leadership could govern civic structures, set rules for information and kinship, and claim authority over marriage and children. The recurring splits reveal the other side of that order: when a prophet’s succession was contested, the community’s unity could fracture along the same lines of religious allegiance that had once held it together.