by Jon Krakauer
The Mormon prophet warned the twelve wide-eyed Saints who sat before him, “Some of you will be handled and ostracized and cast out from the Church by your brethren because of your faithfulness and integrity to this principle, and some of you may have to surrender your lives because the same, but woe, woe, unto those who shall bring these troubles upon you.” Then Taylor called together five of the assembled Saints, including Samuel Bateman, John W. Woolley, and Lorin C. Woolley, and granted them authority not only to perform celestial marriages but to ordain others to do the same, thereby seeing to it “that no year passed by without children being born in the principle of Plural Marriage.”
This historic meeting (the authenticity of which has been angrily disputed by LDS General Authorities ever since) lasted eight hours. As it was winding down, Taylor prophesied that “in the time of the seventh president of this Church, the Church would go into bondage both temporally and spiritually, and in that day the One Mighty and Strong spoken of in the 85th Section of The Doctrine and Covenants would come.”
And thus were the seeds of Mormon Fundamentalism sown. Four years later, when the LDS Church voted to sustain the Manifesto and end polygamy, Mormon society began to take its first tentative steps toward joining the American mainstream—slowly and ambivalently at first, and then with stunning determination. But the fundamentalists refused to have any part of it. They remained dedicated to the doctrines of Joseph Smith—to his doctrine of plural marriage, in particular. They vowed to uphold John Taylor's covenant with ferocious resolve, regardless of the course taken by the rest of Mormondom or the rest of the world. Today, that same vow has been taken up by the fundamentalists' twenty-first-century brethren, and their fervor is no less resolute.
To Mormon Fundamentalists—to the likes of Dan Lafferty, and the inhabitants of Colorado City, and Brian David Mitchell (the abductor of Elizabeth Smart)—September 27, 1886, is a sacred date. From that moment forward, faithful polygamists have been eagerly anticipating the arrival of the “one mighty and strong,” who will, as Joseph prophesied, “set in order the house of God.”
PART IV
Both revelation and delusion are attempts at the solution of problems. Artists and scientists realize that no solution is ever final, but that each new creative step points the way to the next artistic or scientific problem. In contrast, those who embrace religious revelations and delusional systems tend to see them as unshakeable and permanent. . . .
Religious faith is an answer to the problem of life. . . . The majority of mankind want or need some all-embracing belief system which purports to provide an answer to life's mysteries, and are not necessarily dismayed by the discovery that their belief system, which they proclaim as “the truth,” is incompatible with the beliefs of other people. One man's faith is another man's delusion. . . .
Whether a belief is considered to be a delusion or not depends partly upon the intensity with which it is defended, and partly upon the numbers of people subscribing to it.*
ANTHONY STORR,
FEET OF CLAY
TWENTY-ONE
EVANGELINE
My mother was born into a world of early twentieth-century Mormon Utah—a place that, in many respects, was dramatically different from the America that surrounded it. The Mormons had long possessed a strong and spectacular sense of otherness and unity: They saw themselves not only as God's modern chosen people, but also as a people whose faith and identity had been forged by a long and bloody history, and by outright banishment. They were a people apart—a people with its own myths and purposes, and with a history of astonishing violence.
MIKAL GILMORE,
SHOT IN THE HEART
For more than fifteen years—ever since Rulon Jeffs became leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—the inhabitants of Colorado City were sustained by their conviction that he was the “one mighty and strong,” the Lord's anointed emissary on earth, a prophet whom God had granted eternal life. But Uncle Rulon had been gravely ill for a long time, and on September 8, 2002, his heart stopped beating and a physician pronounced him dead. That was four days ago; now, as the reality of their leader's death has begun to sink in, the town's residents are desperately trying to reconcile their faith in his immortality with the inescapable fact that he is deceased. Today, on a warm and cloudless Thursday afternoon, more than five thousand people—mostly devout fundamentalists, but a few Gentiles and mainline Mormons as well—have assembled in Colorado City from as far away as Canada and Mexico to pay their respects and bury Uncle Rulon.
