Pilgrim's Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier

by Tom Kizzia

  (photo credit tp.1)

  Copyright © 2013 by Tom Kizzia

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins publishers and Hodder and Stoughton Limited for permission to reprint excerpts from The Road to McCarthy by Pete McCarthy. Copyright © 2002, 2004 by Pete McCarthy. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers and Hodder and Stoughton Limited.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kizzia, Tom.

  Pilgrim’s wilderness: a true story of faith and madness on the Alaska frontier/by Tom Kizzia.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Hale, Robert (Robert Allen), 1941–2008. 2. Hale, Robert (Robert Allen), 1941–2008—Family. 3. Pioneers—Alaska—McCarthy—Biography. 4. Fundamentalists—Alaska—McCarthy—Biography. 5. Criminals—Alaska—McCarthy—Biography. 6. Abusive men—Alaska—McCarthy—Biography. 7. McCarthy (Alaska—Biography). 8. Dysfunctional families—Alaska—McCarthy. 9. Incest—Alaska—McCarthy. 10. Cults—Alaska—McCarthy. I. Title.

  F914.M33K59 2013

  979.8′05092—dc23 2012016502

  eISBN: 978-0-307-58784-8

  Map illustrations by Jeffrey L. Ward

  Jacket design: Eric White

  Jacket photograph: Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News/MCT/Landov

  v3.1

  For Emily and Ethan

  As I walk’d through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a Denn; And I laid me down in that place to sleep: And as I slept I dreamed a Dream. I dreamed, and behold I saw a Man cloathed with Raggs, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own House, a Book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back.

  —John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 1678

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  MAP

  PROLOGUE: THIRD MONTH

  Part One: Pilgrim’s Trail 1 The Road to McCarthy

  2 History’s Shadow

  3 The Bollard Wars

  4 Sunlight and Firefly

  5 Motorheads

  6 The Rainbow Cross

  7 Hostile Territory

  8 Holy Bob and the Wild West

  9 God vs. the Park Service

  10 The Pilgrim’s Progress

  Part Two: The Farthest-Out Place 11 Hillbilly Heaven

  12 Flight of the Angels

  13 The Pilgrim Family Minstrels

  Part Three: Out of the Wilderness 14 A Quiet Year

  15 The Wanigan

  16 Exodus

  17 Pilgrim’s Last Stand

  18 The Man in the Iron Cage

  EPILOGUE: PEACEFUL HARBOR

  SOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  IN THE winter of 2002, a man with the wild gray beard of a biblical prophet showed up in the remote Alaska ghost town of McCarthy with his wife and fourteen children. He called himself Papa Pilgrim. His family found a deserted mining camp in the mountains nearby, deep inside North America’s largest national park, and set about building a homestead life straight out of the country’s pioneer past—packhorses, goat milk, bear meat. Fiddles and guitars. And a Caterpillar D5 bulldozer. By the Seventh Month—the Pilgrim Family did not use the pagan names of the calendar—they were at war with the National Park Service.

  I was a reporter for Alaska’s biggest newspaper. Pilgrim was wary of reporters, bureaucrats, police officers, and park rangers. He said he would let me ride on horseback to the homestead to hear his story, in the company of his adult children, because my wife and I had a cabin of our own near McCarthy.

  The cabin had actually been my wife’s idea. She had old ties to the small Wrangell Mountain community. For me those mountains had mainly been a place to go camping, but Sally used to play the fiddle at dances in McCarthy’s tinder-dry Hardware Store and knew all the local characters and feuds. We were both East Coast refugees and had professional interests in the area as well—Sally, a Sierra Club lobbyist working to protect Alaska’s still-wild federal lands, and me, a former American Studies major scribbling down stories of manifest destiny for the paper. After we met and married, we built a small cabin on her dream spot, a river bluff inside Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve. Pilgrim seemed to believe this pioneering impulse would make me sympathetic to his struggles. He called me “Neighbor Tom.”

