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

by Tom Kizzia

  The family had moved on from New Mexico when the Rockies grew too civilized, Pilgrim explained. Alaska was the sweet name whispered by God as their firstborn came of age. Later, he would show photographs of the caravan that carried them north—a small tour bus with a mountain of gear on the roof, two 1941 flatbed trucks bearing cabins of rough-cut lumber, antlers and snowshoes and frying pans lashed to the exterior walls, and an olive drab army-surplus six-by-six with a canvas tarp and a white star on the door, which the family had named “Armageddon.” The four vehicles, each pulling a trailer and flying a navy-blue Alaska state flag with the gold Big Dipper, crept along at a top speed of 45 mph and turned heads all the way to the Canadian border and beyond. They were like a wagon train, Pilgrim liked to say, headed west when the land was free and wild.

  For three years they had searched throughout Alaska, he said, a land truly blessed with so many riches. They knew somewhere a place was prepared for them. It had not been easy, because Fairbanks and Anchorage and the Kenai Peninsula turned out to be more tied to the modern cash economy than the subsistence mountains they’d left behind. Even now, Mama Country Rose and the younger children were waiting in the town of Kenai, along with their goats and horses and purebred mountain dogs. Everywhere they went, they encountered the welcoming arms of many new friends, but they never settled for long, as strangers did not know what to make of their countenance and their family-centered ways, and sometimes took advantage of their innocence and generous nature.

  “We have truly followed a long, hard road to get this far,” said Pilgrim, “and as we passed through the rock in Chitina last night, we all felt we had arrived at last at our home.”

  He asked Neil Darish if this ghost town had any property for sale.

  PAPA PILGRIM had led his family into the mountains of Alaska looking for one of the last empty spaces on the continent. But he stumbled on something that would suit his purpose even better: a remnant settlement out of American history, teetering nostalgically between the open frontier of the nineteenth century and the protected wilderness of the twenty-first.

  McCarthy had sprung to life a century earlier with the discovery of the richest vein of copper the world had ever known. Most mining camps of the Alaska Territory were lonely endeavors, but in these remote mountains the great capitalists of the Gilded Age, J. P. Morgan and the Guggenheims, invested millions to build a small city and a railroad up the canyons from the coast. The copper was pulled out of the mountain in blocks that were up to 80 percent pure, so rich that much of it could be loaded straight onto the trains without processing. One of the mines in the area consisted of nothing more than tunnels through glacier ice to extract the moraine, high-grade rocks that had been tumbling off a snaggletooth ridge for centuries. Copper from the Wrangells electrified the nation, built mansions and museums in New York City, and gave the world the Kennecott Copper Corporation—named, along with the nearby river and vast glacier, for the early explorer of Russian America Robert Kennicott, though the name of the company somehow ended up with an extra “e” in place of the “i.”

  It didn’t take long, though, to hollow out Bonanza Ridge. Alaska’s first industrial boom lasted four short decades: from the afternoon in 1900 when a prospector named Tarantula Jack mistook the green oxides of exposed copper for alpine grass, to the sudden announcement that the last Kennecott train was pulling out on November 11, 1938, with twenty-four hours’ notice, leaving bunkhouse beds made and the offices locked up as if for the weekend.

  Down the mountain from the Kennecott mines and mill buildings, McCarthy had been staked in 1906 among the cottonwoods at the Kennicott Glacier terminus, an entrepreneurial service center providing saloons and hardware stores and whores’ cabins by a creek. The town had a provisional air from the beginning, having been erected in the path of oncoming ice. The scrape and clatter of falling rocks, and floods dumped out of hidden summer reservoirs, kept the boomers alert to the talus-strewn face only hundreds of feet away. But instead of surging forward to push the outpost off its foundations, the glacier had retreated, baring a raw rubbly plain where green nature was slow to copy itself onto the blankness. With the closing of the copper mines, the false-front wooden stores and rooming houses weathered gray and began to puff and sag with rot. Roofs caved in under heavy winter snows. Fire razed the Alaska Hotel and the McCarthy Drug Store. Bushes fanned up in front of windows, and frail green poplars filled the streets and vacant lots, so that what remained of the town seemed to have been deftly hidden in the leaves where the rest of the world would not easily find it.