The men and boys somberly filing out of the funeral service that has just concluded in the LeRoy Johnson Meeting House are dressed in their Sunday best. The women and girls wear ankle-length dresses in pastel shades of pink, lavender, and blue that could be straight out of the nineteenth century; their hair, pulled back into long, chaste braids, first rises from their foreheads in fabulous crests, painstakingly arranged, that bring to mind breaking surf. Above the grieving throngs, the cliffs of Canaan Mountain glow in the angled sunlight, profiled against a blue autumn sky.
Uncle Rulon, who was three months shy of his ninety-third birthday when he passed on, left behind an estimated seventy-five bereft wives and at least sixty-five children. There is much uncertainty about how the next of kin and the rest of his followers will cope in his absence. An air of vague anxiety hangs over the community.
The same kind of apprehension gripped Colorado City in 1986, when the prophet who preceded Uncle Rulon—LeRoy Johnson, the much adored Uncle Roy—perished at the age of ninety-eight. Uncle Roy was also supposed to live forever. After his death, Uncle Rulon assumed leadership of the sect, but his right to claim Uncle Roy's mantle was furiously contested by those loyal to a prominent bishop named Marion Hammon. Hammon's followers, amounting to nearly a third of the community, left the fold en masse, moved onto a swath of desert just across the highway, and founded their own fundamentalist church—which became known as the Second Ward (the original church was called the First Ward). Each congregation accused the other of being godless apostates and issued impassioned warnings about the eternal damnation that would surely be the other's fate. Which is pretty much how things still stand today.
Now, following Uncle Rulon's demise, the First Ward is threatened by further rifts, even though forty-six-year-old Warren Jeffs—the second son of Rulon's fourth wife—moved swiftly to take the reins of the church. Because his father had been seriously ailing for several years, Warren had already been running things, and had long functioned as prophet in everything but name. But Warren—a tall, bony man with a bulging Adam's apple, a high-pitched voice, and a frightening sense of his own perfection in the eyes of God—has never received anything remotely close to the kind of affection lavished on Uncle Rulon or Uncle Roy by the people of Colorado City and Bountiful, British Columbia. Almost nobody in either town refers to Warren Jeffs as “Uncle Warren.”
“My father, and especially Uncle Roy, were warm, loving prophets who taught polygamy for the right reasons,” says one of the new prophet's older siblings. “Warren has no love for the people. His method for controlling them is to inspire fear and dread. My brother preaches that you must be perfect in your obedience. You must have the spirit twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, or you'll be cut off and go to hell. Warren's a fanatic. Everything is black and white to him.”
A great many First Warders had hoped that an admired, ninety-five-year-old patriarch named Fred Jessop—known as Uncle Fred—would succeed Uncle Rulon. When Warren was ordained as prophet instead, there was considerable speculation that Uncle Fred's followers would be sufficiently disenchanted to secede from the First Ward and form yet another sect of their own. But the brother of Warren quoted above speculates that this faction may bide their time for a while before deciding to make the break, because they don't think Warren is going to be sitting in the prophet's chair for long: “They're holding on. They believe that it's just a matter of time before God takes this ev
il man from their midst, leaving the First Ward intact, with one of their own in power. And I agree with them. I think Warren's going to get his comeuppance. I don't know how it's going to happen, or when, but I think he's going to suffer an untimely death. I feel this in my bones.”
In the meantime, Warren is still very much in the company of the living, and he has been taking steps to consolidate his power. Up in Bountiful, British Columbia, he has stripped Winston Blackmore (whom he has long resented and distrusted) of his leadership position and has threatened to banish him from the religion altogether. Warren installed a compliant man named Jimmy Oler (the half brother of Debbie Palmer, the woman who burned her house down to escape Bountiful) as the new bishop of the Canadian branch of the church, but at least half of the Bountiful community has remained loyal to Blackmore. Should he decide to establish an independent sect of his own, many Canadian fundamentalists would probably sever their ties with Warren's church in Colorado City to follow Blackmore.
