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

by Tom Kizzia

  Winter has always been the easiest time to travel in much of Alaska. The unfordable rapids and vast swampy muskegs are frozen and covered in snow, open to travel at 60 mph with the latest technology, or half that on vintage Tundras. The Pilgrims rode out the Nizina River valley as far as the mouth of the Chitistone Canyon, where they checked out cabins that once housed a commune set up by California beatniks who reached the Wrangells by way of Tangiers. They looked in town at the Hippie Hole, a grown-over excavation for a marijuana-growing lodge, abandoned in 1971, but originally inspired by McCarthy’s Prohibition-days reputation, when trains from the coast had a special whistle to warn of the approach of a revenue officer.

  The family searched as far as Long Lake on the road back toward Chitina, and south to May Creek, probing the countryside with a bluntness of purpose that struck residents in the valley as obtuse, even rude. There was a protocol out here. You met a person in town and introduced yourself and hoped for an invitation. You didn’t ride up to a stranger’s place in the wilds. You certainly didn’t turn and drive away when you were spotted, as the Pilgrims were doing. The community watched apprehensively as this furtive family went about its business. The Pilgrim offspring displayed a formal Old World politeness when approached in town but seemed easily spooked, eager to scamper away. It was as though they hadn’t quite learned the niceties of community living. Still, people tried to reserve judgment. The newcomers were eccentric, without a doubt, but their novelty flattered the area’s self-image as an oddball, open-to-anything part of the world.

  By chance, another unusual visitor showed up in McCarthy around the same time: a best-selling British humorist. As a consequence, there exists a brief published account of the Pilgrims in their first weeks in the Wrangells, opening with a scene in which the Englishman, careening uncontrollably across the frozen Kennicott River on a borrowed snowmachine, encounters a sprawling riverbank camp full of Pilgrims that strikes him as something from The Grapes of Wrath.

  Pete McCarthy’s first book, a self-deprecating barstool memoir about his travels in western Ireland, had once soared to the top of England’s best-seller lists. Now as a follow-up to McCarthy’s Bar, the author was touring the Irish diaspora in search of connections to his Irish mother’s surname, which he had taken for his own. He had hoped to drive out to McCarthy, but found “the worst road in Alaska” closed due to spring breakup conditions. His trip to Alaska nevertheless would provide a title for a new book—The Road to McCarthy—as well as a penultimate chapter in which, after some Mark Twain–style tall tales depicting the cheechako’s white-knuckled small-plane flight over the mountains and an epiphany regarding the unfavorable ratio of grizzly bears to people in the valley, the explorer was pleased to discover fine beer and exquisite cuisine at the newly remodeled McCarthy Lodge, where he was the only guest. He marveled at the “meticulously designed pioneer-style rooms” assembled by the new owners, with their crisp linens, patchwork quilts, and hand-tinted photographs.

  I’d had visions of living like a brute for a week, then dumping my clothes in an incinerator back in Anchorage, hosing off the moose shit and going looking for food that didn’t come out of a can. Instead I have been dropped into the Alaskan edition of Homes and Interiors. Doug and Neil have done a fine job. There are few more comforting experiences for the traveler than to journey great distances through unfamiliar and threatening landscapes, anticipating an austere and possibly squalid destination, only to discover that catering and interior design are not in the hands of heterosexuals.

  Like any good travel writer, Pete McCarthy had trumped up a quest—in his case, to find out about a Wrangell Mountain prospector named James McCarthy. In 1899 this Irishman had loaned horses and provisions to a military surveyor exploring the upper Chitina and Nizina river valleys. In return, the surveyor named a local creek after McCarthy. A few years later, when the well-liked prospector drowned while crossing a river on horseback, the new town at the mouth of the creek was named after him as well.

  McCarthy Creek winds twenty miles back into the mountains east of town, ending in a high glacial cirque. By chance, this cold and steep-walled defile became the very place the Pilgrims soon focused their hunt for land. What suited them especially, beyond the absence of neighbors, was the valley’s geological and human history. McCarthy Creek had seen a lot of spillover copper-mining activity in Kennecott days, which meant there was likely to be remote private property. The family rode their snowmachines into the valley’s upper reaches, where they found old habitations connected to an abandoned mine called the Mother Lode—a name surely never uttered in the presence of Pete McCarthy, who would not have resisted making another joke about the family with fifteen kids.

