Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

by Jon Krakauer

  In a commandment Crossfield received in 1975, God called him by the name “Onias,” revealed that he was the true prophet and rightful leader of the LDS Church, and explained that Onias had been put on earth specifically “to set in order My Church.”* According to God, Uncle Roy and his lieutenants in the UEP were supposed to take their marching orders from Crossfield/Onias.

  Of course, none of this went over well with Uncle Roy or the other men who ran the UEP's affairs in Creston and Colorado City. The leader of the Creston polygamists promptly informed Crossfield/Onias that his presence was no longer welcome at the Creston prayer meetings, and he was kicked out of the UEP. Unfazed, Onias moved to Idaho, and then, in the early 1980s, to a little town outside of Provo, Utah.

  The official title of the supreme leader of the LDS Church—today, as in centuries past—is “President, Prophet, Seer, and Revelator.” This is because from its inception, Mormonism was a faith in which religious truth and ecclesiastical authority were supposed to be derived from a never-ending string of divine revelations.

  In the beginning, Joseph Smith had emphasized the importance of personal revelation for everyone. Denigrating the established churches of the day, which were more inclined to filter the word of God through institutional hierarchies, he instructed Mormons to seek direct “impressions from the Lord,” which should guide them in every aspect of their lives. Quickly, however, Joseph saw a major drawback to such a policy: if God spoke directly to all Mormons, who was to say that the truths He revealed to Joseph had greater validity than contradictory truths He might reveal to somebody else? With everyone receiving revelations, the prophet stood to lose control of his followers.

  Joseph acted fast to resolve this dilemma by announcing in 1830—the same year the Mormon Church was incorporated—that God had belatedly given him another revelation: “No one shall be appointed to receive commandments and revelations in this church excepting my servant Joseph Smith, Jr.” But the genie was already out of the bottle. Joseph had taught and encouraged his Saints to receive personal revelations, and the concept proved to be immensely popular. People liked talking to God directly, one-on-one, without intermediaries. It was one of the most appealing aspects of Joseph's new church.

  Thus, even after Joseph told his followers that henceforth they were forbidden to receive divine commandments concerning church doctrine, many of these Saints quietly ignored the edict and continued to heed the voice of God, whether He was talking to them about matters of theology or personal issues. The simple fact was, God's words were always going to carry more weight than Joseph's, and there wasn't much the prophet could do about it. This goes a long way toward explaining why, since 1830, some two hundred schismatic Mormon sects have splintered off from Joseph's original religion; in fact, sects continue to splinter off on an ongoing basis. The UEP communities in Colorado City and Creston are a prime example. The followers of Robert Crossfield, the Prophet Onias, are another—and one of them would turn out to be Dan Lafferty.

  An hour down the Interstate from Salt Lake City, the stolid, can-do city of Provo covers the flats between Utah Lake and eleven-thousand-foot Provo Peak. Boasting a population of slightly more than one hundred thousand, it is the seat of Utah County, and home to both the LDS Missionary Training Center—from which thirty thousand young men and women go forth each year to proselytize around the globe—and Brigham Young University (BYU)—Mormondom's flagship institution of higher learning, owned and tightly controlled by the LDS Church.

  For a person accustomed to the multiethnic commotion of Los Angeles, Vancouver, New York, or even Denver, walking across the BYU campus can be a jarring experience. One sees no graffiti, not a speck of litter. More than 99 percent of the thirty thousand students are white. Each of the young Mormons one encounters is astonishingly well groomed and neatly dressed. Beards, tattoos, and pierced ears (or other body parts) are strictly forbidden for men. Immodest attire and more than a single piercing per ear are forbidden among women. Smoking, using profane language, and drinking alcohol or even coffee are likewise banned. Heeding the dictum “Cougars don't cut corners,” students keep to the sidewalks as they hurry to make it to class on time; nobody would think of attempting to shave a few precious seconds by treading on the manicured grass. Everyone is cheerful, friendly, and unfailingly polite.

