Trouble in the Hills

In some ways, the Texas raid appeared to some to be a case of history repeating itself. In July 1953, armed Arizona deputies burst into the FLDS town of Colorado City, then called Short Creek, taking 177 children into state custody. Officials charged the men as polygamists; they dispersed the mothers and children to new homes around the state and put them on welfare. "This is déjà vu for us," says Benjamin Bistline, 73, a former member who wrote a history of the FLDS in Colorado City and who was 18 at the time of the raid. His wife, Annie, then 15, was forced to resettle in Phoenix with her mother.

That raid 55 years ago and its aftermath cast a long shadow, making the fundamentalist Mormon leadership even more secretive and reclusive. Voter backlash in Arizona against the images of children ripped from their parents' arms cost the governor his job and convinced officials in Utah and Arizona to leave the polygamists alone. Only in the 1990s when the forced marriages of young girls, child abuse and alleged welfare fraud came to light did law-enforcement and child-welfare officials begin to pay attention.

Polygamy has always been the keystone of the FLDS church, and underage marriages are nothing new, according to former members. Bistline, who left the group in the 1980s, recalls that in the 1940s girls as young as 12 were married off to older men. The church leader arranges most marriages, claiming divine guidance for the matches. In practice, a small group of wealthy men get multiple wives, leaving many younger men, called the "Lost Boys," unable to marry and forced out of the group in an inexorable numbers crunch.

The girls are married off young, Bistline believes, because they are more malleable. "When they are in their early teens, they are a lot easier to persuade to marry a man 30 or 40 years older," he says. "By the time they are 18, they have their own ideas." The early marriages are also a means of control. In some cases, girls who show independence and a precocious interest in boys become young brides in the group's belief that the new husband will exert a strong guiding hand.

In Eldorado, owners of neighboring ranches were reportedly warned to watch for girls fleeing the compound. The local sheriff, David Doran, would drive up to the gates near the guarded entry post and peer at the group through his binoculars. Eventually he established a rapport with the sect leaders and was one of the very few outsiders allowed inside.

Far from taking over the town, sect members isolated themselves from Eldorado and had almost no contact with local residents. The women and children did not shop at local stores or attend public schools, as they once did in Utah and Arizona. Men driving down the country roads in their work trucks did not wave back when residents offered a greeting, though they were nice enough shopping for propane in Eldorado. The group did most of their business in the much larger city of San Angelo, 45 miles up the road past flat dry cotton fields, where they could shop in bulk for warehouse staples and were often seen at the Lowe's home-improvement store.