  But there was, in fact, property for sale. Kennicott and McCarthy were never quite abandoned. In the decades after the mines closed, the valley became host to a small scavenger culture surviving off what the land provided—not just berries and moose and salmon, but also such nonrenewable resources as window frames of mullioned glass, china dishes, and spools of steel cable from aerial tram stations. It was not a bad place to eke out an Alaska bush living. The mining era had left rough, washed-out roads and a tattoo of private homesteads and claims on the landscape. Government didn’t control every last acre here, as it did in most of rural Alaska. Nor did McCarthy have a complicating overlay of ancestral Native American occupancy. Winter temperatures plunged far below zero, but the summers were hot and there was enough gold in the creeks to pay for shipped-in groceries. For a while, you could even get back and forth to the highway at Chitina over sixty miles of old rails, riding a truck fitted with flanged steel wheels.

  The iron rails were eventually pulled for scrap and replaced by a gravel road, a rattling washboard that ran flat and straight, splashing through beaver ponds and dipping past fallen trestles. Improved access in the early 1970s livened up McCarthy’s otherworldly mix of homesteaders, marijuana growers, mountain climbers, sheep-hunting guides, college students researching the environment, and placer miners riding their bulldozers through town to get a beer at the lodge. Far from medical care, law enforcement, and the last filling station, it was no country for the casual tourist. Where the road ended on a rocky floodplain, visitors had to pull themselves into town on a tram car dangling from a cable above a murky glacial torrent in which boulders could be heard rolling angrily downstream. As in the old mining camps, there were no local authorities, and neighbors took care of problems themselves.

  Two big events then drew attention to McCarthy and shaped what the town would become. One was the creation of Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve. The park was part of a sweeping act of Congress in 1980 known as the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, or ANILCA. Capping a frantic decade for Alaska that included settlement of Native land claims and construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, ANILCA was the biggest act of wilderness preservation in the history of the world, protecting more than one hundred million acres of the forty-ninth state and doubling the size of the national park system. The new national park in the Wrangells, created to “maintain unimpaired the scenic beauty and quality” of the natural landscape, was the biggest park in North America—at thirteen million acres, six times the size of Yellowstone National Park. It was bigger than Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey combined. Tiny McCarthy, proud and unimpressed, was its only town.

  The other event that put McCarthy on the map was the last thing anyone expected in such a get-away-from-it-all scene of natural splendor. One morning in March 1983, a quiet newcomer shot and killed six of his neighbors as they gathered to meet the weekly mail plane. Half the wintering-over population died. The killer, nabbed by state troopers as he fled the valley on a snowmachine, later told a court psychiatrist that Alaska was being spoiled like everywhere else and he wanted to purge nature of human beings—starting with residents of the wilderness town where he’d settled.

  These two nearly simultaneous events, weirdly linked, had given McCarthy a defiant mind-set about its future. The survivors of the mail-day murders had been determined to rebuild their outback community. Settlers prepared for the rigo
rs of self-sufficient bush life were welcomed. The modern world, with its big-government rules and general craziness, would be held at bay as long as possible.

  To be sure, such a life was more complicated now that McCarthy was surrounded by a national park. The days of proper homesteading were over, and Neil Darish wanted Papa Pilgrim to understand this. It would be hard to imagine a family of seventeen moving their livestock into the heart of Yellowstone.

  Alaska, however, was supposed to be different. Congress wrote special provisions into the 1980 conservation law to protect the lingering frontier lifestyles of rural Alaskans. Even in national parks, local residents could continue to live off the land, mine the creeks, and hunt moose. Federal management and promotion were to remain low-key. American dreamers could take heart: It seemed the nation, in protecting for perpetuity the great wilderness of the north, could not quite bear to say good-bye to the last of the Last Frontier—the small log cabin in the forest—or consign to mere inspirational metaphor the jumping-off point for the settler, the fur trapper, the gold panner, the young idealist dreaming of a better place, or the American Adam seeking to reinvent himself in a New World.