  Most non-Mormons think of Salt Lake City as the geographic heart of Mormonism, but in fact half the population of Salt Lake is Gentile, and many Mormons regard that city as a sinful, iniquitous place that's been corrupted by outsiders. To the Saints themselves, the true Mormon heartland is here in Provo and surrounding Utah County—the site of chaste little towns like Highland, American Fork, Orem, Payson, and Salem—where the population is nearly 90 percent LDS. The Sabbath is taken seriously in these parts. Almost all businesses close on Sundays, as do public swimming pools, even on the hottest days of the summer months.

  This part of the state is demographically notable in other aspects, as well. The LDS Church forbids abortions, frowns on contraception, and teaches that Mormon couples have a sacred duty to give birth to as many children as they can support—which goes a long way toward explaining why Utah County has the highest birth rate in the United States; it is higher, in fact, than the birth rate in Bangladesh. This also happens to be the most Republican county in the most Republican state in the nation. Not coincidentally, Utah County is a stronghold not only of Mormonism but also Mormon Fundamentalism.

  Salem is a farming community twelve miles south of Provo, situated where the orchards and potato fields of the east bench rub up against the high, craggy mountains of the Wasatch Front. This is where Dan Lafferty was born and raised. From miles away, one's eyes are drawn to a gargantuan white structure clinging to the steep hillside immediately above Salem: the legendary Dream Mine, which drew the Prophet Onias to the area in the early 1980s.

  The Dream Mine was the lifework of a salt-of-the-earth Mormon named John Hyrum Koyle, who passed away in 1949 at the age of eighty-four. Koyle counted himself among those special Saints who had been blessed with the gift of prophecy. He'd predicted the stock market crash of 1929 to the exact day. He'd prophesied the date World War II would end. He'd foretold of the devastating floods that swept through northern Utah thirty-four years after his death. But his most notable and far-reaching prophecy concerned the Dream Mine.

  On the night of August 27, 1894, the angel Moroni—the same Moroni who had given the gold plates to Joseph Smith sixty-seven years earlier—visited Koyle in a dream. Moroni guided Koyle to the top of a nearby mountain, where the ground opened to admit them deep into the earth. There, Moroni led Koyle through nine enormous caverns overflowing with gold. It had been gathered by the Nephites (of The Book of Mormon), but all that wealth had made them prideful and covetous, so God had taken it away from them some two thousand years ago and hidden it deep beneath this mountain, along with ancient records documenting the entire history of the Mormons' forebears.

  Moroni informed Koyle that the gold would remain hidden inside the mountain until just before the Second Coming of Christ, by which time the world's mightiest civilizations would have crumbled and horrible strife would afflict all of humankind. At that desperate moment, Koyle would unearth the Nephites' gold and use it to provide for the faithful, enabling them to survive the privations of the Last Days. Moroni showed Koyle exactly where he should start digging and assured him the gold would eventually be unearthed there—but not until the Second Coming was imminent.

  Koyle filed a mining claim on the hillside east of Salem and started digging on September 17, 1894. At the time, much of the American West was undergoing a boom in mining, so it was relatively easy for Koyle to find financial backers, almost all of them devout Mormons who saw the Dream Mine as a sound spiritual investment, as well as a surefire way to get rich. Some seven hundred thousand shares of stock were eventually sold. By the mid-1940s a shaft had been excavated thirty-four hundred feet into the mountain. The fact that no gold had yet been fou
nd didn't particularly worry Koyle or his investors: Moroni had assured him that the riches would be uncovered when the Last Days were at hand, and not a moment before.

  The LDS leadership, though, took a dim view of Koyle's mine. In the modern church, as in Joseph Smith's day, major revelations were supposed to be channeled through the LDS president, prophet, seer, and revelator—and nobody else. Church authorities repeatedly proclaimed that Koyle was a false prophet and warned the faithful not to invest in the Dream Mine, but many Saints continued to believe in Koyle's vision. Finally, in 1948, the LDS leadership excommunicated Koyle. Heartbroken and humiliated, he died a year later. Thousands of Koyle's followers, however, remained convinced that Koyle's prophecy would eventually come to pass—and remain convinced today. The Prophet Onias is one of these believers.

