Year-End Update: Revisiting Scenes and People From 1986 View Stories : Politics of Polygamy

View has revisited some of the people and places it reported on in 1986 to update their stories. Among them:

--A shelter for the homeless that was itself homeless.

--An author who had new ideas about how to market and promote his book.

--The campaign to save Nancy Reagan’s 1981 inaugural gown, which is stretching under the weight of its bugle beads.

As one who opposes the politics of polygamy--although not the practice itself--Ben Bistline, 51, has lived his life as an outcast in Colorado City, Ariz., a community of polygamists on the Utah-Arizona border. When View reported on Colorado City ways last April, Bistline said he felt trapped in a town where he and his wife and 15 children (only eight are still living at home) were often harassed for being dissenters.

Bistline, who does not practice polygamy, believes that it is not a religious practice so much as it is a reward system for powerful men--the more powerful, the more wives they’re rewarded. Because all property in the community is held in a common trust, Bistline said he was unable to sell his home and move his family somewhere they would not be discriminated against.

But town leader LeRoy Johnson died Nov. 27 at the age of 98, and for the first time Bistline feels there is hope for his family in Colorado City.

The townspeople have been “more friendly, more relaxed,” toward the Bistlines since November, said Bistline, in a telephone interview from Phoenix where he was working on a job as a contractor. Bistline said that Johnson, a self-proclaimed prophet, was responsible for some of the hostility directed at the family because the patriarch openly foretold suffering and death for those who were not polygamists, a practice rejected by the main Mormon church in 1890.

Now that Johnson is gone, and no terrible fate has befallen the Bistlines, “We’re not under the pressure that we were,” Bistline said. “It looks more hopeful that we’re going to get the deeds to our places someday.”

It remains to be seen what the newly appointed leader, Rulon Jeffs, will do with his influence over the townspeople. And all is not harmony in Colorado City. The longstanding power struggle between the Barlow and Jessop families has yet to be resolved. And the young men and women of Colorado City still face some hard realities: Young men are pressured to move out of town and leave the new crop of wives to a handful of aging patriarchs. And once appointed to a polygamist household, the young women relinquish almost all control over their lives.

Some of the women manage to run away or leave home before they are married, but it’s not uncommon for them to end up with financial and emotional problems.

At least one young Colorado City woman, 17-year-old Diane Bistline, has recently made a successful break. At home, Diane was embroiled in controversy with the local school authorities because she chose to wear jeans to school. (Colorado City girls and women wear old-fashioned prairie-style dresses, even for activities such as gardening and playing volleyball.)

Diane has since graduated from high school. She’s working at a lodge in Lake Powell, and she has a boyfriend. Sounding like a proud father, Ben Bistline said that he doesn’t expect Diane back home.