I nside a health clinic at the base of a craggy mountain on the Arizona- Utah border, May Keate’s phones won’t stop ringing. If the landline isn’t interrupting her, she’s silencing her cell phone to continue a conversation. It’s been like this for the past two months at Hometown Wellness, where Keate is the billing manager. The clinic’s two physi- cians and staffers have been kept busy responding to a growing, border-spanning outbreak of measles, one of the most infec- tious diseases known to man. Hometown Wellness sits in the scenic southern Utah town of Hildale, which hugs the border across from the northern Arizona hamlet of Colorado City. But few who live there make such a distinction. All of this is Short Creek — or “the crick,” if you live there. Fewer than 5,000 people do, many of them treating the twin municipali- ties as a single entity. The Arizona side even follows Utah’s time zone. The border line doesn’t mean much to Creekers, as residents call themselves. It certainly doesn’t mean anything to measles. Since early August, Short Creek has been besieged by measles cases. As of Oct. 15, there have been 73 positive measles cases in Arizona’s Mohave County, almost all of them traced to Colorado City. Another 41 cases have been traced to Hildale on the Utah side, spreading into St. George and Cedar City, both roughly an hour away. Combined with four cases in Arizona’s Navajo County — which, unlike the Colorado City’s numbers, never grew — the Short Creek outbreak is now the biggest Arizona has seen since 1991. It’s been keeping Short Creek’s health workers busy and Keate’s phones buzzing. Her clinic has seen patients of all ages — from children and teenagers to full-grown men — who are in the throes of the disease. First comes the head cold, then a runny nose and fever that can spike to 106 degrees. White spots appear in the mouth and a red rash covers the face, traveling down the rest of the body. Measles weakens the immune system, and Keate says “tons” of patients have contracted pneumonia, forcing them to seek treat- ment at bigger facilities at least a half-hour away. Luckily, no one has died from measles, at least yet. “I get people who have 15 to 20 kids in their family, calling and saying, ‘What should we do? We’re all sick,’” the 55-year- old Keate says, hunched over and exhausted in her cramped office off the clinic’s only hallway. Fifteen to 20 kids is quite the passel of children, a sign that Short Creek isn’t like most places. It’s no coincidence that measles, a disease considered eradicated in the U.S. in 2000, would spread here. For a century, Short Creek has been defined by its association with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or FLDS, a polygamous offshoot of the modern Mormon church. In the early 2000s, Short Creek became infamous because of FLDS leader and “prophet” Warren Jeffs, who exercised cult-like control over church members and married an estimated 78 women — many underage, and one as young as 12. Before he was arrested in Nevada in 2006, Jeffs occupied a spot on the FBI’s most-wanted list. The 69-year-old Jeffs has been serving a prison term in Texas since 2011, and much has changed in Short Creek without him. Many who left the church and Short Creek to escape Jeffs — including Keate — returned to the area once he was behind bars. Short Creek now has more former FLDS members, or apostates, than current members. The area is still full of dirt roads, extra-large unfinished homes and occa- sional livestock, as it was during Jeffs’ reign. Meanwhile townhouses, modern new builds, breweries, glamping sites and drive-thru coffee shops have also popped up. With each passing day, the shadow of Warren Jeffs fades ever so slightly. But Jeffs’ influence is far from gone. It lingers in the repurposed church buildings, including Jeffs’ former home. You can see it in the large families, many of whom share the same last name. And, as measles has thoroughly exposed, it’s there in Short Creek’s low vaccination rates — a result of Jeffs’ distrust of outside medical profes- sionals and, in turn, Creekers’ post-Jeffs suspicion of anyone trying to exert control over their lives. Nearly everyone who has tested positive for measles was unvacci- nated. Even in a small town, there’s plenty of territory for measles to conquer. Right now, the spread of the disease doesn’t figure to slow until either “everybody’s got it or everybody’s immunized,” Keate said. In a town that has labored to move past the dark days of Warren Jeffs, leave it to measles to bring the not-so-distant past crashing, rash-covered and running a fever, into the present. ‘HUNTING RABBITS WITH AN ELEPHANT GUN’ The history of Short Creek, and its resi- dents’ wariness of the government, goes back to 1887 — decades before Colorado City was founded. That year, in an effort to crack down on the Mormon practice of plural marriage, Congress passed the Edmunds-Tucker Act, which disincorporated the Mormon church and seized its assets. Three years later, then-LDS President Wilford Woodruff signed a manifesto eliminating the practice of plural marriage within the Mormon church. “The end of plural marriage required great faith and some- times complicated, painful — and intensely personal — decisions on the part of indi- vidual members and Church leaders,” reads the LDS church website. For some, that decision meant abandoning the church, and landing in Short Creek. Mormon fundamentalist sects, including the FLDS, believed the church “abandoned one of the religion’s most crucial theological tenets for the sake of political expediency by doing away with polygamy,” author Jon Krakauer wrote in his book “Under the Banner of Heaven.” “These present-day polygamists therefore consider themselves to be the keepers of the flame — the only true and righteous Mormons.” Colorado City was founded in 1913 by the Council of Friends, a funda- mentalist Mormon group, and Short Creek sprang to life in the 1920s as polygamist members moved to the area. If the law came, residents could jump from one side of the Arizona-Utah border to the other to avoid arrest. The law finally caught up in 1953, culminating in a raid that still reverberates in Short Creek today. Just before dawn on a July morning, more than 100 Arizona law enforcement agents descended into town in an effort by Arizona Gov. Howard Pyle to eliminate the practice of polygamy from the state. Tipped off about the raid, more than 400 FLDS residents met the agents with a reli- gious hymn. Agents arrested and jailed the men in Kingman, while most of the women were sent away to Phoenix. More than 160 children from the polygamous families were taken away by law enforcement and placed into state custody, some to never return to their parents. Frank Pierson, a reporter for Life magazine who witnessed the raid, described the force brought down on Short Creek as being “like hunting rabbits with an elephant gun.” The raid, and the images of children being torn from their families, caused tremendous blowback for Pyle, who lost his reelection bid a year later. Its effects on Short Creek have been longer-lasting. One
