"This Will Someday Be the Head and Not the Tail of the Church": A History of the Mormon Fundamentalists at Short Creek Author(s): KEN DRIGGS Source: Journal of Church and State, Vol. 43, No. 1 (WINTER 2001), pp. 49-80 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23920013 Accessed: 08-05-2017 19:53 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Church and State This content downloaded from 104.219.97.8 on Mon, 08 May 2017 19:53:49 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms "This Will Someday Be the Head and Not the Tail of the Church": A History of the Mormon Fundamentalists at Short Creek KEN DRIGGS In a 1974 sermon, Leroy S. Johnson, whom many Fundamentalist Mormons revered as a modern day prophet, recounted a story he heard as a young man. The great Mormon prophet-colonizer Brigham Young was returning in a buggy from Pipe Springs, a pioneer outpost in ex treme southern Utah on what is now the Arizona border. The Prophet was accompanied by Apostle George Q. Cannon and the driver who reportedly told Johnson the story. Young asked that they stop on Cedar Ridge so that he could survey the barren land. After a moment's reflection he told his party, "this will someday be the head and not the tail of the church. This will be the granaries of the Saints. This land will produce in abundance sufficient wheat to feed the people."1 Today Johnson's religious community regard this as prophecy which they are fulfilling. Introduction In 1890, Wilford Woodruff, fourth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly called the Mormon Church, is sued a press release indicating that the celebration of new plural or polygamous marriage would cease in his denomination. While it took more than a generation before the practice ended, The Manifesto,2 as Mormons call it, began the church's attempt to make peace with main • KEN DRIGGS (B.S. University of Florida; J.D. Mercer University; LL.M. University of Wisconsin) is a criminal defense lawyer specializing in the defense of death penalty cases in Georgia, Florida, and Texas. He has published several articles on Mormon legal history and Fundamentalist Mormons in a variety of journals including the Journal of Church and State. The author is currently writing a book about Fundamentalist Mormons. An initial version of this article was delivered as a paper at the annual meeting of the Mormon History Associa tion on 16 May 1992, in St. George, Utah. 1. Leroy S. Johnson, The L. S. Johnson Sermons, 7 vols. (Hildale, Utah: Twin Cities Cou rier Press, 1983-84, 1990), 3: 854-55. 2. The Manifesto is published as an "Official Declaration" in the Doctrine and Covenants, one of four volumes Mormons recognize as scripture. This content downloaded from 104.219.97.8 on Mon, 08 May 2017 19:53:49 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 50 JOURNAL OF CHURCH AND STATE stream American society. More than just plural marriage was at issue. Mormons dismantled their communal economy called the United Or der,3 dissolved the Mormon "People's" political party, and modified many rituals which offended the outside world.4 The religious rhetoric coming out of Mormon meetings began to change in that it focused on commonality with the world rather than separateness. Other doctrines or their interpretations were changed dramatically in the next genera tion. Mormons backed away from their belief in the near-future return of Jesus Christ and how they interpreted their duty to build a temporal Kingdom of God on earth over which He would reign.5 But not all Latter-day Saints were ready to accept this new Mor mon worldview. Even after a generational change, a small but persis tent minority resisted.6 They finally came to form a separate but parallel religious community committed to preserving "Old Fashioned Mormonism" as many called it.7 By the 1930s, a remote pioneer town 3. Nineteenth-century Mormonism experimented with religious communalism. In the Utah Territorial period, it was called the United Order, but appeared in a wide variety of forms. One of the primary goals of such cooperation was to keep non-Mormon influences at bay. They had become particularly intrusive with the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869. A combination of economic changes and federal pressures brought the collapse of all United Order efforts by 1900. The LDS Church has completely abandoned such social experimentation today and become ardently capitalist. For an excellent study of these early efforts, see Leonard J. Arlington, Feramorz Y. Fox, and Dean May, Building the City of God: Community & Cooperation Among the Mormons (Salt Lake City, Utah: Dese ret Books, 1976). 4. For a rare discussion of this subject which Mormons generally consider sacred and not for public display, see David John Buerger, The Mysteries of Godliness: A History of Mor mon Temple Worship (San Francisco, Calif.: Smith Research Associates, 1994); see in partic ular, 133-71. 5. For studies of this transition see Ken Driggs, "The Mormon Church—State Confronta tion in Nineteenth Century America," Journal of Church and State 30 (Spring 1988): 273 89; Armand L. Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (Urbana and Chicago, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1994); B. Carmon Hardy, Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage (Urbana and Chicago, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Stephen Cresswell, Mormons & Cowboys, Moonshiners & Klansmen Federal Law Enforcement in the South & West, 1870-1893 (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1991); Thomas G. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890-1930 (Urbana and Chicago, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1986); and Edward Leo Lyman, Political Deliverance: The Mormon Quest for Utah Statehood (Urbana and Chi cago, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1986). More recently, see a short summary of this transition in Richard N. Ostling and Joan K. Ostling, Mormon America: The Power and the Promise (San Francisco, Calif.: Harper Books, 1999), 38-93. 6. One University of Utah graduate student, Marshall Day, titled his unpublished 1963 Master's Thesis concerning Short Creek "A Study of Protests Against Adaptation," which is an apt description of what occurred. This source will hereinafter be cited as "A Study of Protest Against Adaptation." 7. For a short general history of Fundamentalist Mormons, see Ken Driggs, "After the Manifesto: Modern Polygamy and Fundamentalist Mormons," Journal of Church and State 23 (Summer 1990): 38-60. This content downloaded from 104.219.97.8 on Mon, 08 May 2017 19:53:49 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms HISTORY OF MORMON FUNDAMENTALISTS 51 on the Utah-Arizona border had become a recognized center for many of these people. Short Creek has today disappeared from maps but thrives as Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona. This article will refer to the area by its historic name, Short Creek. It will include a discussion of early history, how Short Creek came to affiliate with the Fundamental ist Mormon community, their efforts to establish a modern version of the United Order, criminal prosecutions of its members and other dis ruptions of life by civil authorities, the fracture of the community in the early 1950s over a leadership dispute, and its modern development. The term "Fundamentalist Mormons" was not one of their making. They often refer to themselves as the "Priesthood" or as people in volved with "The Work." Mormons believe they have a divinely re stored priesthood authority and attribute their religious power to that authority. In the late 1800s, they often used the term Priesthood synon ymously with their religious leadership. The term Fundamentalists seems to have come from LDS Church Apostle Mark E. Peterson, an outspoken foe of their efforts.8 The term stuck in the media and Fundamentalists embraced it as their own. In 1991, the religious community at Short Creek incorporated a legal en tity called the Corporation of the President of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.9 It is important to appreciate that Mormon Fundamentalism is not a monolithic group any more than the larger Christian or Islamic com munities are homogenous.10 The Short Creek community is but one part of a much larger and very diverse group. There are sometimes sympathies but no formal ties between Short Creek and any of the other Fundamentalist communities. Other unrelated groups include the recently formed Centennial Park community located near Short Creek and consisting of breakaway members; the Apostolic United Brethren (AUB) headquartered in Bluffdale, Utah, and presided over by Owen Allred; the Davis County Cooperative group founded by Charles W. Kingston in 1943 and still dominated by his family which has "attempted to sever its connections [to Mormon Fundamental 8. Note "An Open Letter To Mark E. Peterson of the Quorum of Twelve," TRUTH, De cember 1944, 169. TRUTH was a monthly magazine published by Fundamentalist Mormons from June 1935 until June 1956. 9. This is a different legal entity from the United Effort Plan Trust discussed below.