  THE OLD mine that the Pilgrims would soon call home was on the back side of Bonanza Ridge. The green-and-white Mother Lode Mine had been the inverse of the red-and-white Guggenheim mines on the other side: speculative where Kennecott was spectacularly successful, obscure where Kennecott was famous. Some people once considered the Mother Lode cursed. The same seam that would enrich Kennecott’s owners extended across shear zones and emerged high above McCarthy Creek, where backdoor claims had been snatched before the Guggenheims’ Alaska Syndicate could get them. The first prospectors started sinking tunnels by hand, hoping to find a big deposit. The back side of the ridge did, in fact, contain the richest single vein of copper in the mountain, but the Mother Lode’s original claimants never dug deep enough to find it.

  Those early prospectors set up camp in the valley below and climbed two hours every morning to reach their claims. They worked eight-hour days hammering and blasting and shoveling, then descended to camp, according to one account, in a “fifteen minute rush down the mountain over fine slide rock taking twenty or thirty foot strides and letting the finely crushed rock and gravel carry one along.” Needless to say, these were young adventurers, not bearded codgers chasing a last dream.

  They soon owned a sizable chunk of Alaska wilderness. The federal mining law of 1872 was generous in dispensing public land. In addition to the copper claims up high, the prospectors were granted a five-acre claim on the valley floor dubbed the Marvelous Millsite, where they built some cabins and a station for a tram to haul ore from above. Ocha Potter, a Michigan mining engineer who had guessed the mountain’s secrets, then staked a 160-acre mining claim across the bottom of the McCarthy Creek valley. He imagined this would be the site of a future town. Without a show of pay to prove there were minerals present, however, the government would not grant title to the valley claim. No matter how many shafts he sank on the new claim, which he named Spokane, Potter couldn’t find a single flake of gold. In an unpublished memoir left to his family, Potter described sending “one of the boys” to a friend’s streambed placer mine across the Nizina River to buy ten dollars’ worth of gold dust, which he salted across the bottom of a prospecting shaft. A visiting federal surveyor, “a very conscientious official,” pulled up two buckets of gravel from the shaft and found a pretty tail of yellow in his pan both times.

  After some time out for thought, down he went again. I began now to get worried. Looking down I could see him digging deep into the bottom, far below any possibility of superficial salting. But I had some loose fine gold dust in my pocket. As the bucket was drawn up I leaned casually over the shaft and let the last of my treasured gold dribble through my fingers. By the time the bucket reached the surface it, too, was thoroughly salted. When he saw the yellow tail from that sample, he asked me if I had staked the claims above, and when I said “no,” he grabbed a pick and shovel, and disappeared upstream. When he came back to camp that night he looked at me rather sharply but nothing more was said about the validity of our “gold” claims. Months later he wrote asking how I had “put it over,” but I never explained and my conscience has never bothered me.

  In the end, though, the challenges of McCarthy Creek proved too great even for the resourceful Potter. Things kept going wrong. Ownership of the Mother Lode claims was thrown i
n doubt when one of the original claimants fell under the ice on the Chitina River. He was packing freight on a hot day in April when the ice collapsed beneath his sled. His friends ran to an open spot downstream and threw the fellow a rope as he popped out, saving his life, while his bug-eyed horse and sleigh vanished downstream under more ice. But the man went mad and headed south, disappearing back in the States; his partners had to wait seven years to declare him dead and clear his title.

