Way up in the northwest corner of Arizona sits a tiny town with a somewhat confusing name: Colorado City. Even more confusing, the town is so close to the border, all you have to do is basically cross the street, and you’re in Utah.
When you do that, the name of the town switches, too, to Hildale. Together, the two towns are sometimes referred to as Short Creek, and they’re united by a tormented history. The community was home to the extremist FLDS religious sect ruled by Warren Jeffs, who’s currently serving a life sentence in prison for his role in the systematic sexual assault of many of the women in Short Creek.
In Short Creek, the residents are trying, in various ways, to move on from the horrors of the Jeffs era. In some cases, that means rebranding the town as a tourist destination.
Craig Outhier, Phoenix Magazine editor, visited the region recently to profile some of the people who are part of that effort and joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
CRAIG OUTHIER: Shane was a hairdresser. He and his wife owned a bunch of salons in neighboring St. George. He found this land. It was owned by Warren Jeffs, who, apparently, among his many other paradoxes, enjoyed making wine.
SAM DINGMAN: Which to be clear, he did not approve of his flock consuming.
OUTHIER: Yeah, that's interesting, too. Apparently, alcohol wasn't as verboten as it is in mainstream Mormonism.
DINGMAN: Oh, OK.
OUTHIER: But he did it on the sly, behind this compound and these walls made wine. So, Shane, he saw that it was vineyards. The real estate agent who showed it to him didn't know what they were. He's like, "Ooh, this is fun." You know, picked some grapes, analyzed them, found out what he had there in terms of varietals, and started making, learning, teaching himself wine, natural wine making.
DINGMAN: That’s gotta be a one in a million shot for a real estate transaction, where you're standing there, and then this, basically, garden has been marketed to you as like, you could probably pick this up for pretty cheap, right? And you're standing there and you realize you're standing on a potential gold mine.
OUTHIER: Yeah, right. Again, a lifestyle change. You know, that's what they do now. They own a cool little Airbnb on site, It's an event space. They have weddings. They built a really beautiful tasting room. I mean, the place is lovely, and I think, really emblematic of what's happening in Colorado City, in Hildale, it's very different.
DINGMAN: Can I ask you, you brought up the walls and fences a moment ago, can you talk a little bit more about what those look like? Because people might be imagining just like, you know, fences, like you would see around a yard, but that's not what we're talking about.
OUTHIER: No, we're talking about, in some cases, 10 foot concrete walls that you might imagine surrounded a compound that say, Osama bin Laden holed away in, in Pakistan. I mean, these are designed to keep people in and out. [Hildale Mayor Donia Jessop] told me that a lot of them were torn down and that it's much better than it was before. And she made the point that a lot of the fences and walls were added during the height of media attention, not to keep, you know, pluralistic wives or girls in but really to keep prying eyes away because they didn't feel like they had any privacy.
DINGMAN: Let's talk about Mayor Jessop for a moment, because she's a pretty fascinating figure, and she plays a big role in your piece. She's somebody who had to deal with some of the harshest realities of the Jeffs', I'm going to use the word regime.
OUTHIER: Yeah, sure, might as well.
DINGMAN: Maybe that's too tame of a word.
OUTHIER: Yeah, right.
DINGMAN: And yet, loved the place so much that, you know, she came back, and now she's the mayor, and she has a pretty interesting relationship with the place's past. This sort of live and let live, right? Is that a fair way of characterizing it?
OUTHIER: I mean, she doesn't want to demonize people in town who are kind of trying to capitalize off of the history. I mean, there is sort of a true crime tour energy going on there with, you know, there's a, there's an Airbnb that is situated in the compound that the residents built for Warren Jeffs, someone took it over, and they turned it into a nice hotel. You know, Zion's Most Wanted, they call it.
DINGMAN: Right, because Jeff's referred to himself as the most wanted man in Utah, or something.
OUTHIER: Exactly. So she, you know, she doesn't like that. She wants to look forward. She wants to, you know, when she's rebranding this place. She wants to talk about the beauty of it, and the love and the commitment of the residents to each other, not necessarily the past.
