The horrific killing of three women and six children in Sonora, Mexico, this week has brought a little-known chapter of Mormon and Mexican history into the spotlight, one deeply entwined with the bygone Latter-day Saint practice of polygamy. This history is little understood even by Mormons themselves. Though a lifelong Latter-day Saint, I didn’t learn about it until several years ago, when two Utah men commissioned me to write a biography of their mother, who was born and raised in a polygamous Mormon colony in Chihuahua, Mexico.
The story begins in Nauvoo, Ill., where Joseph Smith, the founding prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, established the religious practice of polygamy in the early 1840s.