  Meanwhile, the miners battled daunting physical obstacles. They built a thirteen-mile wagon road down the valley to McCarthy, with bridges every mile and two rock tunnels, designed at a low grade with a future rail spur in mind. But they couldn’t get financing to lay down tracks until they found a big ore body. A great bunkhouse for miners was built high on the mountain, teetering on a scree slope and cabled to limestone cliffs—in the words of national park historian Logan Hovis, “perched on the edge of nothing.” Just below the bunkhouse, the mountain itself was moving, literally—the slope was the site of a rare rock glacier, a descending mass that is more rubble than ice. In winter, avalanches raked the mountainside. Snow shields behind the bunkhouse helped divert the crushing loads, but sometimes when vast gales of snow let loose the miners had to move inside the mine tunnels, emerging days later to see what remained. One snowslide tore away a high tram station. Another flattened the powder house, turning the rock glacier below into a minefield of scattered dynamite and blasting caps. Without better access or richer ore, capital for repairs was hard to raise.

  In 1919 the Mother Lode investors finally sold out to Kennecott Copper. The big company drilled through from the other side of the mountain, went deeper, found an eighty-foot-wide plug of almost pure copper extending more than a thousand feet, pulled the ore out through the Bonanza Mine, and sent it down a tram to their own mill and train cars.

  The McCarthy Creek valley began reverting to wilderness.

  For a while, miners scratched at a deposit, across the valley and farther down, called the Green Butte. The road from town was kept open that far and became known as the Green Butte Road. But the ore pinched out and the mine buildings there were abandoned, too. After statehood in 1959, a Fairbanks miner named Walt Wigger bought the Mother Lode at an outcry auction and ran a bulldozer up the old wagon road. He erected two small cabins at the Marvelous Millsite camp, rebuilt some crude bridges, and scraped off a runway on Ocha Potter’s never-used town site so he could fly in and out. Wigger drilled and pushed gravel for years but could find no riches that the earlier miners had missed. Then talk started up about a national park. Established mines supposedly would be allowed to keep working, under tighter environmental regulation, but Wigger, in his sixties, could see the end was near. He kept on flying until he crashed a heavily loaded plane by the creek. Rescuers found him alive in the Marvelous Millsite cabin, his face bashed in and several teeth missing. That was it for Wigger and the Mother Lode.

  Again the wilderness closed back in.

  In September 1980, a tropical typhoon drifted north and wrung itself out against the Wrangell Mountains. The rains fell for days. A few locals who happened to be sheltering in a McCarthy Creek cabin reported that the gravel slurry off the mountains was so loud at night, none of them could sleep. Geologists said a thousand years’ worth of erosion occurred in the single storm. The meandering stream down the valley turned into a rocky flume, shouldering aside steep berms of cobbles. Long stretches of the wagon road washed away, along with the last traces of old bridges. God’s untrodden vale was restored.

  The transformation of McCarthy Creek was biblical not only in scale but in its timing. Three months after the deluge, Congress approved the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, and the Mother Lode valley became part of Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve.

  THE PILGRIMS knew nothing of this history. But they liked what it had left behind: 420 acres of patented private holdings surrounded by miles and miles of protected public land.

  They snowmachined up and down the valley to explore. They poked into the cavity in the mountain high overhead. They examined the overgrown gravel runway on the Spokane placer and the two livable cabins on the Marvelous Millsite. They returned to McCarthy and drove to Fairbanks to meet Walt Wigger in a restaurant. He told them the National Park Service had made an offer, looking to buy up potentially troublesome inholdings from willing sellers. But he refused to sell to the government. Wigger was impressed by the Pilgrim Family’s size and single-minded drive, though he warned them the narrow mountain valley was a hungry country. The family patriarch didn’t seem worried. He said God had chosen the valley to be their home. It dawned on the old miner that God might be willing for them to pay just about any price. They agreed on $450,000, twice the offer from the national park, which had been bound by strict agency appraisal rules.

  Pilgrim had his own binding rules. The Book of Ezekiel, among others, speaks against extracting usury. He agreed to pay in annual increments of $30,000 without interest. They wrote out the deal on a table napkin. Pilgrim turned to a daughter, Hosanna, who produced a shoe box with the first payment in rolls of hundred-dollar bills. After three years, the big family’s annual Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend payments from the state’s investments of oil revenues—$1,963.86 per person the previous year—had accumulated nicely.

