Benjamin Bistline

Bistline lived in Colorado City until 2003, when the UEP trust agreed to sell him a mobile home in nearby Cane Beds, Arizona at a low cost, and assisted in the relocation there.

Bistline wrote The Polygamists: A History of Colorado City, Arizona, which he self-published in 1998. Agreka Books republished it as a 432-page paperback in February 2004, and later issued a condensed, 236-page version, titled Colorado City Polygamists: An Inside Look for the Outsider.

Bistline and his wife joined the mainstream LDS Church in 1992.

In the 1980s, Bistline began speaking out about the changes which church leaders were making. He and his family continued to live in a home owned by the United Effort Plan (UEP) — the land trust founded by FLDS members. Bistline was among the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed by Short Creek residents who claimed they were evicted for trivial offenses. The lawsuit ended with an agreement that the trust could buy them out, or they could live in their homes for their lifetimes.

After Bistline's father's death in 1949, his mother became the fifth wife of Rich Jessop (son of Joseph Smith Jessop). Bistline received permission from his stepfather to court one of his daughters on the condition Bistline would practice plural marriage. The courtship was interrupted by the Short Creek raid, but eventually Bistline married Annie Jessop on 24 June 1955. Subsequently, marriage assignment by FLDS leadership began, and Bistline was never called upon to take a second wife.

Bistline's parents were practitioners of mainstream Mormonism, living in Providence when some residents of Cache County began to challenge the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' ban on polygamy. His parents were excommunicated in 1937. After the death of his oldest brother, his family moved to Short Creek in the winter of 1945. At age nine he became the first of his siblings baptized into the polygamous church.

Benjamin "Ben" Granger Bistline (21 April 1935 – 25 June 2016) was an American historian of Mormon fundamentalism in Short Creek, a community of which he was a part.