THE COLONY

A multifaceted exploration of the Mormon communities that moved to Mexico to escape persecution in the 1880s and their increasingly bizarre connections to contemporary Mexican drug cartels.

Denton, the author of The Bluegrass Conspiracy and other acclaimed books, employs the 2019 murder of several young wives and mothers from the sister Mormon communities of La Mora and LeBaron as a point of departure to examine the tumultuous history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the U.S. and along the border. (The author mostly uses the term Mormon throughout the text.) While driving in a caravan along an empty stretch of highway between the states of Sonora and Chihuahua, the young mothers were ambushed by members of rival cartels, executed, and burned in their cars. Clearly, they were targeted because they belonged to Mormon fundamentalist breakaway communities in northern Mexico, many of which consisted of wealthy, landowning families in a very poor region, and there had been animosity over excessive water use for their prosperous farms. But this is more than a modern true-crime story, as Denton reaches back into the history of Mormonism and finds a deep well of violence, including the Cain-and-Abel rivalry and “blood atonement” murders involving Joel and Ervil LeBaron from the 1970s to the 1990s and the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1847, when a Mormon militant group murdered a traveling party of 140 innocent immigrants and then tried to cover it up, “the worst butchery of white people by other whites in the entire colonization of America.” The author examines the messianic beginnings of Mormonism with Joseph Smith in the 1830s followed by Brigham Young and later highly flawed leaders, many suffering mental illnesses. Denton also dissects other elements of the Mormon practice, including legacies of male superiority, female servitude, and forced polygamy.

Thorough research and balanced reporting combine in a riveting investigation.