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

by Tom Kizzia

  Representatives of the National Park Service have been noted publicly in the past to deny any recognition or legality of previous right-of-ways within the park, including even our beloved McCarthy Road a lifeline for it’s people.

  We feel it is important for us to “disclaim” ANY AND ALL of their false claims and disallow their continual course of threats, harassment’s, and proposals about our private land holdings.

  ON A sunny day soon after Hunter Sharp delivered his terse letter to the Pilgrims, everyone in McCarthy headed up the mountain to attend a memorial at Kennicott. The Pilgrims went along, too. There would be food and music and speeches. People were calling it a big event—the end of an era.

  The memorial was for Chris Richards, a slight, animated man with a broom-straw beard and wire-rim glasses who had died in a fire the previous winter. Richards had been known informally as the Mayor of Kennicott. Now people were also referring to him as the seventh and last victim of the mail-day massacre. The older Pilgrim children had heard stories about the murders of six people in McCarthy, back in the early days of the park. Papa told them it was not a fit topic for discussion.

  A hundred people, including Chris Richards’s family from down south, gathered in Kennicott that day above a glacial moraine covered with picturesquely rusting industrial junk. Several Park Service employees were present as well. The agency had been giving the old mining and mill complex a lot of attention lately. In a park created in part to protect the continent’s last wilderness from mineral exploitation, it turned out that visitors were especially fascinated to encounter the lost industrial city, the massive falling-down buildings of the private company town whose red paint and white trim, peeling with age, provided a ready emblem for the “rape-ruin-and-run” development that environmentalists had warned against during the fight to establish the park.

  Tourists liked to explore the fourteen-story crushing mill and leaching plant that stepped down the mountainside in terraces of heavy timbers. They poked through the power station and the bosses’ homes built on a short loop of gravel dubbed “Silk Stocking Row.” There was a hospital, a school, a store and assay office, even a small gymnasium with a knot-free hardwood floor. The way everyone disappeared overnight when the mines closed in 1938 added to the mystique.

  The park was tightening things up, but for the longest time, anyone could wander through the buildings, picking up hospital records or a handful of bolts left in bins at the company store. They could climb the mountain on a half-day hike to the abandoned mines—the Bonanza, the Jumbo, the Erie. The ground at Kennicott was still littered with spilled chunks of blue copper azurite and green malachite. Some of the structures were collapsing, with alders growing up through the floorboards. It was, in short, not only the implacable beauty of the mountain wilderness but the atmosphere of decline and fall, the passing of bygone dreams, that gave shape to the visitor’s experience in America’s biggest national park.

  Chris Richards’s little red millworker’s cabin at Kennicott was where the violence had started that morning in 1983. His new neighbor, a bald, bushy-bearded computer programmer named Lou Hastings, showed up at the cabin on mail day and started shooting. They were the only two people in Kennicott at the time. Richards was full of questions afterward. Why did Hastings take out his hatred of the world on people who had come so far to get away from it? And why put on a silencer to kill the only other person in a ghost town? Richards managed to plunge a kitchen knife into Hastings’s thigh and escaped into the snow in his sock feet, bleeding from a hole in his cheek. He was flown to safety by a local pilot, who warned away the approaching mail plane and summoned the troopers. Six others meeting the mail plane that day, including a young newlywed couple who helped Richards onto the plane and stayed to warn the rest, were shot from ambush and killed.

  In the two decades since the murders, Richards had stayed on in his little tinder-dry cabin with no electricity, hauling water in plastic jugs, living altogether more primitively than Kennecott employees had in the 1920s. His black pirate flag didn’t scare anyone. Tourists peered in his windows. He had fled a broken heart to “the middle of nowhere” and now, he complained, he was living in a fishbowl. But he liked to tell visitors about the history of the mines. Some days he would also tell about getting shot in the face by the mail-day killer. He said it was like Hastings had taken a piece of his own insanity and shoved it in Richards’s brain. “My doctor said I should marry an ophthalmologist,” was one punch line. “I asked if she could be a lawyer-nymphomaniac, too.” Friends knew him as lovable and vulnerable except when he was drinking. One time some tourists were afraid to cross the footbridge in McCarthy because Richards was standing on the far side, waving a pistol in one hand and a bottle in the other. The winter the Pilgrims arrived, he had been struggling to dry out—not for the first time. His cabin was plagued by skittering insects that only he could see. Friends had warned him about excessively spraying wasp killer around the hot woodstove.

