The Great Love-Nest Raid

The Mormon Church outlawed polygamy 63 years ago, but tiny outlaw cults, defiantly devoted to plural marriage, have gone on springing up in out-of-the-way corners of the Southwest ever since. Back in the '30s half a dozen renegade Mormon fundamentalists and their women trekked into one of the wildest and loneliest areas left in the U.S.--the unpoliced, almost uninhabited strip of tumbled, gorge-cut Arizona desert north of the Grand Canyon. They settled there at the little shack town of Short Creek, beneath high red cliffs named the Towers of Tummurru.

By 1942, the colony was formally organized as the United Effort, a communal settlement in which all wages, earnings and food were pooled. The FBI raided it in 1944 and made several arrests. But the colony kept growing; its population reached 36 men, 86 women and 263 children.

A White-Slave Factory? Two years ago the State of Arizona began casting about for a means of stamping out the cultists, their town and their way of life. Last year the legislature appropriated a $50,000 emergency fund to be used in the project, and State Attorney General Ross F. Jones began planning a grandiose attack. Secret agents, some disguised as movie scouts, drifted into Short' Creek. Last month the great "Love-nest raid" began to shape up in all its wondrous detail.

Arizona's Governor Howard Pyle declared that the colonists were in a "state of insurrection." Authorities alerted newspapers and press services weeks ahead of time. "This is a white-slave factory," an assistant attorney general announced. "No woman has escaped this community for at least ten years. They are forced to submit to men old enough to be their grandfathers." Warrants charging 122 adults with conspiracy to commit such crimes as polygamy, rape, bigamy and misappropriation of school funds were carefully drawn up.

Ten Million in Publicity. This week, with the ponderous secrecy of an elephant sneaking across a skating rink, the great invasion began. Sixty state troopers were assembled at the town of Williams, Ariz, (ostensibly to attend a police school). They were joined by 30 deputy sheriffs, twelve liquor inspectors, five police matrons, six welfare workers, three judges, the attorney general and three assistants, and squads of reporters and cameramen. They set out in two motorized caravans. One string of cars swung into Nevada and Utah to approach from the north; the other cut across the Arizona strip to hit Short Creek from the east. An eclipse of the moon cloaked their movements. But as it turned out, the Short Creekers knew all about the raid, and had stationed boys along the road to shoot off dynamite and thus announce its arrival.

When the police forces drove into town at dawn, sirens moaning, red lights revolving and pistols at the ready, the colonists, including whiskery Elder Joseph Jessop and his two 21-year-old sons, George and Tom, were drawn up in the school yard in their Sunday best, singing America and politely waiting to be arrested. Said one Short Creek leader: "This raid will give us $10 million worth of publicity." The governor hoped that most of the men would not only get prison terms but fines, which might enable the state to attach their property and raze the town. But polygamists are difficult to convict. Perhaps the Short Creek colony was finished, or perhaps it had just been given a big shot in the arm.

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