Five years later Willes began practicing plural marriage when he married 24-year-old Docia Emmerine Molen.

Willes participated in the early political and civic life of Lehi, Utah.

[8] He later served as Alderman[9] and in a variety of other positions,[10] including on the 1865 Lehi Library Association.

[11] He was a member of the LDS Church's sixty-eighth quorum of Seventy when it was organized in Lehi in 1862.

[13] Upon his return, he captained[14][15] a pioneer company of English and German saints that crossed the plains in late summer 1865.