SALT LAKE CITY — Look at Bountiful, British Columbia, on a map, and you’ll see it’s barely in Canada at all. It’s just a few miles north of the Idaho Panhandle.
Utah, it seems, is even closer than that.
“My dad had five wives,” said Brandon Blackmore in an interview with FOX 13 News. “So, it was a polygamous situation.”
He and his half-brother Jon – the pair have the same father – have each written new books about growing up in Bountiful in the 1980s and 1990s. The community was founded decades earlier by families who would join what became the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“The people in Bountiful pretty much lived in poverty,” Jon Blackmore told FOX 13, hitting on a theme of each brother’s book.
Brandon’s “Son of Perdition” and Jon’s “Broken Promise” are both out now. Brandon, 42, and Jon, 50, today call each other best friends. But when you grow up in a family of 40 kids, you don’t necessarily grow up together.
Each brother tells his own stories about their respective childhoods in Bountiful and the surrounding Canadian Rockies. A few accounts corroborate each other. For starters, Brandon and Jon both recall living in austerity and families struggling to earn a living.
Jon’s book shares a vignette from the early 1980s where families from Bountiful literally line up to kill, pluck and butcher thousands of chickens.
“So, every three months there was this chicken farm down on the flats of Creston,” Jon told FOX 13 News in an interview, “and we had to go and harvest one quarter of the chickens in that farm.”
“And you'd literally have a pickup full of dead white chickens.”
Timber was the big industry around Bountiful. Brandon writes about his father’s entrepreneurship cutting down trees and turning them into fence posts.
Soon, the business was taken over by some of Brandon and Jon’s uncles.
“My dad didn’t mind this, because he felt like he was building up God’s work,” Brandon writes in his book. “But it was just my uncles he was building up.”
One of those uncles was Winston Blackmore, the bishop of Bountiful. He had his own logging and milling company.
“I actually was taken from my dad at 13 years old and put on Winston's crews,” Jon told FOX 13 News. “And we didn't have any choice. None of us did. We weren't paid anything.”
Brandon worked for Winston, too. Both brothers describe cold conditions working on logging crews and that some workers – nearly all of whom they were related to in some way – lost fingers or toes to saws or other equipment.
Winston, who had his own falling out with FLDS leadership years ago, did not return messages seeking comment.
Utah and Utahns appear in both books. The two brothers each married brides from the twin towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona. Then-FLDS President Rulon Jeffs officiated Jon’s ceremony.
Brandon’s ceremony was officiated by Jeffs’ son and successor, Warren Jeffs.
“I was taught he was this wonderful prophet and almost a God,” Brandon told FOX 13, “and then I had to come to that realization that he actually is a very terrible person.”
Coming to terms with the truth about Warren Jeffs is another theme of each book. The brothers both describe being assigned to the mills around Bountiful to build huge, modular log homes for little or no pay.
“It was a huge expense to supply hundreds of loads of logs into this program,” Jon told FOX 13 News.
It was only years later when looking at news stories online they learned where those homes went. The Canadians were building for the Jeffs-controlled ranches in Texas and South Dakota.
Jon’s faith in Warren Jeffs wavered after hearing stories about sexual abuse. Also, as Warren Jeffs went to prison in Texas for crimes related to sexually abusing girls, he ordered no more intimate relations between husbands and wives. Warren Jeffs’ lieutenants were frequently interviewing people like Jon and his wife to make sure they were complying.
“So, into 2012, we just made the decision after a couple of these interviews that we were just going to be done with it,” Jon said.
Brandon left the FLDS about the same time. His wife and four children stayed with the church. The couple eventually divorced.
Both brothers write about how shattered families have become the new normal in the sect.
“I have three mothers that are still loyal to Warren,” Jon said, “and my dad's first three wives, and we've had nothing to do with them for 12 years, and that's been really hard.”
“My very own mother,” he added, “has 34 grandchildren she has nothing to do with because my other brothers and sisters have left the organization.”
Brandon went on to give information to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as it built a case against his and Jon’s father. A British Columbia court eventually convicted the father and one of Jon and Brandon’s stepmothers of a charge for removing a child from Canada who was then sexually abused.
“It was a struggle to for me to testify against my own dad,” Brandon told FOX 13, “but I also was in hopes that maybe it would help to stop anything in the future and send a message to the FLDS.”
It turned out Brandon wasn’t completely done with the Jeffs family. In 2017 he married one of Warren’s daughters — Raichel.
“I've been a logger, a cowboy,” Brandon told FOX 13 News, “and always wanted to get into law enforcement.”
He is now a sheriff’s detective in the Idaho panhandle.
Jon still lives in the Bountiful area. He estimates Warren Jeffs still has about 300 followers there.
“And then there's the people like me,” he said, “that either believe what they believe and try to carry on with life, or just don't want to be bothered and want to be a part of a community that is free.”