Wyoming State Law Library

Fleeing a difficult past, John Shefford heads out from Illinois, lured west only by a legend of three people living in Utah's isolated Surprise Valley, one of whom is Fay Larkin, a young woman whom John has never met but is already half in love with. He is unprepared for--and captivated by--the high desert landscape of Arizona, its people, and how it will shape his life...

Shes never met the other wives. None of them know each other, and because of this unconventional arrangement, she can see her husband only one day a week. But she loves him so much she doesn't care. Or at least that's what she told herself. But one day, while she's doing laundry, she finds a scrap of paper in his pocket, an appointment reminder for a woman named Hannah, and she knows it's another of the wives. She thought she was fine with her arrangement,...

Private investigator Sam Brower recounts his investigation of Warren Jeffs, leader of the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, also known as FLDS.

Irene Spencer did as she felt God
commanded in marrying her
brother-in-law Verlan LeBaron, becoming
his second wife. When the
government raided the fundamentalist, polygamous
Mormon village of Short Creek, Arizona,
Irene and her family fled to
Verlan's brothers' Mexican ranch.
They lived in squalor and desolate
conditions in the Mexican desert
with Verlan's six brothers, one sister,
and numerous...

At 18, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger, 32 years her senior, who already had three wives. Arranged plural marriages were part of her heritage in the radical offshoot of the Mormon Church that had settled along the Arizona-Utah border. Over the next fifteen years, Carolyn had eight children and withstood her husband's psychological abuse and the watchful eyes of his other wives. Her every move was dictated...

"RUTH WARINER was the thirty-ninth of her father's forty-two children. Growing up on a farm in rural Mexico, where authorities turn a blind eye to the practices of her community, Ruth lives in a ramshackle house without indoor plumbing or electricity. At church, preachers teach that God will punish the wicked by destroying the world and that women can only ascend to Heaven by entering into polygamous marriages and giving birth to as many children...

"For the past twenty years, Bronson Powers, former Hollywood stuntman and converted Mormon, has been homesteading deep in the uninhabited desert outside Joshua Tree with his three wives and ten children. Bronson and his wives, Yalulah, Mary, and Jackie, have been raising their family away from the corruption and evil of the modern world. Their insular existence - controversial, difficult, but Edenic - is upended when the ambitious young developer...

Mormon elders in the town of Cottonwoods pressure the widow Jane Withersteen to remarry so that her lands and herds will remain in their control. Gradually they frighten away most of her cowboys, and rustlers steal away her cattle, but the gunfighter Lassiter stands by her as the inevitable confrontation draws near.

In the inhospitable lands of the Utah Territory, during the winter of 1888, thirty-seven-year-old Deborah Tyler waits for her husband, Samuel, to return home from his travels as a wheelwright. It is now the depths of winter, Samuel is weeks overdue, and Deborah is getting worried. Deborah lives in Junction, a tiny town of seven Mormon families scattered along the floor of a canyon, and she earns her living by tending orchards and making work gloves....

"Irene Spencer tells the full story of her brother-in-law Ervil LeBaron and his unimaginable reign of terror and violence in their polygamist community"--Provided by the publisher