Outsiders, FLDS fight for control of 2 towns
Influence of polygamists wanes on Ariz.-Utah line
SHORT CREEK — From her house on the hill, Loretta Barlow could see everything God had abandoned.
She believed the land below was her birthright, her reward, her refuge from the coming apocalypse. Her church built the twin towns — Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona — by hand.
On a clear day she could see the trails she roamed as a girl and the blood-tinged mountains that wrapped around it all, protecting the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints from a world they feared.
Nobody knew why God had left Short Creek. But the prophet said Zion was somewhere else, that wickedness would soon spill over the mountains, and Barlow watched from above as God’s kingdom crumbled.
Outsiders moved in, and everything changed. Walls tumbled down. Sacred FLDS buildings slipped out of their control. Homes spat out their FLDS
families, then filled with people Barlow didn’t recognize. The world called it progress. The FLDS saw an invasion.
“Every believer is in the same situation,” Barlow said. “It feels like they pretty much want us out of here.”
But this was their home. Their ancestors were instructed to settle the red dirt and give it to the Lord, and now they clung to the land. Families piled into fewer and fewer houses, checking their front door for an eviction notice and the questions that came with it: Where would they go? Who would take their place? What had Short Creek become, and what was left of God’s sacred land?
Every day the world slipped deeper into Short Creek, pulling it closer to an America with no room for the FLDS. On the other side of the mountains, the church’s founding principle of plural marriage was a crime. Those children went to public school. Their parents opened their own businesses and bought their own homes.
Short Creek had never worked that way. A complicated property dispute had led to more than 175 evictions, forcing desperate families into trailers and shipping containers. Barlow watched her mother and sister flee. Her husband left to find work in Idaho. The oversized house next door wasted away, barren and empty. But she refused to give in.
“Until they dissolve me,” she said with defiance in her soft voice, “they cannot dissolve my religion.”
And so Loretta Barlow stayed in her home on the hill and waited for God to return to Short Creek.
An American theocracy
Short Creek’s settlers chose a place nobody could stumble across. Mormons angered by their church’s ban on polygamy fled here in the 1930s, barricading themselves between sandstone cliffs and the Grand Canyon to follow the pure faith, establishing “a branch of the Kingdom of God.”
They built an American theocracy. The FLDS Church controlled everything. Prophets and bishops appointed governments, ran businesses and assigned homes. Only believers could find homes or work, and still the population grew to more than 10,000, all with the same handful of last names.
After five prophets and seven decades of relative peace, Warren Jeffs seized control. He declared himself the FLDS prophet and president in 2002, claiming divine power over Short Creek.
Then he twisted the church into a violent cult, placing himself at the center of the faith and demanding loyalty. He banned books, holidays and the internet, and he directed a security force known as the “God Squad” to chase outsiders from town.
Short Creek shrank into itself. Tall walls and metal fences went up. The outside world grew farther away.
In a few years, it all collapsed. Jeffs was convicted of sexually assaulting young girls and sentenced to life in prison. From his cell, he issued a revelation that God had abandoned Short Creek. Church leadership scattered. Lawsuits and investigations piled up. A federal judge ordered the towns to stop discriminating against non-FLDS residents.
Invisible borders crisscrossed Short Creek as the community split itself into messy groups. Everybody wanted the place to become something it wasn’t: Apostates wanted their homes back. Activists demanded political change. The states ordered equal treatment, and the local governments resisted. Outsiders sensed a good business opportunity.
And the few hundred active FLDS members left in Short Creek clustered together, peering over their walls as the world closed in.
A believer takes stock
Esther refused to believe the pillars of her church had fallen. Her faith and her family made up her entire life, and to give up one meant losing the other. So she wrapped herself in the religion, praying for strength to face daily reminders that Short Creek was no longer hers.
After 41 years, Esther — an active FLDS believer who asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her standing in the church — had lost her place in the only home she knew. No longer could she name every one of her neighbors. All but four of her 18 siblings had left town, and Esther’s decision to follow them loomed.
“I don’t want to move away,” she said. “Having to move out into the big, wide world with all my children, I dread that.”
