Archives West Finding Aid

Rulon C. Allred was born in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1906. The son of Byron Harvey Allred and Mary Evelyn Clark, Bryon’s second wife, Rulon was raised in a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) family that continued to practice plural marriage after the Church denounced polygamy in 1890. Due to the illegal nature of his father’s marriages, Rulon spent most of his childhood moving throughout the Western United States and Canada but eventually chose to continue the fundamentalist practice of polygamy himself. In 1926, he married his first wife Katherine Handy. However, Katherine refused to live the polygamous lifestyle adopted by her husband and terminated their marriage in 1935. From 1936 to 1941 Rulon married five women, a practice for which the LDS church excommunicated him on May 8, 1940.

In May of 1945, The state of Utah convicted and incarcerated Rulon for his illegal practice of plural marriage. The state prison released Rulon on parole that December and he subsequently moved to the LeBaron polygamous ranch in Los Parceles, Mexico. Rulon eventually became the president of the Apostolic United Brethren, a moderate polygamous sect existing in Utah, Montana, Colorado and Arizona. His sect of LDS fundamentalists was often in conflict with the more conservative LeBaron and Jeffs groups, which, on May 10, 1977, resulted in his assassination by two women under orders from Ervil LeBaron. Over the course of his life Rulon married seven women and fathered a total of 48 children.