  He died on the night of the Christmas pageant at McCarthy’s little missionary church. The local pastor almost canceled the event when temperatures dropped to forty below for a week and not even snowmachines would run. But the cold let up and a few dozen friends and neighbors made it after all, mingling for a potluck supper and still talking, in a place that often featured weeks-long gaps in conversations, about the fallen twin towers from that September. Even far from New York City, they said, it felt especially important to come together that year as a community. So with heavy winter coveralls and boots piled downstairs, the people of McCarthy stood side by side in their sock feet, fervent Christians and nonbelievers, and sang “Silent Night” while outside the generator rumbled through the darkest hours of an Alaska winter.

  They saw the light up at Kennicott as they walked back across the footbridge to their trucks. Miles across the glacier, it burned bright like a Christmas star, a single pinprick in the silent sweep of stars and ice. The glow flickered and brightened, throwing shadows up the mountain. A call to Kennicott on the new phone at the church confirmed that it was a fire and made the families on the bridge feel helpless and guilty after the neighborly warmth in the church. The good news was that years earlier Chris Richards’s cabin had been dragged away from the other historic buildings into a leveled yard of mine tailings. The bad news was that his white husky mix was whining outside the cabin door.

  At the memorial six months later in June, people said it was going to be hard to imagine Kennicott without Chris Richards. In a way, his loss marked the end of McCarthy’s transition from hideout to tourist attraction. Richards had been so much a part of the contradictory spirit of that transition, both embracing and resisting the national park’s plans to fix up the ruins, embracing and resisting the visitors who paid him for tours through the sagging red buildings and across collapsing foundations, his acid historical narrative veering into more recent anecdotes of tourists who tried to walk off with souvenirs from his porch.

  Then again, eras were always ending here. It was the natural sadness of living on a frontier, a counterpoint to the great excitement of opening something new.

  And new things were indeed starting to happen. Three weeks after the Kennicott fire, the Pilgrim Family had showed up in McCarthy.

  THE FOURTH of July was a big occasion in McCarthy in copper-mining days, when it was the only day, other than Christmas, that the miners got off work. The streets would be decorated with red, white, and blue bunting for parades featuring marching bands, followed by baseball games between the McCarthy Tigers and the Kennecott Bear Cats and sometimes a team off the train from Cordova, the town at the steamship docks on the other end of the line. These days, the Fourth is still a big deal. A hundred visitors might show up in McCarthy for the improvised events—a parade of the oldest surviving trucks in town, mud wrestling by female mountain guides, a slowest-bicycle race.

  In 2002, the parade featured the newly arrived Pilgrim Family band, performing in the back of a pickup truck that crept
past the lodge followed by Papa on horseback.

  The nation’s birthday served to remind the area’s lone full-time government employee that there had still been no official contact with the new family up McCarthy Creek. The date for shutting off the Mother Lode entrance and surveying the Pilgrims’ property lines was growing near.

  Marshall Neeck took off his NPS uniform and drove his four-wheeler down from Kennicott. Outside McCarthy’s red railroad depot, which now housed a small museum, he saw the town’s last gold miner, Randy Elliott, in conversation with Papa Pilgrim and three sons. In his incident report, Neeck noted that one of the sons wore a pistol.

  “I’m looking for a Mr. Hale,” the ranger said, sitting on his four-wheeler in the street.

  “There’s no one here by that name,” said Elliott.

  “I’m hoping I can talk to someone in the Pilgrim Family?”

  Elliott gestured at the older man standing next to a pickup truck. “That’s him.”