She grew up in a house nobody owned, sharing space with all those siblings but only one mother. All of her neighbors were FLDS. So were all of her classmates at the public school in Colorado City. Most of her teachers were, too. She shopped at an FLDS-owned grocery store and played with FLDS friends, all of them taught to run into the nearest house if they spotted an outsider. “It was kind of amazing to think of how, literally, the entire town was the FLDS people,” Esther said. “It was our place.”
She knew it had changed. Of course it had. But she believed Jeffs’ motives were pure when he cleansed the town of doubt and dissension. She listened when Jeffs said anybody who communicated with the apostates “will not survive,” even when her teenage son left the faith. She was grateful for the ban on school, which gave her more time with her children, and the quiet, which swallowed everything.
Now it was all different. Progress, modernity, culture. A democratic government and the rule of law. All of it had arrived in Short Creek, the effects impossible to ignore. Esther saw it on every block, in the eyes of every believer left in town. But nobody asked her if she wanted it.
What had the outside world done for her? The government’s Medicaid money covered the bills, but the nearest store that accepted food stamps was two towns over. She moved her 11 children into a trailer in the center of Colorado City, because there were no homes available. Then the land under the trailer park was sold, too, and the choice she
dreaded barreled toward her.
To follow the rules, to make a deal with the same people she had been taught to fear, would be to gamble with her spot in heaven. But to ignore them would be to accept eviction, to hunker down and wait for the constable.
One house at a time, the FLDS members left in Short Creek were thrust into the same impossible choice between heaven and Earth: Would they violate their faith to stay in a home, or lose everything for their God?
Esther had already made her decision.
Waiting for the eviction
Nobody owned anything in Short Creek. The church’s founders had been driven by two unwavering beliefs: plural marriage and the United Effort Plan. They built Short Creek in pursuit of the first. For the second, they placed everything — their land, their belongings and their homes — into a trust and consecrated it to God.
For generations, families lived where the church assigned. They built their homes with whatever the church could afford and stayed as long as the church allowed. If they left the church, the UEP Trust kept their home.
“We knew nothing about rent, mortgage, anything like that,” FLDS believer Norma Richter said. “Because our grandfathers and fathers worked together in unity, they protected us and blessed us in that way.”
But like everything else in Short Creek, Jeffs used the trust to tighten his grip. Homes and families became leverage in the prophet’s endless campaign for control.
When men who had been forced away pummeled the church with lawsuits demanding their homes be returned, Jeffs ignored them.
“Answer them nothing,” he told his lawyers, leaving the UEP’s $110 million in assets vulnerable. Even the believers would lose everything, so the state of Utah seized control of the trust in 2005. It installed a board of ex-FLDS members and stripped the trust of its religious rules.
“So, that began sort of a reverse migration,” said UEP Trust Executive Director Jeff Barlow, who left the church at 18 and returned to live in a house near where he grew up.
For the first time, Short Creek was no longer the exclusive domain of the FLDS Church. Apostates trickled back into their childhood homes, settling among neighbors who wouldn’t speak to them. Believers dug into homes they never owned.
They could stay, the trust offered, if they agreed to three basic rules: Sign an occupancy agreement, pay a $100 monthly fee and cover the property taxes that were years late, placing the homes at risk of seizure and a courthouse auction.
Or face eviction.
“We hate evictions. We do not want evictions,” Jeff Barlow said. “But there are some basic requirements that, if you’re not willing to meet, then you can’t stay in a trust house.”
The FLDS believers refused. The trust, they believed, was one more tool for the outside world to take over Short Creek. They believed the church had paid the taxes and that the homes belonged to God, not to a family or a trust. Their faith barred them from even speaking to apostates. An agreement with apostates, they believed, risked their salvation.
They chose heaven. The faithful packed their belongings and held to what was left, praying they wouldn’t find an eviction notice on the door.
Any place for shelter
First they piled on top of each other, cramming two, three, four families into a single home. One house held 185 people until they, too, were evicted, and there was nowhere else to go.
The FLDS started to scatter. They chased work and family and friends, an exodus that spread across North America. A handful of expatriate believers created hidden enclaves in Utah suburbs, on Oklahoma plains and across the Canadian border, starting over in a world they didn’t understand.
