On the morning of 26 July 1953, officers of the Arizona Department of Public Safety and soldiers of the Arizona National Guard entered Short Creek, the settlement on the Utah–Arizona line that later became Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah.1 Contemporary and later published accounts describe it as a large, pre-dawn action against the Mormon fundamentalist community there. Time later called it “the largest mass arrest of polygamists in American history.”2

Those accounts say the community had been warned, and that officers found people gathered at the schoolhouse. Adults were taken into custody. Arizona authorities took dependent children into custody; a superior court in March 1955 ordered that they be released back to their families, though later writers have said that some children were placed in foster care and that not every child was returned.3 Arizona governor John Howard Pyle had invited journalists to observe the raid. Much of the resulting newspaper coverage was critical of the tactics, especially the removal of children.4

The raid remained a living memory in the 1961 recordings. On 18 June, Leroy S. Johnson spoke of “the raid of 1953 when our families were taken away from us.”5

Joseph Smith Jessop, who is described in published accounts as working with John Y. Barlow in the founding of the settlement, died in Hildale on 1 September 1953, a little more than a month later. Published accounts of his funeral say that many of his family could not attend because they were then being held in Phoenix by Arizona authorities.6