Travel

Fear & Loathing on the Polygamy Trail

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Few assignments fill me with dread.

Well, there was that tortuous helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon. And tracking down relatives of the dead after the Delta 191 crash at the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport in 1985. And interviewing William “The Refrigerator” Perry—naked (he was; I was fully clothed)—in the locker room after the 1981 Clemson/South Carolina game. But the boss has decided we need a polygamy road trip story—from Vegas to Colorado City—and I’m the lucky winner.

The dread comes early. How does one write a witty travel/historical piece on polygamy and not come across as slamming the Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS)? I try to be respectful of all religions. I have Mormon friends. And the LDS denounced the practice of taking plural wives a little over a century ago.

The dread continues in Las Vegas. I just don’t have that Vegas gene. Ching-ching-ching does nothing for me. Nor does the drive north to Mesquite.

“This view,” writer Max McCoy once told me in Mesquite, “makes me want to mess someone up.” Well, Max didn’t say mess.

If this wretched desert scenery can make a nice guy like Max want to do bodily harm on innocent victims, imagine what effect it could have on longtime residents.

I bring up Mesquite because it was in a bar here that a drop-dead gorgeous woman flashed me her breasts. I did not ask her to do this. I did not pay her to do this. She just did it. The act did not offend me. It did irritate a nearby Mormon, but I don’t think he was a polygamist. (For the record, I retired to my room alone.)

More dread at Mountain Meadows, just across the Utah border. Mountain Meadows is on the Polygamy Trail because of John D. Lee. On September 11, 1857, Lee led an attack on a wagon train of Arkansas pioneers. Approximately 140 men, women and children were slaughtered; 17 children under age eight were spared, adopted into Mormon families.

With two wives, Lee settled along the Colorado River in Arizona until he was captured, tried and executed in 1877. Lee is buried in Pangquitch, north of Bryce Canyon.

The land here doesn’t make you want to mess anyone up. No, this is God’s country. Bryce Canyon. Zion. Cedar Breaks.

Scenery about as awesome as those breasts the woman in Mesquite unveiled. No, wait. I didn’t see those. Yeah, I averted my eyes.

So the trail leads to Lee territory—Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona—spectacular, overwhelming, a land I would love if not for that dread.

Long before the LDS put a stop to polygamy in 1890 and officially banned it in 1904, the “Arizona Strip” had become a refuge. In 1886, LDS President John Taylor said that God told him to keep polygamy going. As a result, Colorado City, first called Short Creek, became a stronghold for these not-so-secret polygamists, whom the LDS excommunicated in 1935.

Anything goes in Vegas? Mesquite? No, Colorado City tops everything.

Zealots founded their own sect, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), which continues today in Colorado City. Leaders have been arrested, and Arizona’s governor even sent in troops in 1953 after reports of abuses. Yet, the FLDS remains strong.

Colorado City is quiet when I pass through. Hardly a soul in sight, and I don’t think they’ve gathered to watch HBO’s Big Love.

I think about stopping, but I have this urge to drive back to a certain bar in Mesquite.

Road warrior Johnny D. Boggs recommends the Bouchon Restaurant at the Venetian in Las Vegas and the Casa Blanca Resort in Mesquite.