What will today mean for the FLDS?
 
By Tom Vaughan
The Mancos Times
 
Today is the 175th anniversary of the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On this day in 1830, six men met in the Seneca County, N.Y., home of Peter Whitmer and formed what they at first called the "Church of Christ." Those men were Oliver Cowdery, Hyrum Smith, Joseph Smith, Samuel H. Smith, David Whitmer and Peter Whitmer.

The LDS faith has persevered, adapted, fragmented and spread to become a significant denomination in the United States and worldwide. The founding date is significant to all branches that trace lineage to that 1830 meeting, but that may be all some of them have in common.

In particular, after the LDS church officially stopped performing plural marriages in 1890 and banned the practice in 1904, there have been numerous groups, some as small as a single family, that have continued to be polygamists. One of those groups, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has grown to an estimated 10,000 adherents, give or take a few thousand.

The uncertainty as to the true size of the FLDS is a function both of the secrecy surrounding the sect’s activities and membership and the proclivity of its authoritarian leader, Warren Jeffs, to expel people from the group. Those two factors have also focused the attention of media and law enforcement today on the little town of Eldorado, in Schleicher County, Texas.

There, the question is what, if anything, will happen on this date at a nearby 1,691-acre spread where Jeffs is thought to be hiding to evade lawsuits in Utah. While some have spread fears of apocalyptic tragedy, a la David Koresh at Waco and Jim Jones in Guyana, Schleicher County Sheriff David Doran has expressed skepticism that today will bring anything more than an FLDS celebration of the 1830 founding event.

Today may also mark a milestone in an 18-month-long episode of feverish construction at the FLDS property, known as the YFZ Ranch. In addition to more than a dozen large wood-frame buildings that have been constructed during this period — some of which resemble small motels but are probably single-family residences — the group appears to have completed at least the outside of a limestone temple. As shown in pictures on the Eldorado Success Web site (www.myeldorado.net), the temple is a massive, three-story rectangle with truncated towers at each corner, giving it the look of a medieval fortress. The foundation was the focus of a ceremony on New Year’s Day, over which the reclusive Jeffs is thought to have presided, and a disproportionately small cupola was being completed on the roof at the end of March.

Construction has already begun on other buildings, so today is not likely to end the expansion of the YFZ facility. This gives support to Doran’s assessment that such an investment of labor and money is not likely to be ended in some self-destructive event.

Mancos connection still unclear

Nonetheless, the event brings more unwanted attention to this reclusive group, and the Mancos Valley continues to occupy a place at the edge of the spotlight. Jeffs’ son-in-law, David Allred, who purchased the YFZ property in late 2003 for a "hunting ranch," had just a few months earlier purchased 60 acres at the end of CR 39 for a "hunting retreat." That property was quickly expanded, through round-the-clock construction, from a two-bedroom, two-bath house with a barn to four buildings that now house 16 bedrooms and 16 baths.

When the Mancos purchase was linked to the FLDS in the fall of 2004, intense speculation focused on the Mancos site as a possible hideout for Jeffs, who is a nonresponding defendant in two state and one federal civil suits in Utah. There was also speculation that the Mancos Valley site was being used to hide 94-year-old "Uncle" Fred Jessop, an FLDS leader and possible competitor to Jeffs’ one-man rule.

Jessop, who had not been seen in public since December 2003, reportedly died of congestive heart failure March 15 in a hospital south of Denver, entering the facility five days earlier. Those trying to track his whereabouts in the intervening 15 months, including Jon Krakauer, author of Under the Banner of Heaven, have still not ruled out a stay in the woods north of Mancos.

The role of the the Mancos Valley properties in Warren Jeffs’ plans remains unknown. Allred, through Sherwood Management Group, Inc., a Mesquite, Nev., firm doing business out of a post office box, purchased another 60-acre tract near, but not adjacent to, the first property in October 2004. While a dumpster indicates some evidence of remodeling work at that site, there has been no evidence of activity beyond a caretaker at either location through the winter.

Regardless of what happens today in Schleicher County, Texas, Warren Jeffs faces more and more legal pressure in Utah and Texas. A Texas state legislator has introduced a bill to ban plural marriages and marriages between step-parents and step-children. Attorneys in the two state civil suits in Utah have asked the courts to seize the multi-million dollar assets of the United Effort Plan, which holds FLDS properties in trust for the members, and appoint a receiver and a new board of trustees to prevent the assets from being looted by Jeffs. Neither the Texas property nor the Mancos Valley properties were acquired in the name of the UEP.

There is no evidence of criminal activity in association with the Colorado properties, so the Montezuma County Sheriff’s Office has adopted a wait-and-see position, maintaining contact with Doran’s office and the Washington County, Utah, authorities. Sheriff’s Lt. Steve Harmon confirmed to The Mancos Times last week that there was nothing active on the local scene.

Locals may, however, see media representatives in town again soon. The Times recently received another call from a Rocky Mountain News reporter who has written about the local FLDS purchases before and who indicated she is planning a bigger story that includes the Texas compound. A KUSA-TV (Denver channel 9) reporter called the editor Friday, gathering information for an upcoming visit to Mancos as part of a story on the FLDS.

(Ed. Note: To respect the privacy of our neighbors, it is the Times’ policy not to suggest people for outside media to contact on this story. If asked who occupies a specific public position, we will, of course, provide that public information. We also make a point of mentioning to outside media that folks in the Mancos Valley would rather be known for Luther Elliss or the Mancos Mush than for the fact that the FLDS bought land here. Our invitation to have a conversation with David Allred or any other FLDS representative remains open.)
 
The Mancos Times
Originally published April 6, 2005
 
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