February 12, 2020
Building lives after escaping polygamy
By JILL DENNING GACKLE
From poverty and polygamy, Sarah Huber escaped it all.
She ran away from home at 15, kidnapped her uneducated five siblings from a polygamist and later raised them.
Today as a Bismarck attorney and a frequent crafter at Camp of the Cross retreats, she tells her story to organizations as a means of encouragement and information.
“I was born and raised in the last great big polygamist group,” she said. On the border of Colorado and Utah, Huber was among about 15,000 people in Colorado City, Utah under the control of Warren Jeffs, now a convicted polygamist of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He reportedly had 20 wives and 60 children.
“That’s my family,” she said. But it wasn’t a family in the traditional sense.
“Warren and I did not get along at all,” she said, partly because she questioned Jeffs.
She consistently attended classes through fifth grade and intermittent through ninth grade, but it wasn’t always typical teachings. Her last year of schooling there included how to skin a cow and classes were saturated in how to prepare for the end of the world.
She ran away from home at 15, kidnapped her uneducated five siblings from a polygamist and later raised them.
Today as a Bismarck attorney and a frequent crafter at Camp of the Cross retreats, she tells her story to organizations as a means of encouragement and information.
“I was born and raised in the last great big polygamist group,” she said. On the border of Colorado and Utah, Huber was among about 15,000 people in Colorado City, Utah under the control of Warren Jeffs, now a convicted polygamist of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He reportedly had 20 wives and 60 children.
“That’s my family,” she said. But it wasn’t a family in the traditional sense.
“Warren and I did not get along at all,” she said, partly because she questioned Jeffs.
She consistently attended classes through fifth grade and intermittent through ninth grade, but it wasn’t always typical teachings. Her last year of schooling there included how to skin a cow and classes were saturated in how to prepare for the end of the world.
