Editor’s note: what a unique experience to be a tourist in a community like this. And even more, what an incredible job of writing about it through that lens. As you know, we do not shy away from politics and religion here at The Royal Tour, and Sam Spector presents his experience visiting these communities without judgment of polygamy in general. And while we support the right of all adults to make their own choices of partner(s), we do not endorse any system that either denies those same choices for others or allows for the abuse (sexual or otherwise) of anyone, especially minors. For more of Sam’s writing, make sure to click here to visit his index page.

Some of the best travel memories that I have are going to places that seem out of this world and like a completely different universe than the one where I am from. Last week, I went to one such place, and I did so without even leaving my home state of Utah. A common stereotype and misconception of Utah is that there are polygamists everywhere, given how plural marriage (as it is called here) was one of the primary founding principles of what would become the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. However, the mainstream church ended polygamy in 1890, but what resulted from this was many breakoff movements from the church that continue to this day to practice polygamy. In fact, today, it is estimated that somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 polygamists live in Utah, representing more than 1% of the state’s population, and meaning that you are 2-3 times more likely to meet a polygamist in Utah than a Jew like myself. Some of these folks might live in your neighborhood in Salt Lake City, and you may never know that they are practicing polygamy.

The most notorious polygamist group in America and Utah is the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), whose leader, Warren Jeffs, is serving a life sentence for sexual abuse of minors, as some of his 78 wives (you read that right) are as young as 12 years old. The FLDS and the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints do not recognize each other’s validity or the legitimacy of the other’s leader, who is believed to be God’s prophet on earth. Jeffs succeeded his father, Rulon Jeffs, upon his 2002 death and married many of his father’s 60 widowed wives. Under Warren’s leadership, hundreds of teenage boys were expelled from the community as you could not have more men than women for polygamy to work, men were forced to divorce their wives if Warren wanted to marry them, and most of his followers signed their properties over to Jeffs’ United Effort Plan (UEP) trust fund, giving him essentially control and ownership of everyone’s property. Jeffs was on the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted list at the same time as Osama bin Laden. Since Jeffs’ 2006 arrest, the FLDS has become divided between those who still believe that Jeffs is the prophet and those who believe he was an imposter.

The two main cities that were under Jeffs’ control were the towns of Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona, which are literally across the street from each other, forming the community known as Short Creek, roughly a 4.5 hour drive from Salt Lake City and 2.5 hours from Las Vegas. The towns are at the base of the beautiful red rocked El Capitan Mountain, with Hildale having a population of about 1200 and Colorado City’s double at around 2500. Both cities were more than twice as large in 2010; however, with the arrest of Jeffs and the influx of non-FLDS residents, the cities’ populations dramatically declined. In 2018, Donia Jessop, a former FLDS member, was elected as Hildale’s first female and non-FLDS mayor, leading to the resignation of 11 city employees citing their refusal to work for a woman and “apostate”. Mayor Jessop has promoted tourism for the formerly insular community which used to be known for following outsiders around and escorting them out of the town if they tried to enter. While during my visit to Short Creek everyone was kind and welcoming to me, I was curious if they really wanted outsiders like me in their town and what they would think about me writing a travel article.

When I drove through the town, the first bizarre thing I noticed was that I saw virtually nobody outside. The streets were empty, and I did not see any children out and about. The second thing that I noticed was that many of the houses were clearly polygamist compounds, with a couple of homes that said UEP above them. It was common to see houses that were three stories high and must have had a dozen bedrooms. Each of these houses had what I would guess to be a 10 foot fence around the perimeter so that people could not see into the backyard; however, we could see that some of the lots had guest houses and RVs in the backyard for more people to stay in. Above many of the front doors is the word “Zion”. Jeffs would speak about how it was the duty of his followers to create Zion in America, and these homes are signaling that they are still loyal to the FLDS movement. However, not everyone in the town feels this way as there are a couple of centers set up for people wanting to flee the movement, including one called the Short Creek Dream Center that has on staff former FLDS members, including Warren Jeffs’ 65th wife. The center is located inside a 44-room house that was built for Jeffs and his wives.