  Papa Pilgrim was gleeful. The family returned to “Old McCarthy Town,” as Pilgrim had started calling it, to celebrate with their new friends and neighbors. There would be music and dancing at the McCarthy Lodge. Snow still lingered but the days were getting longer, and the springtime sun was bright at eight that evening when the family appeared on the street, striding toward the saloon with their instruments. Pete McCarthy, still in town doing research, wrote that they looked like they were headed to a gunfight, though only Papa wore a pistol on his belt.

  Neil and Doug had laid out food on the breakfast table because the Pilgrims would not enter the saloon. Pilgrim introduced his wife, Country Rose, a redoubtable woman with a tired half smile who sometimes played a stand-up bass, and then the children by name, the older musicians from before, and now the midsized sprouts, Job, Noah, and Abraham, and the little blond girls, Psalms, Lamb, and Bethlehem. He announced that their new home up McCarthy Creek would henceforth be known as Hillbilly Heaven. He said this with a Santa Claus sparkle in eyes that Pete McCarthy noticed were “extremely bright.” The British writer, reveling in the strangeness of his namesake Alaska town, was utterly charmed.

  The kids have spotted the cheese and fruit and cake and cookies, but make no attempt to eat until someone offers the food around. A couple of them have bare feet. I’m not sure whether they took their boots off at the door or whether they walked down here in the snow like that. They take the instruments out of their cases and sit in a semicircle. There are twenty-six people in the room, and sixteen of them are Pilgrims. Pa makes a little speech of welcome, and then they start playing. It’s electrifying, moving and raw. Elishaba, the eldest, alternates lead vocals with nineteen-year-old Joshua as they trade licks on their violins. They have powerful, cutting voices, strengthened by singing outdoors, and sound like themselves rather than imitations of anyone else. Thirteen-year-old Jerusalem is a ferocious mandolin player, standing to take instrumental breaks then taking her seat again as her brothers and sisters, and Ma and Pa, continue the vocals. They’ve already written two songs about McCarthy, and they play them both tonight. At one point they put all the instruments down and sing a cappella in multipart harmony. Neil calls out a title, and they start doing requests. By now the three tiniest girls are holding hands and dancing in a circle, and the only ones not involved are two of the boys, about seven and nine years old at a guess—I think it would be hard to keep track even if you were their dad—who are lurking at the back. Suddenly they charge forward and start clog-dancing for all they’re worth, legs jiggling and big green boots flailing beneath wild grins as the whole room comes alive with them. It’s been a special evening. It’s hard to b
elieve they’ve only been playing for four years, and it’ll be no surprise if in years to come some of these kids are earning a living playing in brighter lights than McCarthy can offer. By the time they finish, we are indeed in hillbilly heaven.

  Talk turned to the new land. Pilgrim was told that traveling the thirteen miles to the Mother Lode camp would be tough. The family would never get their vehicles up the valley. The bridges are all gone, the road is washed away, the snow is melting with breakup at hand, and where it survives the trail is so tangled in willows and alders that even summertime backpackers can’t find their way.

  “We’re gonna be okay,” Papa Pilgrim told the Englishman. “Don’t make it in one day, we’ll take two. Don’t make it in two, then three. Whatever it takes. We got ropes, winches, all kinds of stuff. These kids can do most things.” As if to prove the point, a woman came in looking for help with her snowmachine and one of the clever little boys ran out and switched out a family headlight so she could journey home.

  Pete McCarthy adjourned “for a drop of the devil’s brew” with Doug Miller at the bar, where they admired a photo of the singer John Denver and Doug’s mother in McCarthy in 1975. Meanwhile, Neil Darish headed across the icy street with Pilgrim to inspect the latest improvements to Ma Johnson’s Hotel. Late into the night, Darish and Pilgrim talked in the small hotel lobby about what lay ahead with the national park and tourism and Old McCarthy Town. Darish had grown excited about everything the Pilgrims would add to the local mix—their appearance, their handy skills, their resourcefulness, their optimism, their old-time religion. Their authenticity. There was just one thing about their old-fashioned ways that worried him, and finally he blurted it out.