CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/18/2024

Forsaken modern-day cowboys in Jim Mangan's 'The Crick'

Featured image is reproduced from The Crick, collecting Jim Magnan’s extraordinary photographs of the “lost boys” of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, raised by plural families in households with one father and multiple wives, but now cast out since the arrest and imprisonment of polygamist cult leader Warren Jeffs in 2011. “Some of the boys are related by birth—half-brothers with different mothers and the same father—and some are full brothers or cousins,” Judith Freeman writes, “but whatever their familial connections they have formed a kind of band of brothers and are now bonded irrevocably through their history and their love of horses and of each other. … The town where the boys were raised—the Crick—was ruled by a prophet whose word they were bound to obey until the prophet was convicted of sexually abusing minors and sent to prison in 2011, receiving a life sentence, and then things slowly began to change though the prophet still demanded obeisance from his prison cell. During his final days, as he became more paranoid, he excommunicated many people for their sins—for watching a movie, or listening to music, wearing a short-sleeved shirt or showing interest in a girl. Before that time, before the fall of the prophet, many of the teenage boys were cast out, as had been the custom for many generations. They were left to fend for themselves to ensure the older men had no competition for the younger girls. These boys were referred to as the lost boys only they were not lost they were forsaken, cast beyond the pale to fend for themselves in a world they did not know.”