  “I’m Marshall Neeck, and I want to apologize for any misunderstandings that …”

  “You can stop right there,” Pilgrim said. “I’ve said all I’m going to say.”

  “I was hoping that you can tell me how we can communicate,” Neeck said.

  “If you keep speaking, I’ll get in my truck and drive off. I hope you can respect that.”

  “I do respect that,” Neeck said, “and I respect your privacy and way of life. I was just asking how we can communicate.”

  “That’s it,” said Pilgrim, getting into his truck. The sons stirred, glaring at the ranger.

  Neeck did not want to start anything. He drove away.

  ABOUT ONE thing, the Pilgrims’ neighbors had been right. Getting to the land at Hillbilly Heaven proved a vexing logistical problem. That first spring, the family had all snowmachined up to the homestead. But when Country Rose and the oldest boys went back to the road system to get supplies, the snow deteriorated quickly. Alders poked through where they choked off the old mining road. Papa and the girls and young children were trapped. The boys arranged for a local pilot, Gary Green, to airdrop boxes of groceries.

  A feeling of desperation settled in. It was left to Elishaba, the oldest daughter, to find meat. She scaled the mountainside above the cabin with a rifle slung over her shoulder and her little brother Israel following. When she found herself hanging from a bush on a cliff, she ordered Israel not to look down. The mountain goat she shot tumbled nearly back to the valley floor. It was badly pounded and she had no license and the season was closed, but it was the first meat they’d seen and her father praised her when she carried it through the cabin door.

  Once the snow melted, travel up the valley on horseback required crossing the creek again and again. They scraped off the airstrip but hiring local bush pilots to fly them from McCarthy was eating through their savings.

  In midsummer, the two oldest Pilgrim sons, Joseph and Joshua, spent a week at Wigger’s wanigan in town rebuilding a tracked vehicle that they hoped to use over the trail to the Mother Lode. The journey turned out to be exceptionally arduous, however, with willows leafed out and alders grown thick, and steep gravel climbs at every stream crossing.

  Joseph and Joshua had made it partway home when they heard the rumble of heavy equipment and came around a corner to find their father at the controls of the D5 Caterpillar left at Wigger’s mining claims. He had come from the homestead, clearing the wagon road as he traveled.

  How was the trip from town, boys? he asked.

  Really tough, they said.

  “You’ll have it easy the rest of the way,” Pilgrim said with a big smile.

  For the next three days, the boys helped their father push the bulldozer’s eight-foot blade toward McCarthy, carving through berms of river rock and cutting new trail where the bank had washed away. Pilgrim told his sons they were doing maintenance of the Green Butte Road. But each night, he covered the Cat with a camouflage tarp under trees so the Park Service could not see it from the air. When they got close to town, they left the last stretch disguised as rough trail and turned back up the valley.

  McCARTHY DID not split into pro-Pilgrim and anti-Pilgrim factions right away. At first, the newcomers mystified one and all. They made a curious sight in town that first summer, clustered together in their pioneer garb and talking among themselves, like travelers who didn’t speak the local language. The youngest children met tourists at the footbridge and offered rides to Kennicott in a horse-drawn wagon. A few visitors wondered if they might be Amish. This quaint effort siphoned off a little business from the existing van shuttle service, but the van’s owner was sympathetic and didn’t object.

  Then the Bollard Wars broke out again.

  The bollards were steel and concrete posts, sunk deep into the riverside gravel at either end of the footbridge across the Kennicott River. They were put in place to keep motorized vehicles from crossing the sturdy metal grating into town. To some, the bollards were a symbol of the community’s effort to hold the world at bay. But dissenters had come to see them as a rebuke to the very frontier freedoms that McCarthy’s yesteryear charm was supposed to evoke. Persons unknown had cut them down three times already. The previous summer, with a state trooper investigation under way, highway workers had set out to make the obstructions bombproof, installing ten-inch-diameter steel pipes filled with steel beams and concrete, welded to three-foot-square plates buried five feet deep in the gravel.

  This time the bollard busters had used a torch and bulldozer to clear the way.

