In 1882, the United States government passed legislation aimed at ending Mormon polygamy. The impact on the Mormons in Utah and northern Arizona was immediate. The number of federal marshals in Utah and northern Arizona increased by 300 percent, and with the new focus on tracking down polygamists, Pipe Spring’s Winsor Castle became a hiding place for polygamous families on the run.
Winsor Castle, now a National Monument administered by the National Park Service, was built in 1870 next to tiny Pipe Spring to protect against raiding Navajo. Its isolated location in northern Arizona made it an ideal hideout for polygamous wives. In Riders of the Purple Sage, Zane Grey described the Arizona settlements as places occupied only by women and children, where mysterious husbands rode into town after dark, only to leave before daybreak.
The Woolley Family
Edwin Dilworth (Dee) Woolley Jr., the manager at Pipe Spring, sequestered one of his wives, Flora, and their children at Pipe Spring because if its remoteness. Even if marshals did make their way to Pipe Spring, they had to catch the husband and wife together to prove polygamy. Locating a wife by herself at the fort did not help them make an arrest.
Woolley's journals are stored at Brigham Young University and they reveal his wife as a daughter of the powerful Snow family. She grew up with every advantage a child on the frontier could have. She was a good Mormon, and did what she thought she had to for her husband and her children, but was not always pleased about it. She summed up her situation at Pipe Spring with the pithy comment “I went to prison to keep my husband out.” Woolley was so haunted by the image of Winsor Castle as a prison that she had the outer gates removed to give her a greater feeling of freedom.
Raiding Federal Marshals
The polygamists had a surprising relationship with the marshals. While they were engaged in a serious cat-and-mouse game, the politeness that characterized proper society in that era was maintained on both sides. When marshals came to Pipe Spring and failed to find a husband and his wives together, they usually stayed and took advantage of the fort’s amenities. The fathers also had a cordial relationship with their hunters. After an arrest, Dee Woolley, Flora’s husband, was released due to a lack of evidence. He invited his captors to lunch, they accepted, and spent the afternoon together.
The marshals’ work was still very serious. Flora Woolley's unpublished memoir, In Two Worlds, recalls that Dee Woolley’s responsibilities managing his families’ holdings kept him in the open. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he could not go underground, and as a result, experienced several close encounters with the law. After a particularly narrow escape, Dee Woolley was talking about the near-arrest with some friends. According to Flora, Dee bent down, picked up his daughter, Bessie, and asked “Look at that, fellows, isn’t that worth going to the ‘pen’ for?”
Mormon leadership made decisions that put them at loggerheads with the U.S. Government, and their membership paid the price. The Saints on the Arizona Strip never wavered in their determination to live according to their beliefs. They had chosen the place precisely for its isolation; because it allowed them to live according to their code. Flora Woolley rhetorically asked, “What could the Law do against a spirit of that kind?”
Today, because of some headline-grabbing trials and the success of HBO’s series Big Love, Mormon polygamy is again in America’s collective consciousness. HBO would have been well served to do a show on the activities of 19th century polygamists, whose activities were as fascinating as their fictional descendants.
David McNeill - In 2003, Dave McNeill moved to Las Vegas, to begin his Masters work in American History and hopefully meet a showgirl. While at UNLV, Dave ...