Most stayed in Short Creek. They bounced from home to empty home, squatting for a few weeks until another eviction notice arrived. Soon the church could offer only trailers and shipping containers, so the FLDS took those. They dotted the land with metal boxes, filling parking lots and the red dust of city-owned industrial parks, where the UEP Trust couldn’t control them.
Some boxes stood alone. Others were organized in wide squares, with white porch swings dropped into makeshift courtyards. Women and children filtered through holes cut into the metal.
Around it all rose a crinkled tin wall, blocking the faithful homeless from view.
When the world slipped in and the apocalypse approached, Short Creek’s faithful huddled inside their homes. They waited for shattering earthquakes and marked their doors with signs that read, “Zion,” praying the angel of death would see a believer lived inside.
The rapture never struck, but the faithful’s world ended. Short Creek rotted from the inside, and still Sam Brower couldn’t find Zion.
Brower, a private investigator whose probes into the FLDS led to a book and a documentary, drove over mud streets the cities never paved. Diet Coke spilled from his gas-station cup. He clutched a camera in his lap, because in Short Creek, photography was still a stronger weapon than a gun.
Dozens of unfinished homes blurred past. Eviction notices hung in windows. Brower moved through block after block, checking the space above every front door. All he found were bare patches where a Zion sign once hung.
“See, apostates have moved in so many of these houses that it’s not as common as it was,” Brower said. “As soon as they move in, it’s the first thing they take down.”
He drove slowly, freely, pulling onto private property and circling once-sacred buildings. Nobody tailed his car. No pickup trucks tried to run him off the road. But he was sure they were watching. “We’ll catch a little hell here,” he said, circling the sprawling complex where Jeffs once lived. Angry eyes tracked him. But the God Squad never appeared, because there was nothing left to protect.
All around him were signs of progress and decay. A license plate that mockingly read, “PLIG KID,” parked next door to an empty house with Zion signs. A public school that finally reopened in Hildale, though no FLDS children were allowed to attend. Young boys rebuilding Cottonwood Park in the shadows of the walled-off FLDS meetinghouse. The FLDS storehouse and the building that once housed the God Squad, both gray and empty, both waiting for the outside world to build something new.
Brower worked his way through the manufacturing plants and the trailer park, past empty businesses and a trio of young girls stumbling over their prairie dresses as they packed moving boxes into a truck. Brower stopped across the street and watched another FLDS family prepare to leave Short Creek.
“I don’t think this is an eviction,” Brower said, pulling away. “This is probably just them going on their own.”
Peace is hard to find
Terrill Musser found his childhood home gutted, stripped of anything of value and left to the winter’s cold. When the previous residents were evicted, they took every light bulb, toilet-paper holder and set of blinds in the house. Both stoves were gone, and the floors had been ripped apart. Outside, the trees had withered and a 30-foot hole in the backyard had been filled with garbage.
The house was unrecognizable from the one Musser, 33, left a decade earlier, when he refused to pledge allegiance to Jeffs. As he drove away, he swore he’d come back only to set the place on fire.
But when he came home, there was nothing left to burn. “It was scary quiet,” he said, remembering the day in 2014 his wife drove him back into town. They sat in the same SUV he had driven out of town, headed for the mountains that once brought him peace.
Outside Short Creek, peace was hard to find. The “detox process” of leaving home and a divorce from the girl he wasn’t supposed to marry had stomped his soul. His body withered to 97 pounds, battered by a decade of 80hour workweeks and vicious bone cancer. He prepared to die in St. George, Utah. Then Heather, the wife who broke his rule against dating girls from Short Creek, turned up Hildale Street. Musser’s childhood home rolled by. He wanted it back.
After six months of petitions and paperwork, the UEP Trust granted him the house. He ripped down the Zion sign over the front door.
From the first day, he sensed the government didn’t want him there. Police officers watched him. Elected officials wouldn’t answer his questions. The city refused to connect his utilities.
Another couple was denied water service and sued, eventually winning more than $3 million. The marshals office found excuses to arrest apostates. Two of Musser’s friends, both ex-FLDS, were arrested for trespassing on the property where they worked. “I couldn’t believe where I lived,” Musser said.
