ELDORADO, Texas — The guy didn't look much like a hunter. He was beanpole tall — scarecrow-ish, some might say, with a high, collegiate forehead and a reluctant handshake. Even in a pearl-snap shirt and jeans, this cowboy somehow seemed better suited for a college lecture hall than a saddle.

Still, he wanted land — lots of it — for a corporate hunting retreat. Said he might build a lodge, to entice some big-roller clients of his in Vegas. North of town, the old Isaacs ranch — rocky and dotted as it was with rusty oil rigs, cactus and gnarled mesquite trees — caught his eye. It was plenty cheap, he said, and plenty remote.

But it didn't take long for the sheriff and everyone else in Schleicher County to figure out that their new neighbor, David S. Allred, president of YFZ Land, LLC, had much more on his mind than the hunting of whitetail.

After the closing in November 2003, dozens of Allred's associates arrived to make improvements on the property. Sunday to Sunday, day and night they toiled, completing three, three-story houses — each 10,000 square feet — within weeks. Soon, a cement plant shot up. Then fields of limestone were miraculously plowed into fertile farmland. And then, a superstructure unseen in these parts — a temple, masterfully clad with limestone quarried on site — ascended into the west Texas sky.

And that, as it happened, was only the beginning.

The YFZ Ranch — which, as the townspeople would come to learn, stood for Yearning for Zion — would mushroom into a bustling, parallel city: a 1,691-acre, self-sustaining enclave carved, literally, into a rock pile for the innermost circle of the Fundamentalist FLDS Church, a 10,000-member sect that has continued to practice polygamy after it was banned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1890.

Here, there would be enormous dormitories for enormous families, a cheese factory, a medical clinic, a grain silo, a commissary, a sewage treatment plant — and watchtowers with sentries, infrared night-vision cameras to monitor gated entrances, and 10-foot-high compound walls topped with spikes.

There would evolve a saga of "plural marriages," racism, underage "celestial" brides and allegations of child abuse, turning Eldorado upside down with frightening tales, rumors, and a flood of reporters and investigators. A raid on the polygamists' compound — the largest of its kind in more than a half century in the West, involving hundreds of law enforcement agents — would lead to the removal of 416 children and set up a child custody confrontation of unprecedented dimensions.