Blog

Roundtable

• Josh Garrett-Davis

  Landscapes of Zion

  Tags:

  mormons,

  National Geographic,

  polygamy,

  religion,

  Utah,

  Zion

  Tweet

  

  You can't dig very far into the writings on the "New West" without coming upon the idea that the region has yet to "create a society to match the scenery"—as Wallace Stegner suggests—something grandly social rather than ruggedly individual. You might expect this to mean a typically "progressive" society, but look again at the Western landscape. It's haunting, stark, full of anachronistic hoodoos and mineral monuments that refuse to erode as all the neighboring rocks do. Northern Arizona and southern Utah are particularly weird and isolated. The February issue of National Geographic features a society that matches the scenery of the American outback perhaps better than an ashram full of mountain-bikers: the polygamist Mormons of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (see The Doctrine and Covenants 132:61-62).

  Stephanie Sinclair's photographs show the FLDS in their native habitat, both the wild red-reef-and-sagebrush country and the deseret (that is, honeybee) order of Colorado City, Arizona. Wallace Stegner, the Dean of Western Writers, considered the Mormons to be archetypal Westerners, farther along than most in matching society to scenery. Stegner's first nonfiction book, Mormon Country (1942), is a beautiful narrative history and reportage with a kind eye for Mormonism's socialist aspects and a gimlet one for its authoritarian tendencies. He devotes one chapter to Orderville, Utah, a village that in the 1870s and 1880s created an LDS socialist utopia (including plural "celestial marriage").

  The National Geographic article traces the vestiges of this cooperation:

  [The] communal spirit continues inside the polygamous home. Although living arrangements vary—wives may occupy different wings of a house or have their own granny cottages—the women tend to carve out spheres of influence according to preference or aptitude. Although each has primary responsibility for her own children, one wife might manage the kitchen, a second act as schoolteacher (virtually all FLDS children in Hildale and Colorado City are home-schooled), and a third see to the sewing. Along with instilling a sense of sorority, this division of labor appears to mitigate jealousy.

  Another chapter in Stegner's book is a history of polygamy at Short Creek, adjacent to Colorado City, which seventy years ago had some of the same family surnames still in use today. This part of Arizona is a political island, requiring a five-hour drive through Utah and Nevada to reach its county seat, thanks to a roadblock called the Grand Canyon. This allows for a certain amount of anarchism, at least with regard to gentile authority. (Arizona's first governor, on a visit to the North Rim region, said, "Hell, if I had to live in this place I'd want more than one wife myself.")

  Edward Abbey, one of Stegner's less reverent students from his famous writing seminars at Stanford, invented one more anarchist north Arizonan polygamist worth mentioning: Joseph Fielding "Seldom Seen" Smith, one of the heroes of Abbey's eco-sabotage fantasy, The Monkey Wrench Gang. Smith is a Jack Mormon river guide with three wives who prays for a "pre-cision earthquake" to crumble the Glen Canyon Dam, which flooded his hometown and destroyed his beloved Colorado River. Along with three other comic saboteurs, he begins precipitating his own little precision earthquakes to combat environmental destruction.

  For as Stegner wrote of the Mormon country: "Nowhere in the world, probably, is the transitoriness of human habitation shown so outrageously. Nowhere is historical time pitted so helplessly and so obviously against the endless minutes of geological time."

  Image: "The Polygamists" photo gallery from National Geographic.

  March 7, 2010
  • Email /
  • Print /
  • Comment now