.

The Polygamists: A History of Colorado City, Arizona

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Introduction    Chapter One Excerpt    Chapter Two Excerpt 

INTRODUCTION

Polygamy (plural marriage), a basic principle of The Church of Jesus of Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons), was introduced by Joseph Smith, Church founder, in 1843 at Nauvoo, Illinois. It was not accepted as a tenet of the Church until 1852, after the Mormons under the leadership of Brigham Young settled in Utah territory. Brigham Young became the leader of the Mormons after Joseph Smith had been assassinated in June of 1844.

Joseph Smith established a city in the State of Illinois, which he called Nauvoo. Due to Joseph Smith's controversial doctrine much antagonism was generated among people living in the surrounding area. Joseph Smith ordered a printing press destroyed that had published a paper exposing his polygamist relationship with several women. This led to his arrest and incarceration in jail in Carthage, Illinois, a neighboring community about 30 miles from Nauvoo. Three other men, his brother Hyrum, John Taylor, and Willard Richards were also in jail with him. A mob stormed the jail killing Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum. John Taylor was severely wounded and Willard Richards escaped with barely a scratch. John Taylor recovered from his wounds and eventually became the third president of the Mormon Church in 1880.

After the assassination of Joseph Smith, the Mormons were in a leaderless state of confusion. Brigham Young, president of the twelve apostles of the church, assumed the leadership position and led the people out of their confusion, establishing order among the church. The assassination of Joseph Smith did not stop the persecution of the Mormons. In the winter of 1845-46 the Mormons were driven from Nauvoo. Crossing the Mississippi River, they began their trek westward. Following the Missouri river upstream, they stopped in the area of Council Bluffs, Iowa, and established a camp along the Missouri river bottomlands, remaining there the summer of 1846. Many of the saints contracted malaria and cholera, resulting in many deaths among the refugees, who were scattered in the deplorable camps among the mosquito infested willows and marshes. Brigham Young himself, suffering severely, became a victim of malaria, coming very close to death.

In the spring of 1847 Brigham Young led a vanguard of a little over one hundred people across the great plains, toward the great Basin of the Rocky Mountains, settling around the great Salt Lake.

Brigham Young was sustained as the president of the church in 1848 and by 1852 he introduced polygamy to the people. In 1862 Congress passed the Morrill law prohibiting polygamy, which the Mormons resisted on the grounds that it was unlawful interference with religious belief and practices, thus unconstitutional. This law remained practically a dead letter until 1882, when Brigham Young decided to test the validity of the Morrill law. His secretary George Reynolds offered himself as a test case to go before the Supreme Court to test the constitutionality.

Brigham Young died on August 29,1877. Three years later John Taylor was sustained as the president of the Mormon church. The Reynolds case ascended the territorial tribunals and by 1879 was argued before the United States Supreme Court, which ruled the Morrill Act to be constitutional. Church leaders and members were greatly disappointed and George Reynolds went to prison. However, in light of the failure of the Morrill Act to stem the perceived polygamy menace, the U.S. Congress passed the Edmunds Act in 1882 that provided imprisonment and fines for the practice of plural marriage. It also prevented polygamists from voting and serving on juries.

In 1887 Congress considered The Edmunds-Tucker Bill. This bill threatened to confiscate all church property (except chapels) in excess of $50,000, and to dissolve the church as a corporate entity. This law was approved in 1890 by the Supreme Court. Following that, the Manifesto of 1890 was issued by Wilford Woodruff, fourth president of the Mormon Church, prohibiting any further polygamist marriages.

Many of the Mormon people did not accept this manifesto and in defiance to these laws of the land and this rule of the Church continued in the living of polygamy. A few of these people gravitated to a spot on the Utah/Arizona border called Short Creek (the name was changed to Colorado City in 1961) and established a society based on their beliefs in polygamy and United Order.

