of the children taken by the state was the mother of Howard Ream, who now serves as Colorado City’s first ex-FLDS mayor. Leaning back in his chair in a conference room at Colorado City’s small town hall, Ream calmly recounts how Arizona “incar- cerated our moms.” In his late 50s, Ream was not alive for the raid, but he says it’s left deep scars and a “baseline fear” in Short Creek families “that the government doesn’t have our best interest” at heart. “When the government says, ‘Hi, we’re here from the government. We’re here to help you,’ people are skeptical,” Ream says. After the public relations disaster of the 1953 raid, Short Creek remained unboth- ered for more than 50 years. In that time, the FLDS became the dominant fundamen- talist group in the area. In 1998, Rulon Jeffs — the fifth FLDS president and “prophet” — claimed to have received a revelation that Salt Lake City would be destroyed during the 2002 Winter Olympics. He ordered all FLDS members to sell their homes, donate the money to the church’s trust, the United Effort Plan, and move to Short Creek. The population ballooned: Colorado City grew from 2,426 people in 1990 to 3,334 in 2000, a jump of 37%. That same year he ordered FLDS members to Short Creek, Rulon Jeffs suffered a stroke. The reign of his infamous son, Warren Jeffs, began. VACCINATED ‘TO A POINT’ It’s an early October evening on the Utah side of Short Creek, and the Water Canyon High School gym echoes with cheers and the sounds of a volleyball being smacked back and forth. Metal stairs clang as students run up steps, popcorn in hand, to hang with friends. Others sit by their teachers for help with math homework. It’s senior night, and four players are honored with flowers. The boyfriend of one surprises her by asking her to Saturday’s homecoming dance. There’s little outward sign that school is in the midst of a measles outbreak. Measles is almost assuredly here, though. According to the Utah Department of Health and Human Services, Water Canyon’s roughly 350 students could have been exposed to measles at the school in early September and again later in the month. Only 80% of students have been vaccinated against measles — 95% is required for herd immunity — meaning measles has ample room to spread. The volleyball game is happening while the school is still on measles symptom watch. The school, which can be seen from the front door of the Hometown Wellness clinic, has been trying hard to keep sick or unvaccinated students home amid the outbreak. Some students have remained home for nearly three months. Before returning to school, students who contracted measles must wait 21 days from when the last person in their home tested positive before coming back. Many Short Creek homes have a lot of children, though, and some families are waiting only a week before sending their kids back to school. One of these positive cases was a boy dating the daughter of Hildale’s mayor, Donia Jessop. He got “really sick,” Jessop says, but “he’s doing good now.” Other Short Creek schools are worse protected. Only 40% of students at Colorado City’s high school are vaccinated. At the area’s charter school, only 7.7% of students have received the measles- mumps-rubella vaccine. “There are a lot of people that don’t do immunizations,” Keate says of Short Creek residents. “At all.” The outbreak has led more families to seek out the vaccine, but the attitude toward vaccination in Short Creek is gener- ally ambivalent. Before the school year started, Keate took her 16-year-old son, who attends Water Canyon, to the Mohave County nursing station to receive his second dose of the MMR vaccine, and she’s “relieved” she did. Ruby Jessop, a waitress at the Blue Agave restaurant in Colorado City and a former FLDS member — there are a lot of Jessops in Short Creek — got her kids vaccinated “to a point,” but she isn’t “too terribly worried” about the outbreak. “As a parent, you’re like, I’ve been through a lot. That’s why I have an immune system,” Ruby Jessop says. “I swallowed so much dirt. I drink from the tap. I bet I swal- lowed some tadpoles.” THE RISE AND FALL OF WARREN JEFFS On a warm fall afternoon in 2002, more than 5,000 FLDS members filed into Short Creek’s large meeting house. Men wore their Sunday best. Women and girls donned long pastel dresses and wore their hair in immaculate braids that flowed down to their hips. They were there for the funeral of Rulon Jeffs, known affec- tionately among church members as “Uncle Rulon.” It also marked an effective coronation for Warren Jeffs. Warren Jeffs had “long functioned as prophet in anything but name,” as Krakauer wrote in his book, but now he was getting ready to officially take over the title. A thin man at 6-foot-3, with a slender face framed by wide-brimmed glasses and bulging Adam’s apple, Jeffs had “no love for the people,” one of his older siblings told Krakauer. “His method for controlling them is to inspire fear and dread. My brother preaches that you must be perfect in your obedience. You must have the spirit 24 hours a day, seven days a week, or you’ll be cut off and go to hell.” Warren imposed that obedience harshly and quickly. He ordered all FLDS children to be taken out of public school in Short Creek. Women were required to ditch their denim and patterned clothing and wear only long dresses with long underwear underneath. Jeffs declared that FLDS members weren’t allowed to wear red — the color belonged to Jesus, he said — watch gentile books or movies or speak to anyone who had left the church. Some didn’t leave by choice. Jeffs broke up families by kicking out fathers from the community and giving their wives and chil- dren to another family. In 2004, he stood up in the meeting house and publicly expelled 21 of the community’s highest- ranking men, labeling them “master deceivers.” The same fate often befell other young men in the community. When men can marry scores of wives, “too many boys” can sometimes be a problem. Jeffs exerted a similar control over the health of his followers. He eliminated in-town health care clinics and forbade vaccines. He stopped sending members of the community to college, meaning no Creekers returned with medical degrees. If someone got sick, Jeffs insisted it was because they’d let in a “bad spirit,” says Short Creek resident Briell Decker, who was formerly Jeffs’ 65th wife. Members were ordered to not vaccinate their children. The only way for Creekers to get health care and vaccines was to go against the word of the prophet and leave Short Creek. Few risked Jeffs’ ire by doing so, Decker says, at least over vaccines. Natural or herbal medicine has long been preferred and practiced by many members of the community, so people “just accepted” the order to stop vaccinating their children. “Maybe it’s another power-control thing,” says Keate, who heeded Jeffs’ instructions about vaccines at the time. “I don’t know why, but he just said not to do it anymore.” The five wives and some of the children of Richard Jessop, one of the men arrested when police entered the tiny Mormon community of Short Creek to stamp out polygamy in 1953. (Joern Gerdts/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Colorado City Mayor Howard Ream. (Morgan Fischer) Water Canyon High School in Hildale, Utah. (Morgan Fischer) >> p 18