  This dispute over access had been building in McCarthy for some time. Those who accepted traditional notions of frontier progress believed better access—a faster road, a bigger bridge—was the key to McCarthy’s future. Others saw nothing wrong with a few roadblocks. The pro-footbridge association of local residents, the McCarthy Area Council, or MAC, was now opposed by a second group, the Coalition for Access to McCarthy, or CAM. When the two groups were invited to pose questions to state transportation planners regarding improved access to McCarthy, the final merged list of 122 queries, ranging from the eminently practical to the nigglingly constitutional, read like found poetry, a free-verse ode to rural Alaskan cantankerousness.

  Nobody knew which side the Pilgrims would be on. If anything, people assumed the reclusive family would be opposed to “progress” of any kind, including bridge improvements.

  As that summer of 2002 drew to an end, however, a surprising letter appeared in the pages of the Wrangell St. Elias News, the bimonthly newspaper published in a cabin across the river from town. It started off in a familiar ingratiating voice:

  We really love and appreciate the courage of all the folks of McCarthy, and I would say that we can see everybody’s deep plight concerning the road and the bridge. Although it may not touch my family as close as most, as we are sort of “bent” towards the joy that extreme hardship brings, we in every way share in our hearts with you the needs and frustrations that are upon us all.

  We also have been faced with challenges by Park Service threats of road, bridge and mine closures. It seems they would as soon be rid of us permanently so they could have their own way.

  Papa Pilgrim then unleashed a long anathema on the Park Service, whom he accused of using deception and falsehood—and control of access and the footbridge—to divide the “in-dwellers,” one against the other.

  Don’t they want us? Need us? Aren’t we the people that represent the park and its history? Is it not the devotion of the bush pilots, hotel and lodge keepers, the miners, the families that carved out a living 200 miles from town, that form that personal and living touch that visitors come to see here in Historic Alaska?

  The inholders are the real people of the Alaskan bush. After those few months of serving the park’s visitors, they alone are left, as the cold winter wind is blowing, and the snow reaches the bridle of a horse. They find the joy of the silent northern lights running wild. A hot cup of coffee at the lodge to help out along the winter trail home. Wh
ere, then, are the park officials? The Department of Transportation bridge builders?

  They will think of us again when winter turns to spring and break-up roars off the rivers.

  They will make their secret plans to clean house in a big sweep, through harassment, fraud and deceit, as they strive for total power and control.

  Once they get rid of us, then the roads will open up and become paved, bridges will be built, and fancy parking lots and motor home parks, where you’ll get arrested if you leave the designated walkway or park at the wrong angle with your car.

  Yes, even though I am new to all of this, it’s easy to see down the trail a little ways.

  Pilgrim warned his neighbors of an “onslaught of evil” before turning, like a practiced preacher, toward the bridge as a symbol of unity and a better day.

  We need to see the light and realize where the battle really is—IT IS INSIDE US!

  The challenge is great, but we know that “what we sow, we will reap.” Where bitter seeds are planted, hearts will harden, but a helping hand will make the harvest sweet.

  The National Park Service has betrayed Alaska. This cannot be good.

  But you are my neighbor—thank God you’re there—let’s get together.… We could say, “Remember the Alamo,” or even better, “What must I do Lord to be saved?” I do know love is real. It works and never fails. Our survival as a community is challenged, and we love you.

  In Jesus,

  The Pilgrims

  PILGRIM’S SURPRISING down-from-the-mountain sermon was as welcome to the pastor of McCarthy’s little church as it was to the editor of the local newspaper, for they were one and the same person. Rick Kenyon was a self-made frontiersman, no more trained in journalism when he started the paper than he had been in ministry when he started his Bible study classes in McCarthy—or for that matter, in carpentry when he built his first log cabin, after moving north from Florida. But he was a fast learner and a natural crusader, ready to use any pulpit available and to hammer together additional pulpits as necessary. He was delighted to discover a new ally whose finely honed sense of political grievance and vigorous begetting seemed certain to tilt the hand count at community meetings in Kenyon’s favor.