After his friends’ arrest, Musser stormed into Colorado City’s town hall. He was organizing a protest, he told the town manager, and he wanted a permit. The town manager, Musser recalled, didn’t know how to issue one. Nobody had ever tried before.
But soon, Musser held Short Creek’s first protest, pulling together more than 100 people to stand outside the police station. They held signs and chanted, outsiders and apostates, presenting themselves as the new opposition.
A handful of FLDS members, mostly children, pushed against him. They shot at Musser and his allies. He found his house sprayed with paintballs and his dog stolen from the yard. He lost track of how many times he rebuilt a truck engine that had been filled with sugar. Trucks exploded. Cars were driven off the road. One man found a dead chicken hanging from his car. Another found a cat, still alive, buried up to its neck in concrete.
But more outsiders and apostates moved into Short Creek, and they joined together. Their momentum grew. Musser studied city charters and demanded explanations. A handful of Hispanic families moved into what once was an all-white society. A Christian missionary bought a house and opened a Bible study on the top floor, starting the first non-FLDS church in town.
Cancer treatments forced Musser onto the couch, but still he couldn’t shake the 80-hour weeks. He created email lists and helped a few locals form the Short Creek Community Alliance, a group whose Facebook page said it wanted to “liberate the world.” The group became a fixture at Hildale City Council meetings, complaining every week as the all-FLDS council stared back in silence.
And when a federal court ruled both Colorado City and Hildale had “engaged in a decades-long pattern of abuses,” actively discriminating against non-FLDS members, Musser led a group to record outsiders’ demands. Most people didn’t know how to answer. Nobody had ever asked what they wanted.
An outsider takes charge
For as long as government existed in Short Creek, it was closed to all but elite members of the FLDS Church. The church had free rein in government. Bishops appointed mayors and town councils, instructing members to vote for the right candidate.
Never had one of those names belonged to a woman. Certainly an apostate had never held office in either town. But when 2017 brought a round of elections to Hildale, opening the mayor’s office and three City Council seats, Donia Jessop thought she could win.
“I am the crappiest politician of all,” she told people before the election. “But I will make a hell of a good mayor.”
Jessop, 47, had no political experience but knew the place. It had been a year since she returned home, spurred back by a lopsided pro/con list she made with her husband. They found Hildale empty, without a local economy, a public school or a government that served all its citizens.
As her family settled in, Short Creek started to transform around them. Parades and Fourth of July picnics returned. A haze lifted. But progress couldn’t last without a fair government, so Jessop volunteered to lead Hildale’s first political campaign.
So when talk at Community Alliance meetings turned to elections and unifying behind one non-FLDS candidate, Jessop volunteered. For the next year, she embarked on Short Creek’s first political campaign.
She had natural advantages. Born a Meldrum, she belonged to family known for working hard and entertaining joyfully. In the church, she had led a team of seamstresses, moving 150 women through her home each week to measure pastel prairie dresses. She understood the soft “Cricker” accent and the blessings of plural marriage; she was a plural wife herself.
“I am loved by the people,” she said, “because I love the people so much.”
Campaigning mostly on instinct, Jessop talked incessantly about rebuilding Short Creek’s economy and gaining public access to the church’s private internet lines. Her team drove yard signs into the ground, then circled back to replace the ones covered in graffiti. They took out a parade float and started a “Dialogue With Donia” chat session on Facebook.
The sitting mayor, Philip Barlow, declined every invitation to debate.
Short Creek’s rigged political past haunted the campaign. Jessop and the three non-FLDS City Council candidates — Jared Nichol, Maha Layton and JVar Dutson — brought in county and state election experts. They learned how to check voter registrations and knocked on every door in Hildale, making sure voters actually lived at their listed addresses.
The FLDS saw another way to silence them. Already, many believers were convinced the evictions, which started in Hildale, were designed to remove their votes before the election. An apostate campaign that removed more than 100 ineligible voters from the rolls, many thought, was their backup plan.
Jessop didn’t need that many. She won the mail-in election, 129-81. Nichol, Layton and Dutson won their races, too. In one sweep, outsiders had taken control of Hildale. “We can all have our different beliefs,” Jessop said in her first speech as mayor, a few minutes after her January inauguration. “We can all have everything we want. And we still can come together as a community and celebrate us.”
