Polygamist-town outcasts struggle to fit in

They are the forgotten victims of polygamy, young men pushed out of towns like Colorado City as older men take on more wives.

Most have eight grades of education or less. Many of them are victims of abuse and have severe emotional scars. They have only rudimentary building skills and speak old-school English, straight out of the frontier 1800s.

"They're like foreigners in their own country," said Carolyn Jessop, a former Colorado City polygamist wife who fled earlier this year and moved to Salt Lake City.

Most of them bounce from low-end job to low-end job along 500 miles of the Interstate 15 corridor between Salt Lake City and Pahrump, Nev., west of Las Vegas.

They often live together, sometimes as many as 10 packed into one apartment. According to Flora Jessop, a former polygamist wife now living in Phoenix, many of the young men end up in the jails of Utah and Nevada after being convicted of crimes.

James Black, a travel consultant in Park City and former Colorado City resident, said family support is key for the young males making the transition to the outside world.

"There's a percentage that eventually figures out how to make it," Black said. "But there's a lot more who never figure it out."

Black speaks from experience. When he was young, he was one of the designated men who could rise to be a future prophet in Colorado City's polygamist society.

But as Black got older, he started asking tough questions. For instance: Why should any man have multiple wives in modern-day America? And why are teenage girls mere chattels for some men who are old enough to be their grandfathers?

That is when he says the church hierarchy ratcheted up the pressure on the 15-year-old Black to leave. His secret love since the first grade "disappeared overnight" and was married to a polygamist in Canada. Shortly thereafter, his second girlfriend meekly submitted to becoming the fifth wife of a Colorado City polygamist.

After an altercation with his father, Black quickly moved to nearby Hurricane, Utah. Black had an eighth-grade education and no marketable skills.

He married and divorced quickly. Loneliness and self-destruction led him quickly to drugs. He finally enlisted in the Navy and straightened his life out over the next four years.