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forests begin. To the south there is the Grand Canyon.
    It is in this most isolated of all Arizona communities that this foulest of conspiracies has flourished and expanded in a terrifying geometric progression. Here has been a community entirely dedicated to the warped philosophy that a small handful of greedy and licentious men should have the right and the power to control the destiny of every human soul in the community.
    Here is a community—many of the women, sadly, right along with the men—unalterably dedicated to the wicked theory that every maturing girl child should be forced into the bondage of multiple wifehood with men of all ages for the sole purpose of producing more children to be reared to become more chattels of this totally lawless enterprise.
    One day after the raid, the Deseret News, a daily newspaper owned by the LDS Church, editorialized in support of the action: “Utah and Arizona owe a debt of gratitude to Arizona’s Howard Pyle… we hope the unfortunate activities at Short Creek will be cleaned up once and for all.”
    The raid made national headlines; it was even reported on the front page of the New York Times, with the same prominence given to a story announcing the armistice ending the Korean War. But to the dismay of the LDS leadership, most of the press presented the polygamists in a favorable light. Photographs of crying children being torn from their mothers’ arms generated sympathy throughout the nation for the fundamentalists, who protested that they were upstanding, law-abiding Mormons simply trying to exercise their constitutionally protected freedoms.
    The raid was widely perceived as religious persecution by overly zealous government agencies, and it sparked a great outcry in support of the polygamists. The Arizona Republic, for example, criticized the action as “a misuse of public funds.” In 1954, Governor Pyle was voted out of office, thanks largely to the raid and the egg it left on his face. The arrests and subsequent trials cost taxpayers $600,000, yet by 1956 all the polygamists who had been arrested were out of jail and reunited with their families in Short Creek. Members of the UEP unapologetically resumed living the Principle as taught by Joseph Smith, and the population of the town continued to more than double each decade— a consequence of the community’s giant families and astronomical birth rate.
    Paradoxically, the Short Creek raid proved to be a huge boon to the FLDS Church. Thanks to the backlash that followed the raid, for most of the next half century fundamentalists were able to practice polygamy throughout the Intermountain West with little state interference—until May 1998, when a battered and bruised teenage girl dialed 911 from a pay phone at a truck stop in northern Utah.
    The girl reported to the police that immediately after her sixteenth birthday, her father, a businessman named John Kingston, had pulled her out of high school and forced her to become the fifteenth wife of his brother, David Kingston—the girl’s thirty-two-year-old uncle. Both Kingston brothers are among fifteen hundred members of the so-called Kingston Clan, a Mormon Fundamentalist sect based in Salt Lake County, officially known as the Latter Day Church of Christ, led by patriarch Paul Kingston, a lawyer who is married to at least twenty-five women and has sired some two hundred offspring.
    Twice the girl tried to run away from David, but she was caught each time. After the second escape, she sought refuge with her mother— who promptly turned the girl over to her father. John Kingston then drove her to a remote ranch near the Utah-Idaho border that the Kingstons used as a “reeducation camp” for wayward wives and disobedient children. He took the girl into a barn, pulled his belt off, and used it to whip her savagely across the buttocks, thighs, and lower back, inflicting hideous injuries. The girl later told a judge that before the beating began, her father warned