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

by Tom Kizzia

  “Papa, I just want you to hear it from me,” he said. “You need to know that Doug and I are gay. That doesn’t matter a bit to most people in McCarthy. Folks here live and let live. But I don’t know how you might feel about it.”

  Papa Pilgrim replied slowly, his drawl emerging from his tangled gray beard as a kind of wistful sigh.

  “Neil, you haven’t judged me. We don’t judge people either. We’re here to mind our own business, to live quiet and peaceful lives, to work with our hands and sing our pleasant songs. Now I don’t expect to see a street corner preacher here in McCarthy anytime soon, telling people how they ought to live. But if a preacher like that does show up, I can tell you that Pilgrim won’t be here listening. He’ll be home with his family at Hillbilly Heaven, telling them the truth.”

  It was as if Pilgrim’s bright blue eyes had peered into Darish’s heart. The accepting and nonjudgmental patriarch had made an important friend and ally.

  Within days, the Pilgrims were battling their way up McCarthy Creek to their new home, and Pete McCarthy was headed out the gravel road to civilization. The road from McCarthy, he wrote, was “a tough drive through ruts and potholes and glacial debris, but I hope the Alaskan authorities never upgrade it. Easy access would change McCarthy forever.”

  From Alaska, it would be off to Ireland in a final search for the origins of his elusive namesake prospector. The Road to McCarthy would be Pete McCarthy’s final book. Upon its release, its author was diagnosed with cancer. He died eight months later, at age fifty-two. He left behind a prediction about the Pilgrim Family that would prove, unusually for him, an understatement:

  It’s almost midnight when I head across to Ma Johnson’s to go to bed. Pa Pilgrim and Country Rose and Neil are sitting in the lobby talking, with a selection of children asleep in chairs and sofas all around them. They pick up a couple of the smallest kids, and the big kids pick up some of the medium-sized ones, and they say goodnight and head off into the darkness to their makeshift camp. I wonder how things will turn out for them and the town of McCarthy? Whatever happens, it seems unlikely to be dull. Seventeen people can’t fail to make an impact.

  Bobby Hale and John Connally’s daughter, Kathleen, 1959 (photo credit 2.1)

  IF SOMETHING seemed a little strange about Papa Pilgrim’s rustic charm, no one in McCarthy was inclined to press the matter. His origins were naturally a subject of curiosity. But an old frontier constraint against stirring the embers of a neighbor’s past still prevailed in the Wrangell Mountains. It would be a long time, then, before the first of Pilgrim’s secrets emerged—that the wandering hillbilly had grown up in the top echelons of Texas society, in an affluent Fort Worth neighborhood of well-kept lawns and shade trees, country clubs and sports cars. That he was the son of a Texas-size hero. And that his journey into the wilderness had started when his defiance of one of the most powerful men in Texas led to the death of a beautiful girl.

  He was Bobby Hale in those high school days. His father, I. B. Hale, had been a three-hundred-pound, two-time all-American football tackle for Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. In 1938—the year Kennecott Copper closed its Alaska mines for good—TCU was the undefeated national collegiate football champion. I. B. Hale was cocaptain of the team. His roommate was the Heisman Trophy–winning quarterback Davey O’Brien, the player for whom the national collegiate quarterback-of-the-year award is now named.

  I. B. Hale was a first-round draft pick out of college by the Washington Redskins. But he turned down the pros to remain in Texas, where he signed up instead with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (along with his close friend O’Brien, who played briefly in the pros for the Philadelphia Eagles). Hale married beauty and wealth. He became head of the FBI’s Dallas office and a friend of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. He left the bureau in 1951 to become security chief at the local General Dynamics fighter jet plant. He was admired in the community. But he was an inconstant husband and father, lavishing attention on public charities but not on his family. He was an enthusiastic dancer and bridge player at the local country club, where he had an affair with his wife’s best friend that would end his marriage, and where he dropped dead of a heart attack in 1971 at age fifty-five.