  Onias first heard about the Dream Mine shortly after he converted to Mormonism. He bought three hundred shares of stock in the mine, at $3 a share, and later persuaded his mother to buy three hundred shares, as well. In the late 1970s he began receiving revelations about the mine: the Lord commanded him to buy land in Salem at the base of the mine and build a “City of Refuge” there, where the righteous could hunker down in safety during the Last Days, when all hell broke loose around them. Onias moved to Utah County and made a $1,500 down payment on five acres below the mine entrance. Along the way he crossed paths with Bernard Brady and Kenyon Blackmore, local businessmen and ardent supporters of the Dream Mine who owned expensive homes in an upscale community immediately adjacent to the mine.

  Brady is a fleshy, pink-faced man in his mid-fifties who is easy to like. A natural salesman, he maintains a relentlessly upbeat demeanor that only occasionally shows cracks around the edges. Born into a good Mormon family in Malad City, Idaho (just north of the Utah border), at the age of nineteen, immediately prior to embarking on a two-year LDS mission to Switzerland, he had an experience that changed his life: before leaving Malad, he developed a severe allergic reaction to a routine inoculation. “I felt really strange and kind of weak right after they gave me the shots,” he recalls. “I had to sit down. They gave me some orange juice and I started feeling better, so I left the doctor's office and went back to work.”

  But soon after Brady returned to his job filling bags of flour at his family's grain mill, he started feeling woozy, prompting his mother to drive him home. “It was a hot August day,” he says, “but I felt this unbelievable chill, like I was going to freeze to death. So she put me on her bed with all these blankets and went in to call the doctor. All of a sudden I stopped breathing. Just quit. Then I noticed that the ceiling was coming closer and closer and closer. It took me a moment to realize that the ceiling wasn't moving—I was. I was floating. I turned and looked down, and saw my body there on the bed below me. But the thing I remember most was this overwhelmingly powerful feeling of peace and well-being and love—that all was well in the world. I'd never felt anything like it. It was absolutely amazing.

  “I was just about to hit the ceiling and bust right through it when I started thinking to myself, ‘Something isn't right here. I should be breathing.' So I commanded myself to breathe, and as soon as I did that I immediately found myself back down on the bed, inside my body, and my lungs started filling with air. But after I'd exhaled, my breathing didn't automatically continue—it stopped again. So I thought, ‘Well, I better do that again.' So I did that about three times, willing myself to breathe each time. And then my body finally took over and I started breathing again involuntarily.

  “But when I started breathing, I felt awful again—really sick—where just a few seconds earlier I'd been feeling so good, floating around in the room.”

  Upon regaining consciousness, Brady was rushed to the hospital by his mother. After spending a night there he recovered fully, but his near-death experience made a profound impression that has remained with him, very vividly, ever since. As he floated high above his body in the throes of anaphylactic shock, God ceased to be an abstract concept. He had felt the presence of the Lord firsthand, and he yearned to recapture that overpowering sense of the divine in his Mormon faith.

  For several years before he met the Prophet Onias, Brady had been growing increasingly disaffected with the LDS Church. He was discouraged by the lack of religious passion among most of the Mormons he knew. Too many members of the church seemed to him to be merely going through the motions, treating it more as a social organization than as a means for spiritual enlightenment. Then, in the late 1970s, Brady met Kenyon Blackmore and entered into a business partnership with him, selling investments in tax shelters and other financial instruments that promised incredibly high returns to speculators.

  “Ken was really intriguing to me,” says Brady. “He knew more about Mormonism than anybody I've ever met, yet he said he wasn't a Mormon. After I'd worked with him for six months or so, I sat him down and asked him to level with me: ‘How can you know all this stuff and not be a member of the LDS Church?' So he took a deep breath and told me all about fundamentalism.” Blackmore turned out to be a Canadian-born polygamist. Although he wasn't directly affiliated with the UEP or any other fundamentalist group, one of his first cousins was Winston Blackmore, who had recently maneuvered to become the leader of the polygamists in Bountiful, British Columbia, with whom Onias had once been friendly. Two of Onias's daughters were in fact married to Winston Blackmore's brothers—Kenyon Blackmore's cousins.

