The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land

by Sally Denton Narrated by Ann Richardson

Overview

On the morning of November 4, 2019, a caravan of women and children was ambushed by masked gunmen on a desolate stretch of road in northern Mexico controlled by the Sinaloa drug cartel. Firing semi-automatic weapons, the attackers killed nine people and gravely injured five more. The victims were members of the LeBaron and La Mora communities-fundamentalist Mormons whose forebears broke from the LDS Church and settled in Mexico when their religion outlawed polygamy in the late nineteenth century. The massacre produced international headlines for weeks, and prompted President Donald Trump to threaten to send in the US Army.



In The Colony, Sally Denton delves into the complex story of the LeBaron clan. Their homestead-Colonia LeBaron-is a portal into the past, a place that offers a glimpse of life within a polygamous community on an arid and dangerous frontier in the mid-1800s, though with smartphones and machine guns. Rooting her narrative in written sources as well as interviews with anonymous women from LeBaron itself, Denton unfolds an epic, disturbing tale that spans the first polygamist emigrations to Mexico through the LeBarons' internal blood feud in the 1970s and up to the family's recent alliance with the NXIVM sex cult, whose now-imprisoned leader, Keith Raniere, may have based his practices on the society he witnessed in Colonia LeBaron.

Editorial Reviews

Booklist - Karen Clements

"Reminiscent of Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, this is exhaustively researched and riveting."

Julia Scheeres

"Meticulously researched…. The author couldn’t have found a more bizarro clan to profile than the LeBarons, whose history of murdering family members, mental illness and incest rivals that of the Hapsburgs…. Denton provides an excellent history of a polygamist subculture… [her] book is a testament to what happens when male power, under the guise of religious conviction, goes unchecked."

The Daily Beast - Lewis Beale

"A mesmerizing deep dive into Mormon fanaticism, violence, deceit, mental illness, and misogyny, dating back to the religion’s mid-19th century founding by Joseph Smith."

Douglas Preston

"The Colony is one of the most gripping and disturbing true stories I’ve ever come across. It opens with the horrific massacre of Fundamentalist Mormon women and children in 2019 in northern Mexico, initially thought to be the work of cartel gunmen who mistook their SUVs for those of a rival gang. But the true story is far more complex. In exploring what really happened, Denton, a superb researcher and historian, delves deep into the history of polygamous Mormon splinter sects in Mexico, blood feuds, rivalries, and conflicts over land and water rights, as well as issues of drug smuggling. This is far more than the usual true crime book; it is a deep historical exploration of evil. I could not put The Colony down."

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2022-03-24
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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175368520
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	06/28/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

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