She had dreams of a unified Hildale. Instead, her government tore itself apart. The treasurer, a devout FLDS believer, quit before she took office. He couldn’t work for an apostate — or a woman. On her first day, the town manager warned that he would hold the power. Then the recorder quit. And then two town clerks. The accounts-payable officer. The court clerk. The billing director and the utility manager and the gas manager. The parks director announced he was retiring.
“It has come to a point where I have to choose between my religion and my participation in government,” a utilityboard member wrote in his resignation letter, “and I choose my religion.”
A seam appeared along the state line Short Creek had long ignored. On the Arizona side, Colorado City’s government was entirely FLDS believers. In Utah, Hildale’s had just a handful left.
Jessop’s first meeting with Colorado City Mayor Joseph Allred left her with little hope of cooperation. “There’s no trust on either part,” she said. One Hildale employee jokingly suggested building a wall along the border. But they shared a history, a police department and miles of utility pipes that snaked under it all. Even as they drifted apart, the two cities were tangled at the root.
A new school, a new hope
The school had no students, no teachers and no name when Maha Layton took a job in the front office. The building was empty. She was the second employee — hired after only the groundskeeper. Administrators gave her only one task: Call every home in Hildale. Tell them public school had returned.
So Layton spent that May of 2014 with a phone and a list of numbers, watching as a school came together around her. A principal was hired. A name was chosen. Desks were purchased and classrooms were built and a small teaching staff was cobbled together.
Three months later, 140 students filtered through the glass entrance of Water Canyon School, past Layton’s front desk and into the classrooms that still didn’t have internet access. They took their seats. The bell rang. And for the first time in 13 years, a school day began in Hildale. “That school renewed hope,” Layton said. “It changed Hildale.”
It had been 13 years since Warren Jeffs declared public school full of evil, demanding the faithful stop sending their children. Overnight, enrollment at Phelps Elementary dwindled. The district closed the school.
Layton, who grew up in a prominent FLDS family, was in fifth grade. By the time her family was excommunicated and she returned to school, her education had been whittled away. She clawed her way to a college degree before bringing her family back to Hildale.
For two years she worked at Water Canyon’s front desk, easing children through their first days of public school. The school tested every child who enrolled, scanning for the scars of a childhood without education. Some students scored as many as four grade levels below their age.
Colorado City’s public school had accepted some of Hildale’s apostates, but no FLDS children were allowed to go. Jeffs ordered they be taught at home, by women who were already busy raising giant families and often had little schooling of their own. The curriculum was heavy on Mormon history and praise for Jeffs. FLDS children learned the Earth was flat and that misshapen mountains had been dropped by God onto evil cities. But most children never became students. Many never learned to read or write their names, or even hold a pencil. A generation of FLDS children, now between 15 and 20 years old, was lost.
When they finally returned, the challenges had grown with age. In the high school, teenagers learned how to sit in class and raise their hands. Basketball tryouts stalled when the coaches had to teach how many points a 3-pointer was worth. Dating was a risky game where cousins tried to avoid each other. Most students wore jeans and T-shirts to
school, but a few girls stayed in their prairie dresses, too newly free to be comfortable in anything else.
“I get a child at 16 or 17, and it is extremely overwhelming,” said Darin Thomas, an outsider who became the school’s first and only principal. “They’re bright kids. It’s just paper, pencil, arithmetic, math, is not going to be their strong point.”
Only one student graduated that first year. There were no sports, no clubs, no after-school activities. A public school was enough change for Short Creek already. A basketball team, Thomas thought, might be too much at once. But as the city blended with the outside world, Water Canyon built itself into just another American school. Thomas installed a basketball program. Next came volleyball, cross-country, wrestling, track. Counselors nudged students toward art and music classes. The school’s enrollment steadily climbed. Six students graduated the second year. Then 25. Thomas planned to hand out 60 diplomas in 2018. Already the student body was too large for its building, and more families left the church every month.
Last semester, when a new apostate brought her children for their first day away from home, she asked if she could stay with them. The school agreed, and she spent the first day tailing her children. She came back the second day, and again the third day. On the fourth day of school, she let the children go on their own.