  “Ken was my first exposure to Mormon Fundamentalism,” Brady continues. “The whole concept sort of blew me away: all these things that Joseph Smith had revealed, but had then been abandoned by the modern Church. I went home and shared what Ken had told me with my wife. She and I both did a lot of questioning about whether it was true or not. We went through an intense period of investigating and fasting and praying. At the end both of us were impressed that the fundamentalist message was basically true. And if it was true, we couldn't ignore it. That was the frame of mind I was in when I first met the Prophet Onias, Bob Crossfield.”

  Because Brady was a stockholder in the Dream Mine, he was well acquainted with the prophecies of John Koyle, one of which referred to a “lightly complected man with white hair who would come from the North with whom the stockholders would rally and bring remarkable changes in and around the mine.” This seemed to predict the arrival of Onias in Salem, impressing Brady. Coincidentally, at the time he met Onias, Onias was in the process of putting together an organization called the School of the Prophets, and he invited Brady to become one of the school's six original counselors.

  Modeled on an institution of the same name established by Joseph Smith in 1832, Onias intended his School of the Prophets to be a mechanism for instilling crucial Mormon principles that had been forsaken by the modern LDS Church: plural marriage; the tenet that God and Adam, the first man, were one and the same; and the divinely ordained supremacy of the white race. All of which was customary fundamentalist fare. But there was one aspect of Onias's School of the Prophets that set him apart from the leaders of other polygamist sects: he instructed his followers how to receive divine revelations. Indeed, teaching this sacred art—which had been widely practiced by Mormons in Joseph's day yet all but abandoned by the modern Church—was the school's main thrust. Onias intended to restore the gift of revelation by teaching twentieth-century Saints how to hear the “still small voice” of God, which, as Joseph explained in Section 85 of The Doctrine and Covenants, “whispereth through and pierceth all things, and often times it maketh my bones to quake.”

  Brady, energized by Onias's ideas, set out to recruit worthy candidates for the school. One of them turned out to be a fellow named Watson Lafferty Jr. “He was a real quality individual,” Brady asserts. “And Watson said he had five brothers who were just like him. So I met them, and the whole Lafferty family was outstanding. They all had real strong convictions, but especially Watson's older brother Dan. He would go out of his way to help others much more than most people would. And Dan was unique in the stren
gth of his desire to do what was meaningful, to do what was right. A white lie here and there—to most people that wouldn't be a big thing. But to Dan it would be unthinkable.”

  Brady pauses, and a look of overwhelming regret darkens his face. For a moment he looks like he's going to burst into tears. He recovers his composure, with visible effort, then, in a faltering voice, continues: “So I introduced Dan Lafferty to Bob Crossfield. Looking back on it now, it's unfortunate that I was the catalyst who brought Bob and the Laffertys together. But it happened.”

  EIGHT

  THE PEACE MAKER

  In an age in which economists take for granted that people equate well-being with consumption, increasing numbers of people seem willing to trade certain freedoms and material comforts for a sense of immutable order and the rapture of faith.

  EUGENE LINDEN,

  THE FUTURE IN PLAIN SIGHT

  Dan Lafferty grew up with his five brothers and two sisters on a four-acre farm just west of Salem, Utah. Their father, Watson Lafferty Sr., had served as a barber on an aircraft carrier in World War II; following the war he enrolled in chiropractic college on the G.I. Bill. Upon completion of his training, he opened a combination chiropractic practice– barbershop–beauty salon in a spare room in his home, and settled down to raise his family to be exemplary Latter-day Saints.

  Watson Lafferty spent a lot of time thinking about God. He also spent a lot of time thinking about the government, and the relationship the former should properly have with the latter. He was highly impressed with the ideas of Ezra Taft Benson—the prominent Mormon apostle, Red-baiter, and John Birch Society supporter who in 1961 announced that there was an “insidious infiltration of communist agents and sympathizers into almost every segment of American Life.”* Even in archconservative, ultra-Mormon Utah County, the hard rightward lean of Watson's political views, as well as his extreme piety, caused the Lafferty patriarch to stand out.