Lost Boy, by Brent W. Jeffs with Maia Szalavitz, $24.95. Warren Jeffs, the disgraced head of the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, went to prison a few years ago for forcing a young FLDS girl to marry a man she despised. Jeffs not only was found guilty of being an accomplice to rape but also was a rapist himself and a pedophile, according to his nephew Brent W. Jeffs.
When he was 5 or 6, Brent charges, he was raped by his uncle as many as 10 times, while the church leader’s henchmen stood by, guarding the bathroom door. He says Warren raped his brothers, as well.
The perversion was part of Warren’s sense of power that he was chosen by God to lead his people, Brent says. That meant absolute control. No one was allowed to question Warren’s decisions, and boys, as well as girls, were urged to “keep sweet,” which meant cheerfully accepting the church’s dictates.
Brent is one of the FLDS’s “lost boys,” the young men who were forced out of the church and their closed community in southwestern Utah so they would not compete with its older men for young girls.
Born into a family that had practiced polygamy for six generations, Brent was one of 20 children born to his father’s three wives. As the grandson of the prophet Rulon Jeffs, he was church royalty. (The FLDS church, it should be pointed out, is not connected with the mainstream Mormon Church.)
By the time Brent was born, Rulon was old, and Warren, the son of Rulon’s favorite wife, had begun taking over. He dictated what his flock should wear — women in long underwear and pants beneath their long dresses, boys and men in long pants and long-sleeve shirts buttoned to their necks.
The color red was banned (although Warren was eventually arrested, wearing shorts, riding in a red car). Warren took over the school and ordered bizarre changes in science and history classes. For instance, the FLDS taught that the planet Earth was made up of the residue of other heavenly bodies, and that dinosaur bones were remnants of those other planets, because the animals had never lived on Earth.
Brent’s family was eventually thrown out of the church by Warren, and Brent became one of the “lost boys,” disenfranchised FLDS teenagers with few survival skills. Like most of these boys, Brent got into drugs and liquor and watched his life spiral downward.
“Lost Boy” is especially timely today, following the government’s raid on the FLDS complex in Texas, as well as the HBO television series “Big Love.”
Jeffs’ account of life in a repressed religious colony is riveting. He writes with conviction about the corruption of absolute power and how it turns adherents into robots and leaders into ruthless dictators. Not for nothing were Warren Jeffs’ favorite books about Adolf Hitler.
D.C. Oakes: Family, Friends & Foe, by LaVonne J. Perkins, $30. Every Colorado history buff has heard of the much-maligned D.C. Oakes, the author of a guidebook urging Americans to come to the gold fields of Colorado. A “go-back,” disgusted with his bad luck in the territory, buried a bunch of rubbish in a grave and marked it with a buffalo skull containing the epitaph: “Here lies the bones of D.C. Oakes, the starter of this damned hoax.”
Well, it turns out Oakes wasn’t such a bad guy after all. It was the unreal expectations of gold seekers, not statements in Oakes’ book, that turned him into Colorado’s first villain.
In a monumental research project, LaVonne J. Perkins reconstructs the story of Oakes and his family. Oakes was a seasoned prospector. He joined the 1949 gold rush to California, and 10 years later he wrote his infamous guidebook to Colorado.
The guidebook contained solid advice, Perkins contends, and unlike William Byers, publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, who wrote a similar guide, Oakes had actually crossed the prairie — a couple of times, in fact.
In an 1859 trip to Colorado after the book was published, the by then well-known Oakes wrote that his journey “resembled the triumphant progress of a conquering king.” That didn’t last long, however, and gold seekers with unrealistic expectations blamed Oakes for their bad luck.
Such condemnation didn’t deter Oakes from settling in Colorado. An obituary called him “large hearted, liberal-handed and generous to a fault. He was a pioneer for the love of pioneering.”
Perkins not only has saved Oakes from the disdain of history, but in this biography inspired from a booklet written by Oakes’ daughter — a flea-market find — she introduces readers to the life of a Colorado pioneer.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist who writes regularly about new regional nonfiction.