CHAPTER ONE Excerpt

"They have been shielded…by the geographic circumstances of
Arizona’s northern most territory – the region beyond the Grand
Canyon that is best known as The Strip. Massive cliffs rearing
north of Short Creek’s little central street provide a natural rock
barrier to the north. To the east and west are the sweeping expanses
of dry and almost barren plateaus before the forests begin. To the
south is the Grand Canyon. It is the most isolated of all Arizona
communities. Short Creek is 400 miles by the shortest road from
the Mohave County seat of Kingman. Short Creek is unique
among Arizona communities in that some of its dwellings actually
are in another state."
     A description by Arizona Governor Howard Pyle in 1953.

Stephen V. Jones, assistant topographer to the second Colorado River expedition of John Wesley Powell, in describing his impression of the area, entered in his diary on Saturday, April 6, 1872: "(We) made Short Creek at 1 p.m. A dirty little stream not fit to drink."

In 1872, Short Creek, so named because of the short distance from the canyon to the lake bed it emptied into (a distance of about three miles), indeed seemed an unlikely place for a city to be established. There was very little water, the one most important necessity for the establishment and growth of a pioneer city. The only asset was the good grasslands in the area, making it suitable for the grazing of livestock.

During the period from 1867-1900, Short Creek Valley was "herd ground" for cattle owned by the Mormon Church. The springs in the Upper canyon and also those at nearby Cane Beds to the southeast and Canaan to the northwest were headquarters for prosperous ranches that utilized the luxuriant forage on the Arizona Strip. The Mormon Church owned the ranch at Canaan. The Maxwell brothers owned the ranch in the mouth of Short Creek Canyon. Most of the other cattle on the Arizona strip were owned by the United Order (Mormon Church) based at Orderville Utah.

The first permanent settlers did not move to Short Creek until about 1914 when Jacob Lauritzen came to the valley and, with the help of his brother and sons, installed an irrigation ditch from Water Canyon that was adequate for watering about 200 acres. James Black and his family moved to Short Creek from Ferron, Utah, in April 1918 and helped the Lauritzens put in the ditch.

Water Canyon, a left hand fork from Creek Canyon, about one mile from the canyon mouth, produced the most water for Short Creek. The ditch, bringing the water from the canyon, was about three miles long. It was constructed by hand with the aid of horses and scrapers and was completed in one summer. The first half-mile of the ditch was run in 8 inch concrete pipe, the pipe sections being three feet in length. These pipes sections were hand carried for this half-mile distance before being set in place. The ditch was then hand dug for the remaining two and a half miles to the potential farmland. The water emptied into a reservoir where it was stored overnight and was used to water the fields in the daytime.

One "water right" was one eight hour natural stream flow. These water rights were granted to people (besides the Lauritzens) who worked on the ditch. Some of these included James Black and his family, Isaac Carling, and Elmer Johnson. The Blacks traded their water rights in the ditch to the Lauritzens for land and water rights to springs in the mouth of the main Short Creek Canyon, just above the junction of Water Canyon. They established a small farm there and called the spot The Garden of Eden.

In the 1930s an attempt was made to construct an irrigation ditch out of the canyon for the south side of the valley, but due to the small amount of water from the main canyon, it was not successful in these early times.

The first permanent settlers on the south side of Short Creek were Frank Colvin and his wife Elizabeth, who moved from Pipe Spring in the summer of 1914, where they had been living in the old Mormon fort, about 15 miles east of Short Creek. Pipe Spring Fort had been built in the 1870s under the direction of Brigham Young and the ranch supervisor Anson Perry Windsor.

The building consisted of two sandstone structures facing each other across a courtyard enclosed by wooden gates, which became known as Windsor Castle. Windsor and his family used the fort as headquarters for the cattle herds that he managed for the LDS Church. Even before the fort was completed a relay station for the Deseret Telegraph system was installed, connecting this remote outpost on the Arizona Strip to other Mormon settlements and Salt Lake City, Utah. This was the first telegraph line to enter the Arizona Territory. However, the location of the territorial boundary was not known to the builders, making them unaware of this fact.