But schisms of this sort are hardly a new phenomenon. A look backward at the history of Mormon Fundamentalism shows that its adherents have been splintering into rival sects ever since the first group of die-hard polygamists themselves broke away from the main Mormon Church a century ago.
The polygamous roots of Colorado City, née Short Creek, lead back to John D. Lee and the forlorn outpost where he was exiled by Brigham Young after the Mountain Meadows massacre. Lee's Ferry is situated at a sweeping bend in the Colorado River, immediately below the lowermost rapids of Glen Canyon, and just upstream from where the turbulent river surges into the depths of the Grand Canyon. In the nineteenth century, because it was the only place for many miles where the torrent could be crossed, this bit of desert was of great strategic importance to the Kingdom of Deseret. Saints traveling between Utah and Mormon colonies in Arizona and Mexico—as well as the occasional Gentile prospector—relied on Lee to shuttle them across the river in his small wooden scow. Prior to his arrest and subsequent execution, operating this ferry service provided Lee with a meager living.
When Lee was captured and jailed in 1874, the LDS Church recruited a Saint named Warren M. Johnson to resettle with his two wives and children on the north bank of the Colorado River in order to help Lee's wife, Emma, maintain the crucial crossing. On June 12, 1888, one of Johnson's wives gave birth to a boy at Lee's Ferry. The baby was christened LeRoy Sunderland Johnson, but in later years, after he had risen to become prophet of the fundamentalist church, everyone would call him Uncle Roy.
After the Manifesto, the remoteness of Lee's Ferry was considered especially attractive to polygamists, and it became a haven for cohabs, as did another isolated settlement on the Arizona Strip, Short Creek, founded in 1911. By the early decades of the twentieth century, tight bonds had been established between the polygamous inhabitants of Short Creek and Lee's Ferry, a group that included Warren Johnson and his descendents. In 1928, when improved access brought swelling ranks of outsiders through Lee's Ferry, some of the Johnson clan, including LeRoy, pulled up stakes and moved to Short Creek, which remained farther off the beaten track and was thus less likely to draw the attention of cohab hunters.
By the mid-1930s, the fundamentalist movement was being led by a staunch polygamist named John Y. Barlow. Although he lived in northern Utah, when Barlow heard that Short Creek had become a magnet for families devoted to the Work, he cultivated a close relationship with the community as a whole, and LeRoy Johnson in particular. In 1940 Barlow transplanted some of his own families to Short Creek, and later one of his daughters was married to Johnson. DeLoy Bateman happens to be John Y. Barlow's grandson. Another of Barlow's descendents, Dan Barlow, is today the mayor of Colorado City.
In the homes of the present-day residents of Colorado City and Bountiful, it is common to see the portraits of eight ecclesiastical leaders hanging on the walls. Usually arranged in a large, handsomely framed montage, the portraits depict the preeminent stars in the constellation of Mormon Fundamentalism: Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, John Taylor, John W. Woolley, Lorin C. Woolley, John Y. Barlow, LeRoy Johnson, and Rulon Jeffs. Fundamentalists believe the so-called keys to priesthood authority—the divinely ordained power to lead the righteous—have been given to each of these prophets in turn, starting with Joseph and proceeding through Uncle Rulon (and now, with Rulon's death, to Warren Jeffs). This, at any rate, is how the folks in Colorado City and Bountiful view things. Other fundamentalist communities, however, glorify a slightly different pantheon of prophets.
After John Y. Barlow died, in 1949, the fundamentalist leadership was transferred to a respected acolyte named Joseph Musser, who was immediately stricken by a series of crippling strokes, creating the first major schism in the movement. When he became debilitated, Musser was treated by a folksy, gregarious naturopath and fellow polygamist named Rulon Allred, on whom he became utterly dependent. In 1951 Musser, now gravely ill, appointed Allred his “second elder”—his heir apparent—over the strenuous objections of those who believed LeRoy Johnson should succeed Musser as prophet, as John Y. Barlow had specified before his death.
