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Show Storm Testament V: Background of events By LEE NELSON Storm Testament V takes place in the Utah Territory in the 1880's when the U.S. Congress, federal judges, appointed governors, U.S. marshals and their deputies, the Salt Lake Tribune, and even the President of the United States are determined to crush the Mormon Church, with polygamy as the central issue. Polygamist Dan Storm and others find their families being torn apart in what they see as a one-sided and unfair conflict. With Mormon Church leaders on the run, wives being forced to testify against husbands, good men going to jail without bail, foreign immigrants being refused U.S. citizenship and the vote, and the Mormon people themselves unable to agree on the issue of polygamy, this is a story of tragic proportions as everyone, Mormon and gentile, plays the great Utah guessing game of trying to figure out who is really married to whom. While Dan Storm is off to Canada looking for a more peaceful home for his family, his youngest son, Ben, heads into Utah's west desert, devastated by his inability to stand up to law officers who have arrested his polygamist brother, Sam, and taken Sam's first wife, Kathryn, into custody. Unavoidable events bring Ben into new confrontations with law officers, this time fighting back and winning - ending up with a following of three pregnant plural wives and an outlaw Indian named Flat Nose George. The women are running from the law to avoid being forced to testify in court against their husbands. Ben takes them to a remote hideaway in the rugged mountains of east-central Utah, while his brother, Sam, is convicted of polygamy and sent to the federal prison in Detroit, Mich. Following an intense confrontation con-frontation with one of the guards, Sam joins forces with Mormon patriarch, Moroni Hess, who uses a seer stone to engineer a daring escape from the prison. Meanwhile, back in the rugged mountains of eastern Utah, Madge, the homliest of the pregnant plural wives, goes into labor. There are complications. Flat Nose George comes to the rescue by applying primitive midwifery skills of the Ute Indians. That's where this story begins... |