In the 1880s and 1890s the remote fort at Pipe Spring became a refuge for wives hiding from federal marshals enforcing anti-polygamy laws. A number of women and children hid at Pipe Spring to save their husbands and fathers from prosecution. Faced with the confiscation of Church property the Mormon Church sold Pipe Spring Ranch. Between 1895 and 1923 it remained in private hands. It was an oasis in the desert where travelers would stop to refresh themselves and several families lived there from time to time. On May 31,1923, President Warren G. Harding signed the proclamation setting aside Pipe Spring National Monument, which it remains to the present time.

The Blacks later moved out of the canyon and settled on the south side of the Creek. Two of Elizabeth Colvin's brothers also settled at Short Creek -- Leroy Johnson in 1926, and Elmer Johnson in 1932. Another brother, Price Johnson and a brother-in-law, Carling Spencer, moved there about the same time. These two were probably the first polygamists to move into the area since the Mormon Church outlawed polygamy.

Price Johnson and Carling Spencer embraced polygamy under the sanction of John Woolley (father of Lorin Woolley), a man who claimed he had been given a commission to continue to marry people in polygamy after the Church outlawed it in 1890.

When John Taylor became (the third) President of the Mormon Church in 1880, there was a spirit of revolt among its members against polygamy. The Church had accepted polygamy in 1852 as a law pertaining to salvation in heaven, but the price of salvation became very high for the majority of the members. The desire for statehood was uppermost in the hearts of many members of the church, polygamist and non-polygamist as well. All were chafing under the yoke of territorial "carpet-bag" government, local self-government being denied them. Congress had enacted measures against polygamy and the Supreme Court of the nation had declared these laws constitutional.

Many men were being imprisoned for disobedience to the Civil law and rumors were reaching the people in Utah territory that the United States would grant political emancipation if they would conform to these Civil laws. Also, there were threats of a confiscation of all Church property and the disfranchisement of all Church members who refused to compromise. It only became natural that some of the concerned members would seek some kind of an agreement with the Civil Government. The pressures had become so severe that President John Taylor was forced into hiding lest the civil authorities put him in prison.

John Taylor went into hiding in 1884 and remained so until his death in 1887. While in hiding he remained in Salt Lake and Davis Counties, moving between the homes of people he could trust, often staying just one step ahead of the authorities. He was wanted because he was a polygamist but vigorously because he was the President of the Church. He had trusted bodyguards with him at all times. During this period there were mass arrests among the Latter-day Saints practicing polygamy, resulting in many men going to prison.

THE FUNDAMENTALIST BEGINNING

The following is a partial account of events that a man by the name of Lorin Woolley later claimed to have taken place during these tremulous times. It alleges that a self-appointed committee drafted a manifesto to discontinue polygamy for President Taylor's consideration and these are the events he described. One of the men Lorin claims was present for these events, who he says witnessed all that occurred, denied that he had been witness to any of the events described by Woolley. (Read Chapter 1 Notes for the complete description of these events.)

"On September 26, 1886, George Q. Cannon, Hyrum B. Clawson, Franklin S. Richards, and others, met with President John Taylor at my father's residence at Centerville, Davis County, Utah, and presented a document for President Taylor's consideration.

"I had just got back from a three days' trip, during most of which time I had been in the saddle, and being greatly fatigued, I had retired to rest.

"Between one and two o'clock P.M., Brother Bateman came and woke me up and asked me to be at my father's home where a manifesto was to be discussed. I went there and found there were congregated Samuel Bateman, Charles H. Wilkins, L. John Nuttall, Charles Birrell, George Q. Cannon, Franklin S. Richards and Hyrum B. Clawson.