  Exactly how the people of McCarthy were supposed to continue their eccentric pioneering ways without impairing the scenic beauty and quality of the natural landscape wasn’t spelled out clearly. The Wrangells backcountry, moreover, would not yield readily to agrarian sodbusters and shepherds with their flocks. It was an unfinished country, tough to nestle in to, with its grizzly bears and wolf packs, crevasses and volcanoes, viscous rock glaciers grinding down the slopes, the bottom country slashed by brown, turbulent, unfordable rapids and gravel bars where trees fight to stand and are washed away. Hundreds of square miles of ice reaching into Canada are punctuated by nine of North America’s tallest peaks, among them Mount Blackburn, whose 16,390-foot summit looms above McCarthy. Even the early Ahtna Indians, who staged fall hunts in these drainages and gave the suffix for river, “na,” to many of the place names, preferred to live in easier terrain downriver toward the coast. As a panorama of nature, the Wrangell Mountains have never been a testament to ecological balance and a pastoral ideal. This country told the harsher truth of change—brutal, erosive change.

  CHANGE WITHIN the community, though, had been slow. By the time the Pilgrim Family showed up in January 2002, the year-round population of McCarthy and the big country around was still only a few dozen families and individual households. The National Park Service, tactfully acknowledging feelings about government in a place that never had one, had not even stationed a ranger in town. Local charms were still rough-hewn. The hand-pulled tram across the river, so intimidating to visitors, had finally been replaced—but only by a footbridge, designed to keep out motorized vehicles. The town had a few new cabins, a lunch stand in summer, two bush pilots, and a passenger van for the five-mile taxi ride up to the abandoned mines at Kennicott, but the atmosphere when the Pilgrims arrived was still that of a place letting itself go back to nature.

  It would not be easy, Neil Darish thought, for such a big family to settle here. In an empty country, paradoxically, every individual loomed large. Landowners would be wary of inflicting a family with fifteen kids on their neighbors; you practically needed letters of reference to get a town-site lot as it was. Likewise, some of the old buildings at Kennicott were in private hands, but the Park Service had started buying up the properties and calling everything “Kennecott,” with an “e.” Local people had always spelled it with an “i,” unless referring specifically to the mining company. Now you had to choose a side when you chose your vowel.

  Darish knew that many visitors fantasized about making McCarthy home. Few took the next step, and fewer still lasted through one winter.

  Therefore he kept to polite generalizations and encouragements that first snowy day, until Pilgrim waved away his own real estate question and sent the children to the trucks. They returned with musical instruments—guitars, mandolins, fiddles, and a banjo. Pilgrim introduced the young people now by name: the oldest boys, Joseph and Joshua, and their teenaged brothers, Moses, David, and Israel. Elishaba, his dark-haired eldest daughter, lifted a violin to her chin and smiled, as if anticipating a pleasant surprise in store. Her sisters Jerusalem and Hosanna snapped open their instrument cases, attended by little four-year-old Psalms in a flower-print dress. Papa propped a guitar in his lap, tuned up, and started to strum.

  In the coming years, everyone would agree on one point about the Pilgrims: The family could light up any space, living room or concert hall, once the old-time country gospel got rolling. “Hillbilly music,” Pilgrim called it. They played slow or fast, on tempo and in harmony, traditional tunes and original compositions, with Pilgrim himself singing spirituals in a high, plangent twang.

  From childhood I heard about Heaven,

  Oh I wondered if it could be true

  That there were sweet mansions Eternal,

  Off somewhere out there beyond the blue.

  The fingers of one daughter—Jerusalem or Hosanna, it was hard for Darish to keep the Bible names straight—flew lightly over the frets of a mandolin. Darish got on the phone. A show like this didn’t come often to McCarthy.

