In The West, Polygamy Of 1800s Is Thriving In 1980s
 
By Paul Nussbaum
Philadelphia Inquirer
 
COLORADO CITY, Ariz. — When the Timpson brothers, Ray and Don, head for their homes tonight, tired after another busy day of running the Colorado City Academy, they will be greeted - like young men all over America - by their wives and kids.

Five wives and 18 kids.

Ray, at 35, is the father of 10 children and the husband of three women. Brother Don, two years younger, has a smaller household: only eight children and two wives. But they're still young, their families are still growing, and both men figure to marry again. And again.

Like their father before them, and his father before him, and most of the men in this isolated, mile-high desert town on the Utah-Arizona border, the Timpson brothers are polygamists.

They and their neighbors are a remnant of 19th-century Mormon Utah, defying the law to practice a religion that requires "plural marriage" if believers are to reach the highest pinnacle of heaven.

Polygamy has survived, even flourished, in the West despite federal and state prohibitions and the renunciation of the practice 98 years ago by the Mormon Church. Today, an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 people are living in polygamous households, most of them in Utah and Arizona.

Some live together in isolated polygamous colonies like this one in remote areas of Arizona, Montana, Idaho, Canada and Mexico. Some live openly in suburban Salt Lake City, wives and children and husband together in a single house, with little to fear since anti-polygamy laws are no longer enforced. Others lead secret double lives, placing wives and families in separate towns and visiting each on a rotating schedule.

"We're quite normal people, although we have a religious concept that's different," says Dan Barlow, mayor of Colorado City and husband of five women. "We're just doing all the things that make America great, living our lives, raising our families, building roads and houses and enjoying the freedoms of America."

Some of the women, though, talk about bitter jealousies that can grow over a husband's favoritism to one wife, about cultural brainwashing and male dominance. And even a supporter of polygamy like Don Timpson acknowledges that "it can get ugly."

"It makes the man take control - if he survives it," says his brother, Ray.

In Colorado City, most of the polygamous families live like Don and Janet and Mary Timpson: together, in houses that seem always in a state of construction as they are remodeled to accommodate more and more people.

Wife No. 1, Janet, stays home each day with the children, her four and Mary's four. Wife No. 2, Mary, teaches sixth graders at the local elementary school. Their common husband, Don, is a teacher and administrator with brother Ray at the academy, a new private school just outside the dusty town limits.

At home, they juggle the endless chores of keeping a family of 11 whole, Janet doing most of the housekeeping, Mary bringing home a regular paycheck, Don sharing his bed alternately with each and running the household in proper patriarchal fashion, all of them convinced that they are meeting a divine challenge.

"The reason I married him is that I felt it is what God wanted me to do," says Mary. The marriage was arranged by her father and Don's father, with the consent of the couple - and of Janet.

"You grow to love the other woman and her children," Mary says of her "sister-wife." "It deepens as you live together . . . you have people who are intimately involved in your life who are around all the time.

"Plural marriage is the best social thing there is for me and my children. The things that people see as drawbacks are the things that make for self- improvement. But you have to be the kind of person who is dedicated to improving yourself."

"It's a challenge, it's a lot of work," says Don. "But the rewards are worth it. When I'm 60 or 70 years old, I don't want to be sitting around a rest home. I want to be surrounded by the people I love."

Like her husband, Mary grew up in a polygamous household and says she "loved the advantages I had as a child . . . there was always a mother there. My mothers got along very well." Her own children, she says, also always have a mother around.

And she wonders if maybe the monogamous world isn't missing a good bet.

"One thing I've read in the newspapers is about the problems of single mothers trying to raise their children alone. Women living together like this would be a way to solve a lot of the problems of single motherhood. And I see women looking for men who are good husbands and fathers - this way of life affords women the opportunity to find them."

CONTENTIOUS SUBJECT

Ever since Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, secretly decreed polygamy as God's will in 1843, it has been a contentious subject within and outside Mormonism.

Part of its justification in the early years of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was to emulate the biblical patriarchs who had had many wives and concubines, and a major purpose of plural marriage was "to multiply and replenish the earth."

Although only an estimated 15 percent to 30 percent of the 19-century Mormons practiced polygamy, nearly all of their senior leaders did.

In the mid-1800s, Congress began passing anti-polygamy laws and refused to grant Utah statehood until the Mormon Church officially renounced the practice in 1890 and Utah included a ban on polygamy in its constitution. But neither church nor state has been able to stamp out a practice that had grown deeply rooted by 1890.

And since the once-common "polyg raids" by state marshals are a thing of the past, the practice has become increasingly public.

"It's growing steadily," says Clifford B. Craig, a geography professor at Utah State University who has studied modern polygamy in the West. "It has become a very open kind of thing because of the short arm of the law. But it's a damn sensitive issue in Utah. . . . There are still family ties and connections to polygamy for many Mormons."

QUIET LIVES

Most polygamous families are fundamentalists who believe the Mormon Church erred when it renounced polygamy, and they generally lead quiet, hard-working lives out of the public eye. Often the only time the public hears about polygamists is when one group or another is involved in violence.