  Papa Pilgrim bragged privately to his children that he couldn’t even get a speeding ticket when he was growing up because his father was so respected. But there was a sadness in the way he spoke of I.B., because for all the man’s dashing qualities, he’d never had a lot of time for Bobby. He traveled a lot—he worked out of Kansas City for the bureau at one point, while his family remained in Texas—and when I.B. got home he usually had to sort out some trouble Bobby had gotten into. Nor did Bobby ever forgive his father for the affair, which he was forced to keep secret from his mother, Virginia, until it led to divorce and his father’s second marriage. At least that was what Pilgrim later told his family—the assertion must be measured against the son’s own complicated relations with women in the years to come.

  Bobby did have the company of an identical twin brother, Billy. They were born in 1941. By the time they were college age, Bobby and Billy still looked enough alike to take tests for each other. One way to tell them apart was that Bobby had broken his nose many times. He was a trained boxer and an aggressive playground scrapper. He liked to drink and fight. He was headstrong—he once ran off and got an oilfield job against his father’s orders—but he was good-looking and charming as well. He dressed sharply, drove a Thunderbird, and carried himself like he was something special. “As a kid, he could really snow you,” his stepmother recalled.

  Bobby’s troubles got the twins sent away to an Episcopal prep school in Tennessee, but by the start of 1959 they were back as juniors at Arlington Heights High School, the affluent public school in west Fort Worth. One of their schoolmates was John Deutschendorf, a guitar player who later became famous as the singer John Denver and showed up in McCarthy, Alaska, in 1975 to make a pro-conservation movie. Singers Shawn Phillips and Delbert McClinton also attended in those years. Another schoolmate, when they were freshmen, was Lee Harvey Oswald, whose mother had just moved to a poor neighborhood in the district. And then there was the daughter of fast-rising Fort Worth lawyer and politician John Connally.

  Her name was Kathleen, but Bobby called her by her nickname, KK. A young beauty, brown-eyed, chestnut-haired, an honors student, and popular with her peers, Kathleen was fifteen years old when she started sneaking out at night with Bobby Hale. Her father was legal counsel for the millionaire Fort Worth oilman Sid Richardson. He was also a close and longtime associate of Senate majority leader Lyndon Baines Johnson, having managed Johnson’s first successful campaign for U.S. Senate in 1948. John Connally would go on to become a three-term governor of Texas, secretary of the Treasury for President Richard Nixon, and, most famously, the man wounded by Oswald in the front seat of John F. Kennedy’s limousine in Dallas in 1963.

  The Hale and Connally families knew each other socially. Kathleen, the oldest of four children, had always been a source of great pride to her family. But after she started helping Bobby with his homework and then dating him, she drew away. “We began to notice a subtle change in Kathleen. Suddenly a wall had gone up that we could not penetrate,” Connally wrote in an autobiography published the year of his death in 1993. It was the only place he ever mentioned Bobby Hale in public. The name of his book was In History’s Shadow.

  First it was her behavior, her schoolwork, her time on the phone. Bobby was very good at making a girlfriend jealous, recalled Kathleen’s friend and locker mate, Patsy Dorris, who was dating (and later married) Bobby’s twin brother. Bobby would make sure KK saw him carrying another girl’s books, but deny it meant anything. Then, after one of her parents’ frequent trips to Washington, a teacher from school called to say Kathleen, now sixteen, had been sick in class—and it appeared to be morning sickness. The Connallys interrogated KK and Bobby, separately and together, with growing impatience. The teenagers insisted nothing was wrong. Kathlee
n was grounded. But one night in March 1959, she snuck out again anyway.

  Connally recalled waiting up to meet her when she got home at midnight: “She repeated once again that nothing was wrong. And then I slapped her. Even as I did it, I wished that I hadn’t. A thousand times since—maybe more—I have wanted to call back my hand. She was silent. The slap echoed in my ear. She turned and went to her room.”