DINGMAN: I was sort of alluding to the fact that Donia had dealt with some of the worst parts of the Jeffs' time controlling the area. What did that look like for her?
OUTHIER: Well, she was a part of a prominent family there. She and her husband got married without the blessing, official blessing of the leaders of the church. I think she was one of the most vocal dissidents, and eventually she and her family were all excommunicated.
But even that wasn't clean, like they tried to keep one of her daughters. I mean, disgusting, but it didn't take long after she left for the state to step in. And she did come back, and she's part of a new wave of returnees. I mean, it really is like the biblical Zion, where you have this, you know, this diaspora, and now they're all coming back.
DINGMAN: Yeah, I mean, that's got to be a really fascinating headspace to be in. To have been cast out of this place that you think of as your home, and now to come back, and as you were alluding to earlier, be an instrumental part of trying to look ahead.
Another person who seems to be living that journey is Shem Fischer, whose home was basically commandeered by the Jeffs family.
OUTHIER: Yeah, well, that's the way. Tenant at will in quotation marks, I believe, is the legal mechanism you can use to evict someone from their own home when the entire town is owned in trust by a single entity, the church. So he was one of roughly 40 children, tons of kids. His father was a vowed polygamist who moved from Salt Lake with the family, raised the whole brood.
And, you know, Shem was not a polygamist. He didn't really care for that. He was always sort of an outsider, and had a prosperous company that he ran with his father, who he loved and admired; he just didn't, you know, emulate him on that level in terms of marrying multiple women. They ran a cabinet shop, very prosperous, but when Jeffs took over and told all of the residents that they couldn't hire or work with apostates, a lot of those people were his employees and friends, he objected to that.
He thought it was religiously discriminating on a lot of levels. He just found it abhorrent. And then he was excommunicated and banished. And they took his, this essentially a mansion, really, and Jeffs' brother lived in it. And so when finally the state stepped in and they reclaimed all this property, he was, of course, first in line to get his home back. He did. He put a lot more money into it. They kind of trashed the place, and now he runs it as an awesome guest lodge, you know, with the five beers on tap, great little breakfast kitchen.
DINGMAN: Well, and one of the other little details from that standpoint, that was really interesting to me is I didn't realize that Utah, I guess, has a limit on the percentage of alcohol in beverages.
OUTHIER: In beers, specifically, beers on tap, 5%. I just got back from Utah, so I'm well versed now in this odd little law they have.
DINGMAN: Well, as I understand it, in Colorado City, they're at least one of the breweries there. They're like, well, we're making pretty strong IPAs here.
OUTHIER: Colorado City is on the Arizona side so not bound by that particular law. And apparently, this is Ray Hammon, his name, he's the brewer at Edge of the World, and he apparently gets a lot of business from across state lines, because a lot of Utahans who love beer can't get the, you know, the more potent stuff on tap, so they come across and visit him.
DINGMAN: And we should say, for people who haven't been there. You can walk across the state line.
OUTHIER: Oh yeah, I mean, the line itself is just a street.
DINGMAN: One thing I want to make sure we don't leave out here, Craig, are there still any FLDS folks living in Short Creek.
OUTHIER: Certainly, and I talked to Mayor Jessop, and she says, I would say maybe one in 200 people on the street now that you see walking the roads are wearing the uniform. You know, those traditional sort of prairie dresses. And she says that doesn't necessarily mean that one in 200 people are in the church. They could just be not dressing that way now. But they don't have a way, she says there's no census that they can refer to. She just knows anecdotally that a lot of people left town.
DINGMAN: Yeah, I mean, I have to imagine, for Mayor Jessop in particular, and also Shem Fischer and some of these other folks that we've been talking about, that's got to be a really remarkable thing. To know that this place where they were once the one in 200, the apostates sure to speak, they're now the ones running things.
OUTHIER: Yeah, it's reversal of fortune, a real unique Arizona story.