The hatred between Uncle Roy's supporters and the Allred camp was so strong that the fundamentalist movement split into two rival sects. Following Musser's death in 1954, Uncle Roy assumed leadership of the larger splinter group, which remained in Short Creek and called itself the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or simply the United Effort Plan (UEP). Allred became prophet of the other splinter, called the Apostolic United Brethren, which was based 280 miles to the north in the Salt Lake Valley.*
After the split, the Short Creekers had little further involvement with their counterparts in the Allred group. Taking care to fly below the radar of the Gentile culture, Uncle Roy and his followers were seldom noticed by the world beyond Short Creek. The Apostolic United Brethren wasn't so fortunate. On the afternoon of May 10, 1977, Rulon Allred was treating patients in his office in Murray, a suburb of Salt Lake City, when two young women walked in, shot him dead, and calmly walked out.
Allred's killers turned out to be members of another breakaway fundamentalist sect known as the LeBaron clan. Founded by a man named Dayer LeBaron, who hailed from one of the Mormon colonies in Mexico, the sect had once maintained a loose association with Allred's group. After Rulon Allred was convicted of polygamy in Utah in 1947 and jumped parole, the LeBarons even gave him refuge in Mexico for a period.
Dayer LeBaron had seven sons. Three of the seven LeBaron brothers would eventually claim, at one time or another, to be the “one mighty and strong”; each regarded himself as a divinely ordained prophet comparable to Moses who would return the Mormon Church to the righteous path it had abandoned after the 1890 Manifesto.
The oldest of the brothers, Benjamin, was fond of roaring at the top of his lungs in public to prove that he was “the Lion of Israel.” In one legendary incident that occurred in the early 1950s, he lay facedown in the middle of a busy Salt Lake City intersection, bringing traffic to a halt, and did two hundred push-ups. When the police finally persuaded him to get up off the pavement he proudly insisted, “Nobody else can do that many. That proves I'm the One Mighty and Strong.” Not long thereafter, Ben was committed to the Utah State Mental Hospital.
In the 1960s, with Ben locked up in a psychiatric institution, two of the other LeBaron brothers emerged as the group's guiding lights: soft-spoken, amiable Joel and tightly wound Ervil, who weighed 240 pounds, stood six feet four inches tall, and knew how to nurse a grudge. A dashing figure, he was found irresistibly attractive by many otherwise sensible women. Another LeBaron sibling, Alma, reported that Ervil “used to dream about having twenty-five or thirty wives so he could multiply and replenish the earth. . . . He wanted to be like Brigham Young, a great man.”
Ervil also fancied himself a brilliant writer and scriptorian. According to Rena Chynoweth—who would become his thirteenth wife in 1975 and, two years later, pull the trigger of the gun that killed Rulon Allred*—Ervil would writ
e scripture obsessively, in marathon sessions that might last for a week or more. “He would go for days without shaving or bathing, putting in twenty hours a day,” she recalled, sustaining himself “on continuous cups of coffee. When he sweated, that was all you could smell coming out of his pores—coffee.”
Both Ervil and Joel were imbued with exceptional charisma—and both claimed to be the “one mighty and strong.” It was therefore inevitable, perhaps, that the LeBaron brothers would eventually clash.
The terminal rupture began in November 1969, when Joel, the elder brother and nominal presiding prophet, booted Ervil out of the sect for insubordination. Soon thereafter Ervil had a revelation in which God explained that Joel—by all accounts an uncommonly benevolent man, routinely described by his followers as “saintlike”—had become an obstacle to His work and needed to be removed. On August 20, 1972, in the polygamist settlement of Los Molinos, which Joel had established eight years earlier on the Baja Peninsula, he was shot in the throat and head, fatally, by a member of the group loyal to Ervil.*
After he ordered the death of Joel, Ervil initiated a divinely inspired series of murders, resulting in the killing of at least five additional people through 1975 and the wounding of more than fifteen others. In March 1976 he was arrested for these crimes and held in a Mexican jail, but Ervil's followers on the outside continued to do his bidding. Operating out of a post office box in southern California, they distributed pamphlets denouncing taxes, welfare, gun control, and rival polygamists. When Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976, Ervil's subordinates even issued a decree threatening the candidate with death for his liberal views.