  Connally flew off again the next day to the nation’s capital, and that night Kathleen loaded her clothes in the family station wagon and left, ignoring her mother’s tears. Bobby Hale and Kathleen drove to Ardmore, Oklahoma, where they could get married despite their youth, then on to Tallahassee, Florida. Once they had settled into a grim little second-story apartment and Bobby got a job in a shipyard, Kathleen wrote her parents. I. B. Hale and John Connally drove at once to Florida. Kathleen was indeed pregnant. The fathers were greeted warmly, but were rebuffed when they pleaded for the kids to come home. Connally was disturbed to hear from the landlady downstairs that the young couple argued frequently. Kathleen had even left the apartment for several days to stay in a hotel, but the newlyweds had reconciled. “Kathleen was determined to prove that what she had done was not a mistake, not a fiasco,” Connally wrote. “She felt that what she had done was wrong, that she had disappointed us, but that she would somehow make it all turn out right.”

  The fathers drove home. A week later, on April 28, 1959, Kathleen was dead.

  The teenagers had been married for forty-four days.

  The Connallys and Hales rushed to Tallahassee in Sid Richardson’s corporate plane. Bobby had been placed in protective custody overnight after threatening to throw himself off the apartment balcony in grief.

  He had been the only one present when the shotgun went off.

  A coroner’s inquest was held the very next day. Given the prominence of the parents, it was front-page news in Texas and Florida.

  Bobby conceded they’d been fighting. Earlier they had fought over a bathtub ring that KK failed to clean properly, he said. When she died, it was something even less important—really just a discussion, he said. But she had walked out and disappeared overnight. He searched all over town, little suspecting she was hiding in the landlady’s apartment downstairs. The landlady said Kathleen was “thoroughly frightened.” A police officer said she’d come by the local station that morning. KK wrote Bobby a letter saying she was hurt in mind and soul. She felt he didn’t love her anymore.

  Bobby testified before the inquest jury that when he returned to the apartment at noon, his sixteen-year-old bride was sitting on the couch, holding his 20-gauge shotgun. She had it pointed at her head, her finger on the trigger. He didn’t even know she could load it. He said he got on his knees and tried to talk her into putting down the gun. Then he stood as if to casually stub out a cigarette.

  “At the last desperate moment I lunged at the gun. I hit it as hard as I could. It hit the wall and she was still …” His voice trailed away, and he sat, mute and wide-eyed. I. B. Hale, sitting in the audience, wept.

  After several moments, the judge asked, “Did the gun go off before you hit it?”

  “I don’t know. She opened her eyes once, looked at me, and fell to the floor. I caught her and said ‘KK.’ ”

  The circumstances were certainly suspicious. The shotgun wound was behind her right ear. No fingerprints were found on the gun, according to extensive press coverage. There was testimony about how she tried to get away. Her friends back home couldn’t believe Kathleen would ever threaten to kill herself. But Bobby’s story was supported by a lie-detector test.

  The inquest took less than a day. The coroner’s jury ruled the shooting an accident. The families flew straight back to Texas. Nobody seemed interested in a drawn-out investigation.

  Senator Lyndon Johnson—KK’s “Uncle Lindy”—canceled a lunch in Washington with former president Harry Truman and flew back to Texas to serve as a pallbearer at the funeral. The sanctuary of the First Methodist Church was filled with political friends of the Connallys and teenaged friends of the young couple. Bobby entered on the arm of I. B. Hale.

  “I have not spoken to Bobby since then,” Connally wrote in the chapter of his autobiography titled “Kathleen.” “Over the years, he has attempted to call me. I have never taken his call, nor will I. If this seems flinty and cold, so be it. Our daughter was gone and so was Bobby Hale, as far as I was concerned.”

  Connally wrote that the death of his vivacious daughter left a burden of sorrow more profound than any tragedy in his life—his later bribery trial, his bankruptcy, even the assassination of a president.

  “This is the first time I have ever discussed it in any detail,” he concluded, “and it will also be the last.”

  The Pilgrim Family band, Fourth of July parade in McCarthy, 2002 (photo credit 3.1)

  NOT LONG after the concert at the McCarthy Lodge celebrating the Pilgrims’ new home, the National Park Service stepped forth to welcome the family to the McCarthy Creek valley.