While visiting Short Creek, I drove nearly every road in the town for hours, completely mesmerized. I eventually spotted an FLDS young woman walking down the street with the traditional braid in her hair and a long pink dress, but somehow I was surprised to see her greet me with a smile and having Apple AirPods in her ears. In my head, these folks were like the Amish and rejecting of modern technology, but that is not the case. The place where we saw the most FLDS people was Bee’s Marketplace, the grocery store in Colorado City. Numerous FLDS members work at the store and we saw many teenagers from the sect with young women walking together in groups in their long dresses and with braided hair, and boys who wore blue jeans and tucked-in buttoned-down plaid shirts. With the teenage girls, I wondered if they were school girls or if they were already married, as adolescent girls have been married in this community before. What was also interesting in Bee’s was that different FLDS women dressed differently, I do not know if, like Orthodox Jewish sects, of which I am more familiar, this shows a difference in observance or belief. I was tickled that like in any Arizona grocery store, there was hard liquor and beer for sale in a town that was dominated by Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints, who are strictly banned from consuming alcohol. I am guessing that in 2010, the sale of alcohol in this town would be unthinkable.

The most fascinating place in town was easily the Isaac M. Carling Memorial Park, the primary cemetery of the FLDS religion. As a rabbi, I am regularly at cemeteries to officiate funerals, but this was the eeriest cemetery that I have ever been to. On the tombstones of FLDS women, the names of their children would be listed, and this often was well over a dozen names. Similarly, I saw the tombstone of a man who died in recent years, who had the names of each of his three wives listed on his tombstone, and the many children he had had with each wife under each of their names. On an elderly woman’s tombstone (who died in 2023, 17 years after Jeffs’ incarceration), there was a quote from “WSJ”, an abbreviation for Warren Steed Jeffs. While I commonly see tombstones that are a double stone for a pair of spouses, in this cemetery, you would see fairly recently deceased people’s tombstones where you had a husband’s stone in the middle, and multiple wife tombstones attached. In the cemetery as well was Rulon Jeff’s tombstone, and I was surprised to find it was a modest stone, no bigger than others’, and it stated “RULON T. JEFFS, PROPHET OF GOD, Dec. 6, 1909 – Sept. 8, 2002” and on the back “SWEET AND SOUND”. Jeffs’ longtime predecessor Leroy Johnson’s tombstone was also small, simple, and just said: PROPHET LEROY S. JOHNSON, 1888-1986.

What made the cemetery so eerie was the number of infants, teenagers, and young adults, primarily men from what I saw, who were buried. While it was not uncommon for this to occur before the advances of modern medicine, these deaths were primarily from the past 30 years. The primary reason for this is that there are prominent genetic diseases in this community as a result of inbreeding, as 85% of Short Creek is descended from FLDS founders John Y. Barlow and Joseph Smith Jessop. One such condition, fumarase deficiency, had had only 13 known cases in the entire world prior to 1990; however, in Short Creek, twenty cases alone occurred after this, and now there have been over 100 documented cases. I also wonder how many of these young men may have died by suicide, as there were numerous suicides of those who had been expelled from the community or abused. As I mentioned regarding the town, it is especially important to be respectful in the cemetery as we did see FLDS individuals there who were visiting the graves of loved ones.

Visiting the polygamist communities of Southern Utah and Northern Arizona was an experience that will stay with me my entire life. Despite being in my own country, let alone my own state, I felt that I was in a completely different world. As obvious as it sounds, being greeted with warm smiles and “hello”s by locals was a reminder that these are everyday people, too. Just today, I was in the town of Bluffdale, Utah, which is in Salt Lake County, and only 30 minutes from my house, when I found myself by chance in the parking lot of the primary temple, school, and headquarters of the Apostolic United Brethren, another fundamentalist, polygamist-practicing offshoot of Mormonism, one that has over 10,000 adherents. Folks who looked like everyday people in unassuming Hondas, Toyotas, and other everyday vehicles came in and out of the compound. That is part of the fun of living in Utah; it is a unique place, with unique people, and the most average-looking neighbor of yours may very well be practicing polygamy.

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