Polygamy Tourism

Tony Gutierrez / AP Photo For $69.95, a pair of former Mormon fundamentalists will give you "The Polygamy Experience": a tour of some of America's most isolated and mysterious communities.

For decades, residents of Colorado City, Arizona, practiced polygamy in relative isolation. The town sits about 354 miles northwest of Phoenix, on a red-tinted desert flatland sandwiched between the north rim of the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park in Utah. It was settled in the 1930s by a sect that broke off from the mainstream Mormon church in the late 19th century because church progressives, in hopes of attaining statehood for Utah, had renounced founding prophet Joseph Smith’s revelation that to get to heaven you needed at least three wives.

The tour originates in St. George, and for four hours Holm delivers a spiel that fuses personal narrative with Mormon history and outhouse jokes.

The breakaway polygamous sect called itself the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or FLDS, and thrived in the isolated region. Few outsiders knew or cared about the enclave, but allegations of corruption, welfare fraud, and sexual abuse spurred recent crackdowns and a shower of criminal convictions that have brought unwelcome worldwide attention to the secretive cult.

On Friday, 38-year-old Raymond Jessup, a sect member, was convicted in Texas of sexual assault of one of his wives, an underage girl, who had moved with Jessup from Colorado City to Yearning for Zion Ranch, a new FLDS colony in west Texas. In 2007, the current FLDS prophet, Warren Jeffs, 54, was convicted in Utah of being an accessory to the rape of a 14-year-old "sister wife."

All of this unwanted but very real public attention prompted two brothers who are former members of the FLDS to launch a polygamy tourism business last month.

Heber Holm, a 52-year-old gravelly voiced contractor from nearby St. George Utah, and his brother Richard, a former Colorado City town council member, bought a 29-passenger bus to drive tourists through the secretive town where they grew up. They called the tour the “The Polygamy Experience,” and it costs $69.95 per person. (Discounts apply for kids, oldsters, and groups.) Heber Holm doesn’t know how many people, exactly, have taken the tour, but he shuttles tourists through the polygamous enclave three days a week. The tour originates in St. George, and for four hours Holm delivers a spiel that fuses personal narrative with Mormon history and outhouse jokes. When the bus inches past 15,000-square foot multiwing, multistory locally constructed fenced-in homes, it resembles a Hollywood tour of the stars’ homes. Tourists stop at the local dairy to buy homemade cheese and eat ice cream, walk through historic cemeteries, amble through the park by the creek, where FLDS members hold massive family reunions. (The Arizona Attorney General’s Office estimates 37,000 polygamists live in the mountainous American West, with splinter groups in Mexico and British Columbia. )

Before the return trip to St. George, the final tour stop is lunch at the Merry Wives Café. Members of the so-called Second Ward, a splinter group of about 1,000 polygamists that broke away from the FLDS in the 1980s, operate the cafe. The Second Ward tends to be more welcoming to outsiders than the FLDS. This explains why, so far, Second Warders and a few former members of the cult who doggedly hang on in Colorado City are the only locals who have publicly voiced approval of the tour. The FLDS spokesman, Willie Jessup, did not return several telephone calls seeking comment, and the town mayor, Terrill Johnson, recently had his telephone disconnected.