  One generation earlier, when Wrangell–St. Elias National Park was first created, such a gesture from emissaries of the federal government would have seemed presumptuous, if not rashly provocative. The new parks had been controversial in Alaska. Park rangers were being refused service in restaurants and stores in the regional crossroads town of Glennallen. They were booted from their motel rooms and had their office lease revoked. In 1979, somebody even torched the rangers’ Cessna 180 at the Tazlina Glacier Lodge airstrip.

  But these days a friendly welcome struck the park’s managers as appropriate. Twenty years had passed. The government’s presence in the mountain range was indisputably established. The Pilgrims were the newcomers.

  There was, to be sure, some urgency to the park rangers’ overture. This big family was moving lock, stock, and barrel into a valley that had seen little human disturbance since the park was established. The three Pilgrim properties were, moreover, noncontiguous. In the old days, miners had never worried how they got from one place to another. But now arrangements would be necessary. Even in Alaska, a person could get in real trouble driving cross-country through a national park.

  On May 3, 2002, assistant superintendent Hunter Sharp, who was also the park’s chief law enforcement ranger, stopped by Walt Wigger’s one-room shack in town, a wooden gypsy wanigan on wheels with a smokestack. The family was setting up a kind of base camp, stacking lumber and supplies and staking out their horses. Accompanying Sharp was Marshall Neeck, the park ranger based at Kennecott—or “Kennicott,” as the locals persisted in spelling it.

  Pilgrim was not home. The older sons would not make eye contact with the rangers or speak, except to caution that the big mountain dogs were biters.

  Three days later, Sharp tried again, this time in writing.

  Dear Mr. Pilgrim,

  I am writing you to welcome you and your family to McCarthy Creek. You have selected a beautiful place for your home. I have heard from some of the people you have met around McCarthy that you and your family are very talented musicians. I am sure that your family will have much to offer to the community.…

  I was hoping that we would have a chance to talk at some point. I stopped by your lot in McCarthy on Friday to welcome your family to the area. The two young men there told me to stay off the property, a request that I complied with.

  He said he hoped to avoid any problems.

  I know from my own experience that living with a National Park is different than living next to some of the other public lands such as National Forest lands or State of Alaska lands because the land use regulations are different. Owning land within a National Park does not necessarily mean that you cannot do what you want with the land that you own. However, I am convinced that we will both have an easier time if we can discuss some of the restrictions that may apply to the use of the public lands before any issues come up to create barriers between us.

  At the McCarthy airstrip, the envelope from the Park Service went un
claimed in the mail shack.

  Later, Neil Darish approached Hunter Sharp and said he’d been asked to inform the park ranger that the Pilgrims intended to read the park regulations for themselves and did not wish to be contacted for any reason.

  The Park Service looked up the new deed for the Wigger place and found the surnames “Sunstar” and “Hale.” They began making calls to other agencies. A ranger flew a small plane up McCarthy Creek and took photos of a fresh clearing around Wigger’s cabins. A bulldozer had opened a road across a few hundred yards of public land to the Spokane placer airstrip, and there appeared to be new switchbacks up the rockslides toward the Mother Lode Mine.

  In June, Chief Ranger Sharp sent a terser letter, this time to Mr. Robert Hale. He said the National Park Service was undertaking a program to secure openings to the abandoned underground workings connected to the Kennecott Mines National Historic Landmark. A park crew would be arriving by helicopter in July to install metal gates and plugs at mine shafts proximal to the Mother Lode claims. The crew also intended to make a boundary survey of the Spokane placer site and Marvelous Millsite. Mr. Hale was encouraged to get in touch with District Ranger Neeck if he had any questions.

  The letter was left unopened at the mail shack with a boot mark on it. The Park Service then posted the same information in a public notice in the shack. They returned to find a sheet titled “AKA Pilgrim’s Public Notice #1” nailed directly over theirs.

  The Park Service officials have pursued our family with harassment and threats. We want the folks of McCarthy and Kennicott to understand that the park’s attitude and actions are unwarranted, and legally unfounded.

  The Pilgrim Family declared they would henceforth enforce their claim to all long-standing and existing rights-of-way connected to their mining properties, and deny access to park rangers for any survey or mine closure.