  Pilgrim’s battle with the park appealed to Alaska’s romantic notion of itself. His renunciation of modern life and fight against the advancing forces of government made him a hero to some. Pilgrim had the scapegrace appeal of a Western outlaw, but he presented himself above all as devoted to family and Scripture—traits that squared him in the public eye and gave consequence both to his defiance of authority and to his pious engagement with his Lord’s creation. His secrets were cloaked, as a state prosecutor later put it, “under the guise of pursuing the Alaskan dream, of carving out a piece of the Alaska frontier, where a man pits his strength and that of his family against the wild.” Such anachronistic strangeness might have been a red flag anywhere else, but it elicited great sympathy in McCarthy, where the arrival of federal agents in Park Service uniforms had only recently unsettled old habits of mind about independent self-sufficiency and dominion over nature.

  Papa Pilgrim said it seemed like God’s plan that a McCarthy “neighbor” would arrive to tell his tale. It may be that, in an empty wilderness, the individual stands out more, making it easier to believe an intervening deity would go to such trouble. Certainly Pilgrim liked to tell his own story as a God-wrought tale of redemption. His turning points involved scenes of credulous wonder and signs from above. Let me propose, then, before passing to Pilgrim’s story, such an opening scene in the pioneer life of Neighbor Tom: a late-summer evening in the year we built our cabin in the Wrangells. I’m sitting with my bride on an open promontory above the canyon—Inspiration Point, Sally called it, in mock-solemn national park style. We listen to the river, and she rests her head on my shoulder as the moon comes up in a lazy northern trajectory, its yellow light peeking through a notch in the mountains, then vanishing behind the next summit, half-appearing a second time and setting again, and finally floating free—a magical triple moonrise.

  Or so it seemed, from where we sat. I realize now it was nothing more than the turning of the indifferent heavens.

  PROLOGUE: THIRD MONTH

  WHEN THE song of the snowmachine had faded down the valley, the sisters got ready to go. Elishaba moved quickly through the morning cold and snow in heavy boots, insulated pants beneath her prairie skirt, ferrying provisions from the cabin—raisins, sleeping bags, two white sheets. Jerusalem and Hosanna tore through the toolshed looking for a spark plug. The plugs had been pulled from the old Ski-Doo Tundra machines that morning.

  It was late in the Third Month, and the days in Alaska were growing longer. The overcast was high, the temperature holding above zero. They knew they didn’t have much time.

  White mountains squeezed the sky above the old mining cabin. For weeks, Elishaba had been lo
oking up, praying as if to the summits. But she knew the snow was too deep, she would be tracked easily. The only trail, the one that had brought their family the attention they once shunned, ran thirteen miles through the wilderness, slicing down the canyon through avalanche zones and back and forth across the frozen creek.

  The trail ended at a ghost town. McCarthy had once been a boom-town of bootleggers and prostitutes. These days it was the only place in the Wrangell Mountains that could still be called a community, though most of the old buildings had fallen down and a mere handful of settlers remained through the silent winter. At first that isolation had been the attraction. The Pilgrim Family had traveled thousands of miles to reach the end of the road in Alaska. They had parked their trucks at the river and crossed a footbridge into town and continued on horseback and snowmachine and bulldozer and foot to their new home.

  Now McCarthy burned in her imagination not as the end of the road but as a beginning.

  Psalms and Lamb and Abraham looked on in horror. Their big sisters had been put on silence. Yet here was Elishaba, calling out as she moved to and from the cabin, as if she no longer cared what would happen.

  Elishaba was the oldest of the fifteen brothers and sisters, a pretty, dark-eyed, dark-haired young woman, strong from a lifetime of homestead chores, from wrangling horses and hunting game. At twenty-nine, she was no longer a girl, though she had never lived away from her family, never whispered secrets at a friend’s house or flirted with a boy. She had been raised in isolation, sheltered from the world and its television and books, schooled only in survival and a dark exegesis of God’s portents. She was the special daughter, chosen according to the Bible’s solemn instruction. Her legal name was Butterfly Sunstar.

