Prophet's Prey by Sam Brower

until polygamists started using it as a hideout after the Reynolds Supreme Court decision. “The First City of the Millennium” was a hundred tough miles from Kingman, Arizona, in the days before automobiles and airplanes, and was shielded on the south by the Grand Canyon. It defined raw isolation. The polygamists, anchored there by the rapidly reproducing Barlow and Jessop clans, found a home at the foot of the massive and strikingly beautiful Vermillion Cliffs, which were rechristened with a more fitting biblical name, “Canaan Mountain.”
    The large rebel settlement on the border and the underground movement remaining in Salt Lake City shared the same ideals, but they were far from consolidated. An effective central leadership was impossible, and there were frequent challenges between factions, when each side would “excommunicate” their rivals, flinging the term “apostate” at each other like arrows. The losing group typically would drift off and settle somewhere else, with the result that there are pockets of polygamy all over the West. Even today, fundamentalists always seem to be in organizational disarray and turf wars are frequent. The only things that all of the mutinous groups agree upon are their mutual belief in plural marriage and contempt for the mainstream Mormon Church.
    John Y. Barlow died in 1949, setting off a battle for succession. There is no orderly procedure by which to promote someone to the ultimate position in the fractured religion, and Barlow had tried but failed to maneuver his own candidate, LeRoy S. Johnson, into the chair. The next prophet was Joseph Musser, and when he too sought to name his own successor years later, he also failed. Finally, LeRoy Johnson took over as president and prophet, and Rulon Jeffs was his right-hand man. They ushered in a new era of stern control, because they had both witnessed the problems that could be caused when too many people had the ability to interfere with what the prophet wanted. Uncle Roy and Rulon Jeffs became the champions of a no-questions-allowed policy called “One-Man Rule.” The seven-member Priesthood Council was on its way to oblivion, leaving no system of checks and balances.
    For the man who personified polygamous unions, Johnson actually had encountered problems getting married for the first time. He recalled that when he was young, he had made proposals to many women. “They all turned me down,” he confessed to Joseph Musser, according to the official FLDS version. Musser responded, “Well, I will promise you this, Brother Johnson, you won’t have to go out and solicit them from now on. They will come to you.”
    Uncle Roy made his home down in “the Crick,” which had become incorporated as Colorado City in Arizona on one side and Hildale, Utah, on the other side.
    Rulon Jeffs remained in Salt Lake City, as befitted a man of his stature: a professional accountant, founder of Utah Tool & Die, on the board of many companies, and president of an insurance company. He settled into a new home in Little Cottonwood Canyon outside of Salt Lake City. The main house, with columns at the front, sprawled over 8,300 square feet per floor, and featured two kitchens, twenty-three bedrooms, and ten baths, as well as the Jeffs’s Sunday school, which had a baptismal font. An adjacent “smaller” place had another twenty-two rooms, and the entire property was enclosed by a huge concrete wall, a reminder for the rest of the world to keep out.
    Warren Steed Jeffs was Rulon’s miracle child, delivered two and a half months premature on December 3, 1955, in Sacramento, California, after a difficult pregnancy that jeopardized the lives of both the infant and his mother, Merilyn Steed, one of Rulon’s four current wives. He kept his other three in hiding, spread out in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico to confound the law. Rulon was in Salt Lake City when he received word that