"We discussed the proposed Manifesto at length, but we were unable to become united in the discussion. Finally George Q. Cannon suggested that President Taylor take the matter up with the Lord and decide the same the next day. Brothers Clawson and Richards were taken back to Salt Lake. That evening I was called to act as guard during the first part of the night, notwithstanding the fact that I was greatly fatigued on account of the three days' trip I had just completed.

"The brethren retired to bed soon after nine o'clock. The sleeping rooms were inspected by the guard as was the custom.

That night two guards at the D O (code name for President Taylor's hiding place), Lorin C. Woolley and Henry Charles (Little Charles) Birrell, bore witness to a remarkable event. Although Lorin had checked the locked door and windows of the President's bedroom, a light of intense brilliance appeared under the door. Lorin 'was at once startled to hear voices of men talking there.' He distinguished 'three distinct voices.' one was that of 'the Boss' (President Taylor), the other two were strangers. 'The three voices continued until about midnight, when one of them left and the other two continued.' Lorin's father and other members of the household witnessed the brilliant light and heard the voices beyond the door, which continued until dawn. When President Taylor emerged from his room that morning 'We could scarcely look at him because of the brightness of his countenance,' Lorin said.

"He stated, 'Brethren, I have had a very pleasant conversation all night with Brother Joseph Smith).'

"I said, 'Boss, who is the other man that was there until midnight?'

"He said, 'Brother Lorin, that was your Lord.'"

John Taylor had received a revelation, which he wrote in his own hand:

The Revelation September 27, 1886.

My son John, you have asked me concerning the new and everlasting covenant, how far it is binding upon my people.

Thus saith the Lord: All commandments that I give must be obeyed by those calling themselves by my name unless they are revoked by me or by my authority. And how can I revoke an everlasting covenant?

For I, the Lord, am everlasting and my everlasting covenants cannot be abrogated nor done away with; they stand forever. Have I not given my word in great plainness on this subject? Yet have not great numbers of my people been negligent in the observance of my law and the keeping of my commandments? And yet I have borne with them these many years, and this because of their weakness because of the perilous times. Furthermore, it is more pleasing to me that men should use their free agency in regard to these matters.

Nevertheless, I the Lord, do not change and my word and my covenants and my law do not; and as I have heretofore said by my servant, Joseph, all those who would enter into my glory must and shall obey the law. And have I not commanded men that if they were Abraham's seed and would enter into my glory, they must do the works of Abraham? I have not revoked this law, nor will I, for it is everlasting and those who will enter into my glory must obey the conditions thereof; even so, Amen.

"We had no breakfast, but assembled ourselves in a meeting. I forget who opened the meeting, I was called to offer the benediction. I think my father, John W. Woolley, offered the opening prayer. There were present, at this meeting, in addition to President Taylor; George Q. Cannon, L. John Nuttall, John W. Woolley, Samuel Bateman, Charles H. Wilkins, Charles Birrell, Daniel R. Bateman, Bishop Samuel Sedden, George Earl, my mother, Julia E. Woolley, my sister, Amy Woolley, and myself. The meeting was held from about nine o'clock in the morning until five in the afternoon without intermission, being about eight hours in all.

"After the meeting referred to, President Taylor had L. John Nuttall write five copies of the revelation. He called five of us together: Samuel Bateman, Charles H. Wilkins, George Q. Cannon, John Woolley, and myself.

"He then set us apart and placed us under covenant that while we lived we would see to it that no year passed by without children being born in the principle of plural marriage. We were given authority to carry this work on, they in turn to be given authority to ordain others when necessary, under the direction of the worthy senior (by ordination), so that there should be no cessation in the work. He then gave each of us a copy of the Revelation."

It must be pointed out here that there is no written testimony of anyone other than Lorin Woolley of these ordinations taking place, and the written account was not accomplished until1929, forty-two years later.

Joseph Smith proclaims that "Out of the mouths of two or three witnesses shall all things be established." Even Joseph Musser (the man most responsible for the Fundamentalist movement) does not provide the evidence of these "two or three witnesses."