  She gave the children a brave and reassuring smile. They could see now that she was weeping and frightened and that she did indeed still care. She was committing the unforgivable sin. The Lord had held her, steadfast, in these cold mountains, and would not let her go. His grip was strong.

  Her sisters looked happy, though. Hosanna had found a spark plug. Perhaps it was a sign their enterprise was favored after all. Jerusalem—short, blond, and cherub-cheeked, at sixteen the second-oldest girl—had declared she would not let Elishaba go alone.

  Elishaba and Jerusalem said swift good-byes and climbed together onto the little Tundra and sped down the trail.

  They made it no farther than the open snow in the first muskeg swamp. The snowmachine lurched to a stop. The fan belt had snapped. Jerusalem used a wrench to pull the spark plug and stumped back up the packed trail, postholing through the snow. Elishaba tried to mend the belt with wire and pliers but gave up.

  She looked about. The snow was too deep to flounder through, the trees too far away. It felt like one of those dreams where she tried to run and couldn’t move. She sat listening for the sound of a snowmachine returning up the valley from town.

  Instead she heard Jerusalem coming on the other Tundra.

  They reloaded their gear and started off again. A pinhole in the fuel line was spewing gasoline, but if this, too, was a sign it went unseen. They flew too fast on a curve and nearly hit a tree and slowed down.

  Jerusalem, holding on in back, started crying now, too. She was thinking about all they were leaving behind. In modern Alaska, with its four-lane highways and shopping malls, her family was famous, recognized wherever they went. People cheered when the Pilgrim Family Minstrels performed onstage. That beautiful old-time picture was gone forever.

  The sisters prayed out loud. Where the snow-packed trail turned uphill, they stopped and listened. The valley was heavy with quiet. They started again and pushed up the hill and at the top they discovered the family’s other big snowmachine, hidden in trees too far from the cabin for anyone on foot to find it. The sisters hesitated. They talked about switching, but the old Tundra was running well so they decided to continue. But right there the engine died, and that’s when they discovered the fuel leak. Maybe the Lord was indeed helping them, they said. They felt a surge of hope as they transferred their gear and continued on the third machine.

  There was so much about the world the sisters did not know. But there were things they did know and these were the skills they needed now. Where the trail climbed over the riverbank, Elishaba veered away behind the snowy berm, so that someone coming the other way might not see their track. She drove into the spruce trees and shut down. They could see the trail through the boughs. The telltale smell of two-cycle exhaust lingered in the still, cold air. They covered themselves in the snow with the two white sheets.

  The faint whine of a snowmachine, growing louder, was coming up the valley.

  Pilgrim’s Trail

  Here’s for the plain old Adam, the simple genuine self against the whole world.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals

  McCarthy, 1983, shortly after creation of Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve (photo credit 1.1)

  A PAIR OF old trucks crept down the street, pushing deep tracks through the snow. Neil Darish stopped shoveling the roof of the McCarthy Lodge to watch. In the back of one pickup, three or four hardy young people stood in the morning cold, looking around at the buildings left over from mining days. Strangers in McCarthy were rare in the middle of January, especially after a storm. It was eight hours from Anchorage through the mountains just to reach the end of the pavement, the last miles of asphalt crumbling and swaybacked by frost. At Chitina, you crossed the Copper River, and it was another sixty miles into the heart of the Wrangell Mountains. The road from Chitina was gravel and followed the bed of a vanished railroad, a route frequently closed in winter by drifts or blocked by freeze-thaw flows of ice that locals attacked with chain saws and winches. At the end of the road was a turnaround and a footbridge. These tourists had apparently made the drive through the blizzard and been enterprising and presumptuous enough to push their trucks across the river ice and into town, rutting up the local snowmachine trails.

