The town of Eldorado, Texas, seat of Schleicher County, flanks State Highway 277, approximately 45 miles south of San Angelo, and is surrounded by a vast landscape of mesquite and cedar trees, native grasses, cacti, and lizards. In all, it is a fairly typical West Texas town of about 2,000, mostly oil industry workers, goat ranchers, and their herds. At least it was typical until November 2003, when a man from Utah named David Steed Allred came to town to purchase 1,691 acres of ranchland four miles north of Eldorado's sleepy downtown. Allred was in the construction business, he told several residents, and was going to transform the land into a corporate hunting retreat where he could entertain clients from Las Vegas – which might work out fine, if Allred's clients were going to be interested in traveling that far just to bag a few white-tailed deer.
It was an odd explanation, perhaps, but in a town of independent West Texans, not so odd as to spark more than a general curiosity about the new neighbor. "I knew when [the land] was sold that someone from Utah bought it and I figured they were probably Mormon," says Randy Mankin, the 49-year-old editor and publisher of The Eldorado Success, the town's weekly newspaper. There were already a couple of other Mormon families living in town, Mankin said, so even that wasn't so unusual – or so he thought. But that was before the construction began.
Two months later, Mankin was in the Success office on South Main Street when a local pilot walked in and dropped a computer disk on his desk. The disk, the pilot said, contained digital photos of construction in progress on the property that he'd snapped while flying over the spread; Mankin popped the disk in his computer and scrolled through the photos. What he saw was both stunning and confusing: a fledgling network of roads, a grouping of trailer homes, and three dormitory-sized, log-home-style buildings. It was, to say the least, intriguing: What in the hell was Allred building? With a combination of old-fashioned reporting and a dose of kismet – in the form of a telephone call from an anti-polygamist activist from Phoenix, Ariz., named Flora Jessop – it wasn't long before Mankin and his wife, Kathy, figured it out. On March 25, 2004, the Success broke the first in an ongoing string of stories that not only confirmed the construction was unusual, and not at all what Allred had claimed, but was also major news – not just in Eldorado, but across the country and around the world.
As it turned out, Allred's story about his buying the land for a hunting retreat was just that, a story. Instead, the real purchaser was an insular breakaway Mormon sect, headquartered in the twin cities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., known as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) – of which Allred is a member; the real purpose for the purchase was to secure a site for the newest, and potentially most significant, FLDS community. In and of itself, that might not have been such a big deal – after all, Eldorado (locally pronounced El-doh-RAY-doh) boasts 13 churches for an official population of just 1,951. But, the FLDS isn't an average church – indeed, it isn't even a faith that its predecessor denomination, the Mormon church (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or LDS) recognizes. That is because the FLDS adheres to the very early, "fundamentalist" teachings of Mormonism, long since abandoned or limited by the LDS. Most specifically, the FLDS faith is built upon the practice of polygamy, the taking of so-called "celestial wives" – or, in the jargon of the FLDS, living "the Principle." FLDS adherents believe that in order to achieve the "fullest exaltation" of heaven, every man must have at least three wives.
The revelation that the newest neighbors were polygamists stunned Eldorado. Some residents were literally frightened, Mankin says, worried that the Mormon men might try to steal their daughters. Others cracked jokes, mostly along the lines of wondering why any man would choose to live with more than one woman. And still others were nonchalant; live and let live, they said. "There are those that say, 'Let's go knock down their door, run them out,'" says Mankin. "[And] there are those that say, 'Different strokes for different folks.' It runs the whole gamut."
But it isn't simply that the new neighbors are polygamists that most disturbs the residents of Eldorado. What has the town worried is the litany of allegations of criminal wrongdoing by high-ranking members of the church. Tales of forced marriage, child brides, sexual assault, virulent racism, brainwashing, blood atonement, money laundering, and welfare fraud, among others, have trailed the FLDS for years, intensifying since 2002, when 49-year-old Warren Jeffs assumed his authority as the sect's newest "prophet." Although he's barely known outside his secretive following, in published reports Jeffs is generally described as a reclusive, obsessive, and extraordinarily paranoid man who believes his authority over the flock is equal to that of God, and who rules the FLDS membership (estimated at a minimum of 10,000 followers in the U.S. alone) through fear and threats of retribution against those who are insufficiently obedient. According to Flora Jessop, a former FLDS member who fled the group 19 years ago, Jeffs "control the entire population on fear – fear of eternal damnation, fear of the outside world."
There's a lot more to the article and fortunately they aren't right next store to Petro.
:thumbsup