Snake Valley is the remote desert setting of Greenhaven, the polygamous household of Tom Green and his family. In the account, its distance from paved roads frames a community that might otherwise have remained largely outside public view: Green instead invited journalists and television programs into his life, turning his home in the west desert into a highly visible stage for a legal and cultural dispute over plural marriage.

Setting and Greenhaven

Green’s home was a collection of decrepit trailers on ten acres in Juab County’s desolate Snake Valley, toward the Nevada line and a hundred miles from the nearest paved road. He called the property Greenhaven. The name lent a modest air of self-contained refuge to a sprawling family settlement in an isolated landscape, though the account presents it as a lived-in household rather than a formal institution.

At the time described, Green was fifty-four and had thirty-two children and five current wives. He had married at least ten women altogether; the other five had left him. His oldest current wife was twenty-two years younger than he was, and his youngest was twenty-nine years younger. These details make the household’s scale and age differences concrete, while the remote setting helps explain how the family could live beyond the routine visibility of urban life.

Publicity and the Household

Green differed from polygamists who sought to avoid outside scrutiny. He and his wives opened their lives to print journalists and appeared on television programs including Judge Judy, Jerry Springer, Queen Latifah, Sally Jessy Raphael, and Dateline NBC. Green presented the media exposure as an effort to show that plural marriage could work and that his family was not a threat, fanatical, or criminal. The account records this as his public explanation, not as an independent judgment about the household.

That decision gave Snake Valley an unusual narrative role. Its remoteness did not keep Greenhaven out of public discussion; instead, television carried the household from the west desert to a national audience. The contrast between an isolated property and the reach of prime-time publicity became central to the attention surrounding Green and his family.

Prosecution and Wider Significance

In April 2000, Green was charged with bigamy and first-degree felony rape of a child. His case became a public spectacle, and reports about his plural marriages appeared in major media outlets across the country. The account links the prosecution’s immediate impetus to publicity: Juab County attorney David O. Leavitt had known about Green’s polygamous colony for years, but had not intended to prosecute him until he saw Green discussing his young wives on Dateline NBC in 1999.

Snake Valley thus enters the account not simply as a remote address but as the home of a family whose public exposure helped bring a previously known polygamous settlement into the legal and media spotlight. Greenhaven’s isolation and its deliberate visibility pull in opposite directions: the household stood far from paved roads, yet its televised presence carried the dispute over plural marriage far beyond the valley.