Colorado City information

Colorado City is a town in Mohave County, Arizona, United States and is located in a region known as the Arizona Strip. According to 2006 Census Bureau estimates, the population of the town is 4,607. At least three Mormon fundamentalist sects are said to have been based there.
Colorado City, formerly known as Short Creek (or the Short Creek Community), was founded in 1913 by members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a breakaway sect of the Salt Lake City-based The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The FLDS membership desired a remote location to perpetuate the practice of polygamy that the mainstream church abandoned by public pronouncement in 1890. On July 26, 1953, Arizona Governor John Howard Pyle sent troops into the settlement to stop polygamy in what became known as the Short Creek raid. The two-year legal battle that followed became a public relations disaster that doomed Pyle's political career and set a hands-off tone toward the town in Arizona for the next fifty years.
In January of 2004, the local religious leader, Warren Jeffs, expelled a group of twenty men, including the mayor, and "gave" their wives and children to other men. Jeffs stated he was acting on the orders of God, while the men expelled claimed they were penalized for disagreeing with Jeffs. Observers state this is the most severe split to date within the community.
According to the Utah attorney general's office, this was not the first time Jeffs was accused for expelling men from the community; as many as four-hundred young men are estimated to have been expelled by Jeffs from 2001-2006. Most were removed for failing to follow Jeffs' rules, or for dating women without his permission. While these are given as official excuses, the expulsions are undertaken in order to maintain the gender imbalance necessary to facilitate the practice of plural marriage. These expelled men and boys, many very naïve and sheltered, often wound up homeless and using drugs in nearby towns such as Hurricane, Utah. Most of the property in the town is owned by the United Effort Plan, the financial arm of the FLDS. (...) more....

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