Colorado City, Ariz. -
The records shows that on Sept. 19, 1985, this remote desert community of 1700 people became a full-fledged town. That was when DANIEL BARLOW, the town's first mayor, and six town-council members took an oath of office, swearing to uphold federal and state constitutions and laws.
What the record doesn't show is that Mr. Barlow and many others here have been openly violating the Arizona state constitution and laws for decades - because they practice polygamy. Mr. Barlow, who is the local fire chief and servs on the public school board, has five wives. He says he doesn't see any contradiction between his oath of office and his polygamy. The town's founder and spiritual leader, 98 year old Leroy Johnson, married wife No. 16 in 1984; 13 wives survive.
The swearing-in ceremony before a packed house at the elementary school auditorium here capped a remarkable transformation for what had previousaly been a renegade community. In Colorado City's early days, residents were so skittish they built their homes on skids so they could tow them to sanctuary across the nearby Utah state line in the event of raids by Arizona state officials. Now the reclusive commuity has come full circle - instead of trying to dodge the law. Colorado City has become a law unto itself.
Governor's Approval
"Talk about Americana," marvels Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt, who defends the townspeople's efforts to go public despite their lawbreaking ways. "They're good people, hard working people." Besides, he says, "I'm not in the business of condoning or commenting on people's personal lives."
Not everyone is so approving. "What you have is an outlaw religious cult that somehow took root and grew and now is trying to legitimize itself," says former Gov. Howard Pyle. "That a polygamous town has been able to keep on flouting the law for 50 years just amazes me."
In a celebrated case in 1953, Gov. Pyle tried to enforce the law by jailing the fathers and rounding up the children to put into foster homes. But a judge ordered everyone released, and Gov. Pyle subsequently lost his bid for re-election. No one has since tried to enforce the laws against bigamy in Arizona, the state attorney general's office says.
Colorado City isn't the only town in the U.S. that barbors polygamists. Western scholars estimate that anywhere between 30,000 and 50,000 people, living mainly in Utah, Arizona, and California practice plural marriages.
Nor is it the only town in which polygamists run the local government. Alex Joseph, the mayor of Big Water, Utah, 100 miles east of here, at latest count had seven wives. (Big Water incorporated in 1983 so residents could have their own cemetery.) And a small portion of Colorado City spills over into Utah was quietly incorporated into Hildale, Utah, back in 1963 to obtain state and federal funds to build a water-treatment plant.
"I never knew towns had a marital status," says Mayor Barlow, who doesn't much like to talk about Colorado City's unusual social order. "Maybe setting up a town government will help to wipe away some of the mysticism about the place."
Conventional government notwithstanding, Colorado City is an unusual community by almost any standard. It doesn't have a bank, a doctor, or a dentist, or even a cafe. Although life revolves around fundamentalist Mormon religious beliefs, services are held in a school and there aren't any churches. Lining the ruddy, dirt streets aare drab, dormitory-like homes, may of them frozen in mid-construction, apparently for lack of money.
And then there are the children. Nearly half the polulation of Colorado City is school children; a proportion well over twice the state average. Once town elder is said to have fathered 80 himself. In line with the town's strict conservatism, the girls wear long, ruffled dresses, while the boys wear long-sleeved shirts buttoned tight at the collar. Their only concwessions to modern fashion are their bright-colored jogging shoes.
A cooperative religious trust, the United Effort Plan, owns most of the town's buildings, homes and land, and manages most of its enterprises, which include a cabinet factory, an egg farm and a modular-home plant. Under the leadership of "Uncle Roy" Johnson, the trust has been able to dictte the lives and meet most of the needs of its members, as well as insulate them from the outside world.
"Uncle Roy tells us where to live, where to work, and who to marry, and if you follow all his orders and are generous in your tithing, he'll' reward you with another wife," says Cyril Bradshaw, who has two wives and 22 children. Mr. Bradshaw, who for 20 years was the principal of a private high school here, says his "independent thinking" - he owns a television set and tinkers with computers - is the reason Mr. Johnson hasn't granted him more wives. (Mr. Johnson, who lately has been bedridden with a kidney ailment, wasn't well enough to be interviewed.)
Flight From Utah
Originally called Short Creek, Colorado City was founded during the Great Depression on some barely arable land at the foot of a phalanx of cinnamon colored bluffs called the Tower of Tumurru. Mr. Johnson and his band of excommunicated Mormons were fleeing Utah, which had begun strictly enforcing its laws forbidding plural marriage. (As a condition of statehood in 1896, the federal government required both the Utah state government and the Mormon Church to forbid polygamy, a practice that previously had been a central tenet of Mormon doctrine.)
The splendid scenery wasn't the only reason the group settled here. Just as compelling was the site's isolation from the rest of Arizona by a barrier more daunting than distance-namely the Grand Canyon, which slashes its way across the northwest corner of the state 40 miles south of here. Even today, it takes five hours to make the circuitous drive through parts of Utah and Nevada to get to Kingman, Ariz., the Mohave County seat.
Ironically, it was the isolations from the rest of Mohave County that finally drove Colorado City to incorporated itself. "There is only one road-grader north of the Canyon, and you can imagine what these dirt roads are like when it snows," says Mayor Barlow. "We never have gotten so much help from the county, so we decided it was tiome to get our own tax base and revenue-sharing funds and handle improvement ourselves."
Dissident Group
So far, the newly incorporated government hasn't done much more than hire a city clerk. Still, the town will never to the same, mainly because the decision to incorporate sharpened political and social differences that were beginning to show up in what until lately was a virtually homogeneous community.
In recent months, for example, a group of residents considering themselves the true Mormons and called themselves "the dissidents" has emerged, complaining that the same individuals who run the religious trust will run the town.. Terming the trust "Uncle Roy's religious dictatorship," the dissidents have started holding their own church services in the home of a leader publishing their own newsletter and ignoring the town's strict standards of dress.
"There's no difference between church and state in this town now," complains Donald Cox, an electrical contractor who is one of the more outspoken dissidents. The 49 year old Mr. Cox, who says the trust has retaliated by not hiring his company to do electrical wiring at its modular home plant any longer, says he would simply move out of the town if he could.
"But I can't sell my house," he says, "because the trust says it isn't mine, even though I built it and paid for it." Besides, says Mr. Cox, who has two wives and 19 children, "it isn't easy to find another community where a family like mine will fit in." |