All Roads Lead to Bountiful

• Author: Craig Jones
• Pages: 71-92

71

PART 3

All Roads Lead to Bountiful

The Persistent Polygamists of Lister

So let me return to the story of Harold Blackmore and Bountiful in the

years after the Second World War, at which point he took the leash o

what I say was his evolved preference for polygyny. By the 1950s, Harold

had became the patriarch of a small polygamist community as more fol-

lowers were convinced to move there and adopt the polygamist family

structure, referred to in fundamentalist Mormon doctrine simply as

e Principle. His founding family was joined by those of Eldon Palmer,

Dalmon Oler, and Ray Blackmore, who was Harold’s nephew (John

Horn Blackmore’s son) but was around the same age. Each was by then a

polygamist. Later they were joined by the Bartons and McKinleys, and

then others still.

e Bountiful group aligned themselves with the main fundamental-

ist Mormon group in the United States, which was run by its own prophet

Joseph Musser and made its home base in Short Creek, Arizona. In time,

Musser would be replaced by LeRoy Johnson, then by Rulon Jes, and

nally by his son Warren Jes.

No sooner had the founding families of Bountiful established them-

selves and formalized t heir contact with their Southern counterpa rts, that

the Short Creek polygamist community in the United States came under

the government’s most determined attack. In 1953, the town was raided

by Arizona authorities and many of its men arrested. Hundreds of chil-

dren were seized by the state.

is hardline approach, though, backred. Life magazine ran sym-

pathetic pictorials that painted the polygamists as harmless, simple folk

whose only crime was being dierent. And they weren’t even that dif-

ferent: patriarchal families were hardly radical in the United States of

the 1950s, and the men, like Mormons everywhere, had short hair and

conservative clothes. e Short Creek persecution (for many viewed it as

A Cruel Arit hmetic: Inside the Case Against Polygamy

72

just that) seemed to mirror the paranoid pursuit of Communists in the

same period, and there was widespread outrage from the Left, but also

from the Right, who saw the raid as the nanny state run amok. And as

I’ve said, the men of Short Creek, aside from their peculiar marriage be-

liefs, on other levels seemed exemplary — clean-cut, hard-working, deeply

religious, and intensely American (when the raid began, the men of the

community were gathered around the agpole, singing patriotic songs as

they awaited arrest). Despite the fact that the raid revealed unequivocal

evidence of serious problems (and in particular child brides), the families

were reunited and the state slinked o, beaten and humbled. Short Creek

was left alone to grow and nurture its “peculiar institution,” and the 1955

events set a tone that endured from decades to come. e raid became a

signicant episode in the persecution mythology of the polygamists, and

would be held up, even in 2010, as the archetype of heavy-handed and

inept state response. For governments, or at least for politicians, it was a

cautionary tale whose lesson was c lear: as painful as inaction on polygamy

was, taking strong measures could be far worse still.

e ties between Short Creek and the Lister enclave that would be-

come Bountiful were strong. ere was an old “rumrunners’ road” that

led from the Bountiful property across the American border, and entire

families could move back and forth at will. At least in those early years,

niceties of borders and customs did not need to be observed.

But the bucolic excitement of the early settlement came up against

some hard realities soon enough. It is one thing to establish a polygam-

ist colony through migration, but it another thing to sustain it through

the generations. When the polygamous pioneers arrived, they brought

with them their own unnatural gender balance, with several women for

each man. But they tended to have children in equal numbers of males

and females, and as their children grew up and looked to marriage, the

diculties of the mathematics would play themselves out as Bountiful

increasingly fell under the inuence of the strict and conservative Amer-

ican wing of the church, which became, over time, if anything more

oppressive as time went on.

As his community grew, Harold Blackmore came to bridle under the

authority of the FLDS (as the Short Creek church came to be called) and

its autocratic rulers. He was over time squeezed out of the Lister com-

munity and ordered by the church to move to Short Creek to supervise

construction in 1964. Depending on whom you listen to, Blackmore was

either persuaded to sign the BC properties over to the FLDS’s trust, the

United Eort Plan, or he had them stripped from him aga inst his will. In

any event, by 1968, Blackmore, who remained devout in his fundamental

beliefs, had become so disenchanted by what he perceived to be the hypo-