Trouble in the Hills

If the accusations are sustained during upcoming court hearings, the children will be placed in foster care. For now, welfare workers are interviewing the children in San Angelo at Fort Concho, a sandstone former frontier post during the Indian wars.

A warrant was issued for the arrest of a man suspected of abusing the girl, but the man lives in Arizona and says he has never met her. Texas authorities are aware of his location but have not tried to take him into custody. Two men were arrested in recent days during the raid on the Eldorado compound: Leroy Johnson Steed, 41, for tampering with physical evidence, and Levi Barlow Jeffs, 19, for interfering with the duties of a public servant. But so far no one has been arrested for the allegations of abuse or neglect.

An Uneasy Town
Members of the group and their sympathizers have long argued that they are persecuted because of their religious beliefs. The group's leaders, confronted by county officials a few years ago about their plans in Eldorado, said they wanted nothing more than privacy to worship in peace.

The fundamentalists, chased from their historic home along the Utah-Arizona border, have related enclaves in the states of Colorado and South Dakota, as well as in the Canadian town of Bountiful, British Columbia, and in the Mexican state of Chihuahua.

Eldorado residents, however, were not appeased by the group's claims that they were being unfairly targeted. They feared that the group's followers would register to vote and take over their town by running for sheriff or public office. Locals repeatedly buzzed over the property in airplanes, snapping photos of women in long pioneer dresses digging gardens. They watched as sect members built barracks, a concrete factory, a cheese dairy and a clinic, fashioning a virtually self-sustaining enclave out of what had been "a rock pile," as one Eldorado resident put it. "They must never sleep," marveled Gloria Swift, owner of the Hitch'n Post Coffeeshop, admiring their hardworking ethic.

Texas Rep. Harvey Hilderbran of Kerrville, alarmed by reports from Eldorado, the Utah attorney general and sect members who had fled the group, helped push new legislation into law in 2005 that raised the legal age of consent to marry in Texas from 14 to 16, that made it illegal for stepparents to marry their children and made officiates liable for performing illegal wedding ceremonies. "We didn't want to facilitate the things we knew they had been involved in before, including child abuse, sexual abuse, forced marriages, that were clearly detrimental to the safety and welfare of children," Hilderbran tells NEWSWEEK. "It's not in the best interest of a 14-year-old girl to be forced to marry her uncle or stepfather or any other man in this cult, because the men are being rewarded for their obedience with these child brides."