Visiting Colorado City
 
Dispatches from Las Vegas by Richard Abowitz
The Movable Buffet
Richard Holm
 
Richard Holm

On Friday I took the three-hour drive to Colorado City to see how much has changed since the arrest of the man the overwhelming majority of its residents believes is God's No. 1 dude on earth, Warren Jeffs.

To the rest of us, Jeffs is better known for facing charges related to child rape than for his more spiritual pursuits. Anyway, it isn't clear how aware people of Colorado City are that their prophet was busted in a 2007 Cadillac with a bunch of wigs and $50,000. No store in Colorado City sells newspapers or magazines. The so-called prophet bans those. The public school in town is covered in weeds since the Jeffs pulled all the children out a few years ago. Obviously, there are no bars or video stores.

I dropped by one of the few restaurants: the Vermillion Cafe. The tables were mostly banquet-style for reasons made clear by the one family there that included one man, a few women, and a horde of children. A typical Colorado City brood. They wore their Willa Cather outfits and turned totally silent from the moment I entered until I left. I wasn't even thanked for the tip I left when I paid. Not very Vegas.

I decided to walk around the town. As I wandered about, passing cars slowed down and the male drivers glared at me while talking on cell phones. No eyes on the road. The massive honeycomb houses looked to be constructed almost haphazardly and in many cases were only half constructed with lots of mud, building supplies and squalor and unattended children. Yet as I walked on the public street with a camera and a digital tape recorder, a police officer did take the time to ask me if I was lost. Lost? There is nowhere to go. There is nothing to do. How does one get lost in a town with nothing in it?

I found an open gate that I thought led to a public park. It had the base of a monument praising FLDS leaders past. But there was no monument. Then I noticed that in fact this was a graveyard with almost all the names from a small group of families: Barlow, Steed, Jessop and Jeffs.

Of the graves in Colorado City, many are marked as stillborn or very young. There has been a lot made of all the dead children here. I don't know how much credit to give those suspicions, but considering the extraordinary adult-to-child ratio I saw last Friday (kids wandering about unattended or kids, with no adult in sight, playing in the filth) the authorities should spend some time checking in on the kids who are still alive there. Are they getting any education? Last time I was there I met a teen who was not clear on who the President was. I did, however, find a tape of the sort of teaching Jeffs was giving to sixth- and eighth-graders. In November 1995, Jeffs explained to students why only the prophet can decide wedding matches:
"If you young people were to marry a Negro, you could not be a priesthood person, even if you repented. You could not stay in this work.... Today, you can see a black man with a white woman.... A great evil has happened on this land because the devil knows that if all the people have Negro blood, there will be nobody worthy to have the priesthood. The devil is trying to get people to go out and marry and mix with the world, even different colored people. That is why we marry only who the prophet says — because if you marry anybody out in the world, there's a chance they could have Negro blood in them."
Leaving all that aside, one thing is clear in visiting Colorado City: I can't imagine a sadder place to be a kid than that joyless town.
 
vegasblog.latimes.com
Originally published September 6, 2006
 
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