  Unseen on the low roof, Darish stared as the trucks stopped and emptied their passengers: eight young people in their teens and early twenties, the boys with long hair spilling out from under vintage hats of wool and leather, a few wispy beards, the girls in tattered coats and long flowered skirts down to their snow boots. Darish felt vague misgivings as the strangers peered in the windows of the closed-up hotel across the street. He caught himself: He’d been in McCarthy only a short time, and already he’d picked up the local mistrust of visitors hunting souvenirs from the past.

  The driver of the first pickup emerged. He was an older man, wiry and bespectacled, with pinched cheeks and a long, unruly beard. He gazed appraisingly at the weathered lodge and the few false-front buildings nearby.

  “Papa, this is what we thought Fairbanks would look like,” said one of the boys.

  At this, Darish smiled. He knew Fairbanks was no longer anyone’s romantic vision of the Last Frontier. Nor was Anchorage with its oil company high-rises, nor Wasilla with its busy highway and chain-store sprawl. McCarthy was another matter. And these new arrivals, he had to admit, looked like they belonged here—like they had just emerged, blinking, from the abandoned copper mines up the mountain.

  The bearded father stopped taking the town’s measure when he spotted Darish on the roof. At a wave, two youngsters grabbed shovels and scrambled up a ladder to pitch in. Darish tried to shoo them away. He could just picture one of these longhaired boys tumbling to the street. He had too much at stake here to invite a liability lawsuit. Buying the lodge, opening it in winter—Darish was trying to restore some can-do pioneer spirit to a melancholy town that had been shutting itself down for decades.

  He caught himself for a second time rushing to judgment—he could hardly imagine a less litigious-looking family. It was a first impression he would recall ruefully, years later, as the family’s appeal briefs were being filed before the U.S. Supreme Court.

  Still, the boys wouldn’t stop shoveling until he climbed down and invited them indoors to sit
by the woodstove.

  “I’m Pilgrim,” the old man said in a deep and friendly drawl. “These are some of my children.”

  They were a striking brood, strong jawed and pink cheeked, handsome despite their ragged jackets and hand-me-down garments—an authentic, no-pretense look that wore well in rural Alaska. They stood by shyly as their father arranged himself at a table in the small dining room. His motions were deliberate, his eyes sharp and watchful.

  The sound of hammering came through the walls. The innkeeper got the coffeepot. “So what brings you to the Wrangell Mountains, Pilgrim?” he asked.

  It was a simple question—and with it Neil Darish became the first to hear a story that everyone in McCarthy would hear, sooner or later, told in that strange King James diction and plaintive Texas drawl, the pitch and timbre of the tale evolving over time as the teller came to comprehend the local pattern of feuds and factions and was thus better able to ascertain the Lord’s purpose in bringing him here.

  “My name is Pilgrim,” he said, “because I’m a sojourner on this earth. The Bible says we are all strangers and pilgrims, and we live by faith until our Lord returns.”

  His story began with a big-bang religious awakening and a shaft of celestial light. Before that, things were vague—a backdrop of youthful affluence and pride. With God’s direction, he had raised up his children on horseback in New Mexico mountains named for the Blood of Christ. There were fifteen of them, he said. Pilgrim was a trained midwife and had delivered each child at home. They had never seen a television nor experienced the temptations of the world. They were schooled at home, tended flocks of sheep in alpine meadows, made their own buckskin, and lived pretty much as their forebears did a century ago, innocent and capable and strong, spinning wool and making lye soap and each night singing songs of praise.

  The Pilgrim children were silent and listened raptly to their father’s words, as if uncertain how the story would turn out. The absence of teenaged restlessness among these bright and earnest offspring would strike many, on first meeting, as a healthy sign of what it must have been like to grow up within an oral tradition. People tried to remember if all children had been so attentive before they were handed cell phones.