Parallels to Short Creek raid in 1953 are pointed out

In the early morning hours, law enforcement moved into the polygamist community, seizing hundreds of women and children under the premise of child abuse — specifically that young girls were being married to older men.

This isn't Eldorado, Texas, in 2008 but rather Short Creek, Ariz., in 1953. At the time, the raid made national news as the largest roundup of men, women and children in modern American history.

One University of Utah professor, who has written a book on the history of the Short Creek raid, says what is unfolding in Texas is history almost repeating itself. The removal of hundreds of women and children and placing them in foster care, the raid of a polygamist community by dozens of officers and the accusation of child-bride marriages are all eerily similar, said Martha Sonntag Bradley.

If history is to be any kind of teacher, Bradley said, Texas authorities need to know that after the 1953 Short Creek raid, every man, woman and child returned to Short Creek to resume their polygamist lives. The raid quickly became the FLDS Church's rallying point — a tale handed down to the next generation as of a test of faith and of overcoming of outside oppression, which made the community even more closed and opaque to the outside world.

"Remember Short Creek" is a motto heard among polygamists. Even today in the twin communities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., monuments serve as a reminder. "July 26, 1953. We must never forget how the lord blessed us in restoring our families taken in the 53 raid — Uncle Roy," one states.

Bradley interviewed more than 100 people in Colorado City about the raid, and in 1993 published the book "Kidnapped From That Land: The Government Raids on the Short Creek Polygamists."

"It's playing out again," Bradley told the Deseret Morning News after reading the articles and viewing the TV images pouring out of Eldorado and the YFZ Ranch. The images of women and children being ushered out of the community is almost the same as images from 1953 in Arizona.

Bradley said Arizona Gov. John Howard Pyle was concerned that men were marrying young females. In order to investigate, Pyle hired a group of private investigators, who infiltrated Short Creek under the guise of a Hollywood film crew. At the time, Hollywood loved the Utah/Arizona border's red-rock terrain as backdrops for westerns. While "scoping out the terrain," the crew filmed young women and their children as evidence of child-bride marriages.

"It was about the children, in particular the young women," Bradley said. "The purpose of that raid, and this one, was to take children out of that context, and the mothers were given the option to go along."