A future from the outside
A highway slices alongside Short Creek, moving more than 4,000 cars each day along the twin towns’ western edge. For years, George Jessop watched people stare as they blew past, always curious but never willing to turn into town.
There was nothing for them, anyway. As the black cloud of Jeffs’ reign lifted from Short Creek, it revealed empty shops and strip malls that once held FLDS businesses. The local economy, if there ever was one, had been smothered. Almost every FLDS-owned store had closed. There were no restaurants, no grocery stores, no movie theater or hospital. But Short Creek had the mountains, a one-hour drive to Zion National Park and an opportunity. George Jessop had seen how the surrounding towns transformed, how Springdale and St. George and Cedar City shed their dingy reputations and marketed themselves as destinations.
“We are ready to create tourism on the FLDS culture,” he said. He paused. “As far as that goes.”
A growing team started to build an economy from scratch. They started with Warren Jeffs’ home.
It had been seven years since Jeffs declared that only a new mansion in Short Creek would allow him to come home. The FLDS still prayed for his freedom, but there was nowhere to return. The unused mansion had been auctioned, cleansed with rock ‘n’ roll music and opened to the world as the America’s Most Wanted Bed & Breakfast, offering outsiders the chance to stay in a once-sacred mansion for just $99 a night.
Hotel rooms and Airbnb listings soon dotted the towns. A karate studio opened. Subway planted a franchise. Short Creek went from zero restaurants to five, with bakeries, a drive-through bistro and Colorado City’s first liquor license.
Six investors — four of them natives — moved their homebrewing operation into an abandoned space near Town Hall. They carried muted visions of success. How would a bar survive in Short Creek? There was no way to know. The FLDS were allowed to drink alcohol in moderation, but few did.
As they raced to their March opening, the founders fine-tuned recipes for a porter and a pale ale and renovated the space themselves, searching for a balance between cultured and inviting. They wanted a gathering space, a local bar that served local beer to locals. And they wanted a local-sounding name.
Their first choice, White Rock Brewing, was taken. Then they remembered the Hurricane Fault Line west of town, where the plateau beneath Short Creek leveled off and fell away. The earth stopped suddenly and formed a sharp, rocky border, declaring where one place ended and another began.
Locals called it the Edge of the World.
Nothing left
Loretta Barlow found the notice taped to her front door, between the cracked porch light and the metal “Zion” that declared her faith. Either pay the Assessments, it read, or remove your
personal property and vacate the property. The payor-vacate notice listed two addresses: Barlow’s and the house next door. Together, the trust said, they owed more than $15,000. They had 10 days to decide.
Her neighbor, a Colorado City councilman named Donald Richter, refused to leave. He paid the property taxes he didn’t believe were due and asked the trust to waive the occupancy agreement, because he still wouldn’t sign an apostate’s contract. Instead, he suggested, a non-FLDS volunteer could negotiate on his behalf. “We’re going to try it,” Richter told Barlow.
But the memories of her mother’s and sister’s evictions had lodged in Barlow’s mind. Her sister left for Oklahoma, leaving behind nine children, and her mother moved to a St. George suburb. Barlow felt her mother tremble as she prepared to leave, forcing a visit to the fire department’s medics.
For months Barlow and her husband tried to prepare for that same day, searching for somewhere to go when the inevitable came to their door. They needed a house with a yard, somewhere with room for five children and 14 purebred cows.
Their time trickled away. They drove to see the only rental they could afford, curling around the mountains to a 15-acre patch in Veyo, Utah, 60 miles from Short Creek. It was one more choice in a year of them: Stay and fight for their home, their land, their people? Or sign the lease and become one more FLDS family forced out of Short Creek?
They couldn’t take the risk. So, as the trust and the court approved Donald Richter’s last-minute pitch to keep his home, the Barlows were 60 miles away. They signed the lease in Veyo, agreeing to move into a strange house in a strange land.
“There’s really nothing left to stay here for,” Barlow said. “Everything that was here isn’t here anymore.”
Short Creek had slipped away. The world turned their home into something new, something American, and there was no way to win it back. All they could do was pile into their car and drive down the hill, away from the land that once belonged to them.