Earlier this month, members of a polygamous clan were convicted in Salt Lake City for their roles in a siege and shootout in Marion, Utah, that left one state corrections officer dead and one of the polygamists wounded. (The group's patriarch, John Singer, had been killed by police 10 years ago in a confrontation over the home-schooling of his children.)

And police say as many as 20 polygamist murders in the last 15 years may be attributed to the "blood atonement" beliefs of a violent polygamist sect faithful to the teachings of their prophet, the late Ervil LeBaron.

Here in Colorado City, polygamists half a century ago created a town unlike any other in the country, purposely isolated from mainstream America by the nearby Grand Canyon, towering red buttes and endless mesas, as well as by their forbidden lifestyle.

A trip here from the county seat in Kingman, Ariz., means a circuitous, five-hour drive through parts of three states.

It looks something like a slice of Appalachia or a piece of the Alaska bush, spectacular landscape littered with the effluvia of subsistence. In the shadow of the sandstone Towers of Tumurru, cows and horses graze in dusty, fenced yards, used tires are piled next to abandoned machinery, well-tended lawns vie with dirt plots, and paved streets turn into dirt roads.

Girls and women wear long, pastel-colored dresses and austere hair styles that vanished from most of the nation with the Depression. The men are all cleanshaven, with short hair, their long sleeves buttoned at the cuffs.

The burgeoning families live in trailers and huge, unfinished houses that they built on land owned not by them, but by a communal religious trust. And when the time comes for marriage - for the first time or the fifth - the community patriarch often decides who will wed whom.

It is an inbred town where the family trees are hopelessly intertwined: a man's wife may also be his aunt or his first cousin or his stepdaughter. By marriage, one local man recently became his own nephew. Although reported cases of incest are rare, there have been several convictions over the years, according to the county attorney.

And it is a closed community, very wary of outsiders. The old-timers still remember the 1953 raid by Arizona and Utah police, back when the town was still known as Short Creek. That nighttime Short Creek Raid resulted in a massive roundup as the unresisting townspeople gathered around an American flag, singing patriotic songs. The men were taken to jail, the women and children to foster homes.

Eventually, 27 men were sentenced to a year's probation on charges of adultery, bigamy, open and notorious cohabitation and marrying the spouse of another. Charges against 69 others were dismissed, and within two years, the reunited families returned to Short Creek, renamed it Colorado City and picked up where they had left off.

"It was a fiasco," says Utah's chief deputy attorney general, Paul Tinker. "Basically, it didn't work. The welfare costs were enormous, and after the men got out of prison, they all migrated back to Short Creek anyway and went on with life. It was an unpopular raid. People generally said, 'Don't we have better ways to spend tax money?'

"And for some, maybe subconscious reason, people haven't had the stomach to prosecute polygamy after that."

(Tinker successfully defended Utah's anti-polygamy law in 1983, when a police officer in Murray, Utah, challenged the statute after being fired for practicing polygamy.)

The local county attorney, William Eckstrom, says he won't prosecute polygamists, either, in what he describes as "a very peaceful community," even though the Arizona Constitution outlaws the practice and state laws prohibit bigamy and cohabitation.

"It's a practical problem," he says. "If you prosecute them, what do you do with the wives and children? You split up the family. What the law allows is not a solution."

For 50 years, Colorado City has survived police raids, Mormon excommunication, public ridicule and social ostracism. Now, though, it is being threatened from within.

Some residents have grown disenchanted with polygamy. Some are angry with the power wielded by a handful of founding families and the religious trust that owns the land. Together, these dissidents have done the unthinkable: They have taken their complaints outside. They have filed suit in federal court in Salt Lake City to break up the religious trust that owns the town.

The resulting split has divided families, made enemies of neighbors and splintered the local theocracy.

"We were all brainwashed," says Earlene Cox, a slight, dark-haired woman, sitting next to her husband, Don, at their 20-foot-long dining-room table, and across from Don's other wife, Katie. "We were all taught that you're nothing if you don't have plural wives."

In the course of a conversation, Don will move comfortably from Earlene's side to Katie's and back, familiarly draping an arm over the back of a chair. The women mostly talk around each other, although one will occasionally call the other's attention to a phone that needs to be answered or a child attended to.

"It's the way I was raised," says Katie, who was given to Don in marriage when she was 18 as a reward for electrical work he did for Colorado City. "We were told in our 'fireside classes' (religious instruction) not to let our feelings go out to any boy, to keep our minds open to being placed in marriage."

For 26 years, Earlene and Katie, mothers of Don's 19 children, have shared a home and a husband. They live in a sprawling house where the anachronism of polygamy coexists with a big-screen color television and videocassette recorder and state-of-the-art children's toys.

The wives have their own bedrooms and alternately share Don's. They share the kitchen, and they're civil to each other. But although they're reconciled to polygamy, neither of them is very happy about it.

