The Short Creek Community, founded in 1913, began as a small ranching town in the Arizona Strip. In the 1930s it was settled by Mormon fundamentalists. In May 1935, members of the Council of Friends, a group of fundamentalists excommunicated from the Salt Lake City–based the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sent a handful of followe…The Short Creek Community, founded in 1913, began as a small ranching town in the Arizona Strip. In the 1930s it was settled by Mormon fundamentalists. In May 1935, members of the Council of Friends, a group of fundamentalists excommunicated from the Salt Lake City–based the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sent a handful of followers to the Short Creek Community with the express purpose of building "a branch of the Kingdom of God." Fundamentalist leader John Barlow believed that the isolated Creek could provide a place of refuge for those engaging in the covert practice of polygamy, which was criminalized using bigamy statutes from 1935 to 2013 and 2017 to 2020. Within a month, the town's population more than doubled. The Council of Friends membership desired a remote location where they could practice plural marriage, which had been publicly abandoned by the LDS Church in 1890.
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