Quoting from TRUTH, a monthly magazine he published, he states: "There are a number of the brethren now living who heard not only Lorin Woolley and Daniel R. Bateman, but also John W. Woolley, relate the incidents of the meeting referred to, and their story agrees in all essential details" (Truth, vol. 2, p 126).

Daniel Bateman, in a written statement: "The proceedings of the meeting, as related by Brother Woolley (Lorin), are correct in every detail. I was not present when the five spoken of by Brother Woolley were set apart for special work, but have on different occasions heard the details of the same related by both Lorin C. Woolley and John W. Woolley, and from all the circumstances with which I am familiar, I firmly believe the testimony of these two Brethren to be true" (Truth, vol. 2 p 120).

Daniel Bateman's testimony presents a question. If he was not present when these ordinations took place, can he be considered as a legitimate witness? There is no other written testimony of anyone witnessing these ordinations (note 1).

In all fairness it must be acknowledged that John W. Woolley was aware of what his son Lorin was telling people. There is no written record that he ever contradicted Lorin's claims. Before his death in 1928, J. Leslie Broadbent and John Y. Barlow published a pamphlet. These two men were associated with the Woolleys and were eager to not only live polygamy but also wanted to get the message to the general LDS. Church membership that there was a Priesthood established outside of the Church commissioned to keep the Principle alive. The General Authorities had declared polygamy no longer a necessary tenet of the LDS. doctrine and were excommunicating those who still advocated it be lived.

It was in September of 1927 that this pamphlet first appeared, entitled Celestial Marriage, with a big question mark on the front cover. The little pamphlet was read by many people and created some controversy among the general LDS Church membership and some began asking questions of their Bishops concerning the doctrine advocated in the booklet.

 Read the rest of Chapter One in the book. . .

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CHAPTER TWO (Excerpt)

The United Effort Plan

In June of 1935, Joseph Musser sent out the first issue of the TRUTH magazine. One of the front page paragraphs reads:

"A complete breakdown threatens the monogamistic order of marriage, the boast of modern civilization, has failed. Gnawing at it's very vitals, to which the glorious principle of marriage is slowly but surely succumbing, are the death dealing agencies of infidelity, birth control and divorce. The remedy is comprehended in God's order of marriage known today as Celestial or Patriarchal Marriage [polygamy]. It was revealed to Abraham by the Lord and in the present Dispensation was restored through the Mormon Prophet, Joseph Smith."

The TRUTH magazine, a monthly publication, was circulated widely among the Ward members of the Mormon Church throughout the inter-mountain region. Joseph Musser used the magazine as a forum to promote the ideas of the Priesthood Council. The Lorin Woolley story was told of how the former Church president, John Taylor, had set the group of men apart to keep polygamy alive afterthe Church would abandoned it. Statements from the early presidents of the "Mormon" Church on the necessity of living polygamy were quoted extensively.

It was not long until Musser acquired a number of followers who began seeking him out for counsel and advice. Little groups of people sprang up throughout the western region of the United States, from Idaho to southern California. As early as 1933, the Priesthood Council began holding cottage meetings in the Salt Lake Valley to tell their followers of the special commission that had been given them to keep polygamy alive.

After the advent of TRUTH, Joseph Musser spent much of his time traveling through-out the region teaching the groups that began asking more about the special calling these men had been given. One such group of followers were located in Eastern Idaho around the St. Anthony area. The interested people there would gather money to buy a bus ticket from Salt Lake City. Sending it to Joseph Musser, they would request him to come visit them, where he would hold cottage meetings, teaching them the story of the Priesthood Council. It was in December of 1938 that Musser made his first trip to St. Anthony, Idaho to meet with the little group there. This was after the breakup of the United Trust at Short Creek but the principle of the United Order was still an important part of the teachings of the Priesthood Council. A man by the name of Jonathan Marion Hammon, who was living at St. Anthony, became a member of this group and was to become a very prominent figure in this history.

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