  The hammering next door stopped. Darish’s partner, Doug Miller, stuck his head through a door to listen. Miller was extending the dark-wood bar he’d salvaged from the Golden Saloon. He had grown up in McCarthy, among antiques pulled from the ruins of Kennecott’s bunkhouses. His parents once owned this very lodge—Miller had hung the moose antlers above the door as a boy. He had always wanted to get the lodge back. Now he and Darish had a business plan. Darish would deal with the public. Miller would do the remodeling and make sure everything about the place stayed authentic.

  A small crowd gathered. Darish noticed how the mandolin player smiled when her big sister accidentally poked her with the fiddle bow. In his own family, such a provocation would have meant instant retaliation. He couldn’t help but be impressed by the harmonizing and the genuine off-the-grid family warmth. The McCarthy audience clapped happily. The children were self-taught musicians, Pilgrim said. When they decided to take up music, he put the names of instruments in his cowboy hat, and the Lord guided their small hands as each child picked one.

  The children stood politely as their papa named another tune and asked, “How about that one?” They always said yes.

  They had learned to pick at mountain-man festivals down around Santa Fe, Pilgrim explained during another pause. Their family motto was “In our Lord Jesus, Music and Wilderness Livin’.” They had been performing at a folk festival in Anchorage, in fact, when they first heard the name of McCarthy. Then the boys spied a large full-curl ram’s head at a taxidermist’s and were told it was shot in the Wrangells. So they drove out through the darkness of the previous day’s snowstorm. And when they reached the place in Chitina where the pavement ends and the road passes in one lane through jagged walls of solid rock—it was the old Copper River and Northwestern Railway cut, just before the big bridge—the feeling was like something out of the Old Testament, like they were passing through a gate to a land of heavenly promise.

  His audience could perhaps imagine the patriarch’s sense of urgency, three years out from New Mexico: A pilgrim can wander alone, but a father of fifteen can’t keep sojourning forever. Men in heavy parkas had been working on the road that evening, and Pilgrim described how they squinted at the strange family and asked where they thought they were going. Soon all those men saw through the blizzard were the red taillights of a family confident of the Lord’s guidance as they headed at last into the true Alaska.

  Doug Miller returned to hammering. The partner in charge of authenticity had seen enough.

  The rest of the McCarthy audience couldn’t have been happier, though. They wanted to hear more tunes, but instead Pilgrim inquired again about property. He was informed that January is a hard time to look at land, because the old mining roads are snowed shut. He declared the family would return w
ith snowmachines in the Second Month.

  As the musicians played merrily on, Neil Darish thought about writing up a little something for McCarthy’s newspaper, which came out six times a year. The implications of a family this big moving to town were beginning to sink in. They would nearly double the winter population. He wondered—had he been too encouraging?

  As the brief afternoon grew dark and the family prepared to head back across the frozen river to camp, Darish followed them to their trucks and drew Pilgrim aside. Darish was a follower of Ayn Rand’s rational ethics of self-interest. An Objectivist perspective seemed usefully applied here. People would help the family if they came back, Darish explained. But it would be out of the shared values of self-help, not altruism or charity. The Pilgrims would have to show they were able to take care of themselves. Darish hoped he didn’t insult the family patriarch as he spelled this out.

  “You don’t have to worry about that at all,” Papa Pilgrim said, with a smile that showed he was a perceptive hillbilly who understood exactly where Neil was coming from. “All we want is a place to live our old-time way and be left in peace.”

  WITHIN WEEKS, the Pilgrims returned with six old snowmachines and fanned into the surrounding country. As the days lengthened and the snow softened by day and set firm at night, Papa Pilgrim and the older children pursued rumors of remote cabins and poked down private roads on their thirdhand one-cylinder Tundra snowmachines. The still-absent mother, Country Rose, hung back in the highway town of Glennallen, checking property deeds and looking up the names of absentee owners in file drawers of the Chitina District recording office. They called back and forth from the phone at the lodge.