It’s said that real communism has never been tried (an old joke), but those who say so likely have never visited the tiny Mormon town of Orderville, Utah, set in a long, broad valley of red-rock buttes along the Virgin River. Cut off from the interstate highways of America by the Grand Canyon to the south, Zion National Park to the west, and, to the east, an expanse of cliffs and fissures of devilish geological complexity, it’s a decidedly out-of-the way village with a fascinating utopian past. I approached it that spring morning from the north, on a lonesome two-lane road which passed the log-cabin boyhood home of Butch Cassidy, the frontier outlaw. The scraggly farmstead was just the sort of place that might cause a lively child to want to someday rob banks — every bank he could.

My notion that day was to poke around the town and see what remained of its idealistic history. In the 1870s an impoverished …