Colorado City: Inside America’s Largest Polygamist Community, and What Happened There

Two small towns straddle the Arizona–Utah border in one of the most remote corners of the country. For most of the last century, one religious leader controlled nearly everything about life there. That included who owned property, who got married to whom, and who was allowed to stay. That control only fully ended in the last few years. Recovery is still happening now, in real time.

A Community Built on a Break From the Mainstream Church

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, known as the FLDS, formed after splitting from the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That mainstream church had formally renounced polygamy in 1890. FLDS followers settled in this remote stretch of desert in the 1930s. Their settlement became the twin towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, historically known together as Short Creek.

In 1953, authorities raided the community, jailing dozens of adults and placing their children in foster care. Photos of children being pulled from their mothers’ arms turned the raid into a public relations disaster. For decades afterward, officials largely looked away, and the FLDS kept building its own closed, self-governed world in the same spot.

One Man’s Rise, and the Crimes That Followed

Warren Jeffs took over as the FLDS prophet in 2002, after his father’s death. Former members have described him as authoritarian. He reportedly used marriages as rewards for loyal followers. Men and boys who questioned him faced exile, with their wives and children reassigned to other members of the sect.

In 2005, Arizona charged Jeffs with arranging the marriage of a teenage girl to a 28-year-old man who already had a wife. In 2011, a Texas court convicted him of sexually assaulting two girls, ages 12 and 15. He was sentenced to life in prison. Evidence from that case came out of a 2008 raid on an FLDS ranch in Texas. One survivor, Briell Decker, became Jeffs’s 65th wife in an arranged marriage at age 18.

The towns themselves weren’t just background to Jeffs’s crimes. Federal prosecutors later accused local government of denying basic services to residents who weren’t part of the church, including water hookups and police protection. Police in the area were widely reported to answer to church leadership rather than the law. In 2017, courts placed both towns under direct supervision, specifically to break the FLDS’s grip on local government. That followed a jury finding past town and police officials guilty of civil rights violations.

A Slow, Very Recent Return to Ordinary Life

That court supervision only lifted last summer, nearly two years ahead of schedule. Judges found the towns had made real, sustained progress. Today, Colorado City and Hildale reportedly look close to any other small town in that part of the country. There are youth soccer leagues, a few bars, and even a winery, all things that were strictly forbidden under FLDS rule. Homes that once belonged to Warren Jeffs personally have been converted into bed-and-breakfasts and sober living centers. Non-FLDS residents have won control of Hildale’s town council and mayor’s office, and nearly did the same in Colorado City.

None of this means the harm has fully stopped. Some FLDS members still live there. The new openness has brought its own problems, including rising drug use. And the abuse didn’t end with Jeffs’s imprisonment. In late 2024, another sect member in Colorado City, who had more than 20 spiritual wives, including 10 underage girls, was sentenced to 50 years in prison for coercing girls into sexual acts.