St. George, Utah, serves in the book as a nearby point of access to the outside world for residents of Colorado City, Arizona, and as a setting where state authorities briefly intervened in a case involving a young member of the FLDS community. Its appearances connect private departures from community rules with the larger question of how effectively public institutions respond to the community’s authority.

A Nearby Route Beyond Colorado City

Residents of Colorado City who secretly sought television access traveled to St. George or Cedar City, Utah, to buy satellite dishes. They hid the equipment and watched television despite the community’s prohibition on television and print media. The account describes this pattern as cyclical: after Rulon Jeffs preached against television and warned of spiritual consequences, dishes were dumped in the desert; over the next two or three years, people gradually began installing them again. St. George thus appears not as a distant alternative, but as a nearby commercial gateway through which a forbidden connection to the wider world could be obtained.

A Brief Child-Welfare Intervention

St. George also became the site of an official meeting concerning Ruby Jessop. After Ruby, then fourteen, was reportedly taken from her brother’s home and brought to her stepfather’s house, her sister Flora pressed authorities to act. About a month later, the Utah Department of Child and Family Services required FLDS members to bring Ruby to St. George to meet a social worker. The interview took place in the presence of a person alleged to have abducted her. Ruby told the social worker that all was well, and she was returned to members of the faith. The meeting therefore marked contact with an outside agency without producing a lasting separation from the community or an effective safeguard for Ruby.

Regional Press and Public Scrutiny

The city’s regional reach also appears through the Spectrum, its daily newspaper. St. George is described as an LDS stronghold less than forty miles from Colorado City. After Tom Green received a relatively light sentence in a case involving child rape, the Spectrum published an editorial criticizing the outcome and emphasizing the children affected by the court’s decision. In this account, St. George is both close enough to register the consequences of events in Colorado City and a place from which those events could be publicly challenged. Together, the newspaper’s criticism, the child-welfare meeting, and the discreet purchases of satellite dishes show different kinds of contact across the boundary between the FLDS community and the surrounding society.