"We step on each other's toes, we get in each other's way," says Katie. "I don't think girls ought to have to live this way."

Other residents talk about jealousies and intra-family feuds that polygamy has created in some households here. They talk ruefully about children of less-favored wives who grow up as second-class members of their own families, and they whisper gleefully about the local husband who was supposedly beaten up by several angry wives.

Today, the Coxes are leaders of the Colorado City rebels. The dissidents say they are economic prisoners of the United Effort Plan, the religious trust established in 1943 by the polygamist town founders as the owner of most of the town's land. The trust owns most of Colorado City and adjacent Hildale, Utah, which essentially form a town of about 4,500 people.

The trust grants lots to selected young men, who then must build their own homes and pay taxes to the trust. But the land, and the house on it, remain the property of the trust, which can evict a tenant at will.

For the dissidents, that's the rub. They want to own their homes or be paid for them so they can start anew elsewhere. In their federal suit, which is not expected to come to trial until late this year or early next, they ask that the trust be broken up and its assets be parceled out among the town's tenants.

"We have to get rid of this, this communism," says Connell Bateman, Don Cox's son-in-law who gave up his dreams of polygamy when his wife, Trudi, refused to go along and who now is an outspoken opponent of plural marriage and the trust.

"It's like there's a little hole in the Berlin Wall now, and when we win that lawsuit, we're going to go through into America. For the first time in 40 or 50 years, this town is going to be in America."

The United Effort Plan was founded by John Y. Barlow, a polygamist who homesteaded here in the 1930s with several fellow believers in search for a safe haven from the state marshals conducting "polyg raids."

They were disciples of one of Joseph Smith's successors as head of the Mormon Church, John Taylor, who they believe received a commandment from God in 1886 to perpetuate polygamy. Today, the eight polygamous sons of Barlow and his third wife pretty much run Colorado City.

Dan Barlow, with five wives and what he will only say are "quite a few" children, is town mayor, fire chief, school board member and operator of Danco, the sewing factory where 70 townswomen make professional uniforms for a Los Angeles firm. Sam Barlow, with three wives, is the town's deputy marshal. Alvin Barlow is school superintendent. Truman Barlow is the tax assessor.

TOWN COUNCIL

The town council includes Dan Barlow, Truman's wife Karen, Dan's son-in-law and his brother-in-law. Fred Jessop, brother of the Barlow boys' mother, is town clerk of Hildale and the controller of the trust's house lots.

"They've colluded over the years to take over the place, and they've pretty well done it," says Ben Bistline, a smiling hulk of a man who, like so many here, makes his living in out-of-town construction. Bistline broke with the local powers when the patriarch of Colorado City, Leroy Johnson ("Uncle Roy" to most townspeople, in name as well as fact), turned down his request for a second wife.

"I believed if I didn't get more than one wife, I wouldn't get into heaven," Bistline recalls. "So I went to Uncle Roy and said, 'I'm 40 years old and I don't have another wife. What are you and the Lord going to do about it?' And he told me there weren't enough women to go around. I walked out of there mad, and since that day, I haven't paid one red dime to the UEP."

A SHORTAGE

(The shortage of potential wives that confronted Bistline is not an uncommon problem here. To enable the most favored men to have many wives requires some demographic manipulation: Some women move to Colorado City from polygamous families outside the community, and many young, single men move out in search of jobs and families.)

When Uncle Roy died at the age of 98 in 1986, leaving 12 widows, 15 children and 187 grandchildren, the contested line of patriarchal succession created new divisions within Colorado City.

The Barlows and their allies installed a polygamist accountant from suburban Salt Lake City as patriarch, while a splinter group - including the Timpsons - who supported another elder as the true patriarch began to build their own communal subdivision, Centennial Park, right next to Colorado City.

Mayor Barlow, a tall, genial, soft-spoken man, says the complaints from the dissidents are just sour grapes against a few industrious families.

"It's not like it's portrayed. Some people have had their feelings hurt, that's all.

"You can go into any little community where there is a big pioneer family, and they're the ones that are trying to get things done. That's the way it is here. The people that are complaining are not helping make it a good community. No one is trying to stop them from believing what they want. But we can't let them destroy what we have."

STAUNCH DEFENDER

Barlow's father was arrested in 1937 and jailed again in 1944 for practicing polygamy. And he himself was arrested as a 21-year-old father of three during the Short Creek Raid. But he remains a staunch defender of polygamy, both as a practical way of life and as a religious principle.

"In two-thirds of the earth, it's an accepted lifestyle. Most people here don't want to broadcast their lifestyle, they just want to live their lives and respect their God, and they have every right to do that. And in a day and age where there are so many alternate lifestyles, it is foolish for the state to try to enforce something like this."

Don Timpson agrees. But he says when he gets married again, and he expects to, he'd like a wife in step with the times.

"I'd probably prefer one with a college degree. A wife has to be a breadwinner, too, after all. You know, we could really use a good dose of women's lib around here."
 
articles.philly.com
Originally published May 30, 1988
 
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