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

by Tom Kizzia

  Afterward some locals lit a bonfire, and several of the Motorheads drifted outside. Carl Bauman was pleased to see Papa come over. Bauman was a lawyer with a corporate firm in Anchorage and was rather more conservative than some of his friends on the trip (he was later appointed a state judge by Governor Sarah Palin). He had been the one pushing his friends, unsuccessfully, to seek a group discount for their day trip. But up at the homestead he’d been impressed by the family’s resilience and music and their plight after the cabin fire. He admired the older sons’ wilderness proficiency and good cheer. He was stirred by Papa’s long and heartfelt prayer before they broke bread. On their return to the lodge that night, Bauman had gone around collecting a big tip for the Pilgrim boys. They talked about putting together a clothing drive when they got back to Anchorage.

  “I do have a question,” Bauman said by the fire. “You keep saying sixteen children. I count only fifteen.”

  “We always include our daughter, Hope,” Pilgrim said. “Hope would have been our third child. She died at four months.”

  It took Bauman a few more questions to realize Pilgrim meant four months after conception. The visitor was moved that they counted the miscarriage of Hope when they added up their children.

  “We buried her on the bend of a river in Texas,” Pilgrim said. It was a story he’d recited to his family so many times that all except Country Rose had come to believe it was true. Rose remembered leaving the fetus—boy or girl, she never knew—in the freezer of a kindly couple who took them in after their truck broke down on a West Texas back road.

  Bauman handed Pilgrim his card. He sensed the old backwoodsman had singled him out because he was shrewd enough to recognize a sympathetic worldview, despite superficial differences in education and affluence. They were both conservative fathers who understood the value of piety and the importance of family.

  Later, though, Bauman wondered if Papa Pilgrim had singled him out that night because he knew he was going to need a lawyer.

  Preacher Bob and family at the Rainbow Cross Ranch, New Mexico, 1986 (photo credit 6.1)

  FOR THE traveler approaching the Sangre de Cristo Mountains across the high sagebrush desert of northern New Mexico, the Mora River valley comes as a lush surprise. Foothill ridges of bare rock and Ponderosa pine open suddenly into broad green panoramas marked by clusters of cattle, isolated farmsteads, and big shady willows along the creeks and irrigation courses. In the town of Mora itself, once an outpost of Old Mexico, families trace their roots back centuries: Spanish was spoken here long before English-speaking immigrants showed up. State highways crossing the valley turn at ninety degrees to avoid old cemeteries and rotting adobe ruins. The land rises through canyons to high peaks where snow lingers into summer. The Sangre de Cristos are the southernmost extension of the Rockies. The old Santa Fe Trail turned away here, marking the summits on early maps as “Impassable Mountains.”

  The range has a tradition of saints and mystics. The mountains got their name, according to legend, from a seventeenth-century missionary who asked God for one last sign before Pueblo Indians martyred him. He looked up to see the summits bathed in sunset alpenglow—the Blood of Christ. Scholars say the name is more likely from the Penitentes, the cultish nineteenth-century society of poor and isolated Hispanic mountain villagers whose Holy Week ceremonies included flagellation with yucca whips, barefoot treks with heavy crosses, and ritual crucifixion. Not far south of Mora is Hermit Peak, where an Italian ascetic lived in a shallow cave atop a thousand-foot cliff during the time of the American Civil War, subsisting on corn meal and water gathered drip by drip from a rock seep. Giovanni Maria Agostini was the son of a Piedmont noble who, it was said, traveled the world as a pilgrim with a heavy burden, the sin of killing his cousin in a quarrel. He was said to have cured poor villagers of smallpox with herbal potions and prayer. When they found him murdered by renegades in a cave south of the mountain, a knife in his back, admirers erected a heavy wooden cross atop Hermit Peak in his memory.

  One century later, another massive timber cross appeared in the high country above the Mora River. It was the work of another pilgrim bearing a heavy burden, a bearded Jesus freak who rode the high trails on horseback and lectured backpackers about salvation. He went by the name of Preacher Bob, or Mountain Bob, or Holy Bob.

  Down in the valley, people knew him and his young family as the hippies who’d been struck by lightning.

  THE FAMILY drove down into Mora from time to time, looking for hay or old truck parts. At first nobody knew where they lived. This was not unusual. Land ownership and tenancy in the far reaches of the local Mexican land grant tended to be deliberately vague. This guardedness dated back to the Mexican War, when American volunteers taught a lesson to Mora’s combative Hispanics by leveling their town with a cannon. After the war, Anglo businessmen used American courts to pry grazing and forest lands out of the hands of the original families, who once owned vast parts of the nine-hundred-thousand-acre land grant in common. Then, around the turn of the century, the federal government expelled local grazers and tree cutters from the high mountains when it created the first generation of national forests. For its complexity, opacity, and legacy of bitterness, the history of land control in northern New Mexico makes Alaska’s modern disputes over conservation lands seem simple by comparison.

  Another complicating wave of settlement arrived in the decade before Preacher Bob, as hippies were drawn to the backwoods, most famously around the artist colony of Taos. These were the mountains supposedly home to the commune visited in the 1969 road movie Easy Rider. Some of these newcomers lived flamboyantly, others took quiet advantage of murky land titles, in either case causing stress within traditional Hispanic and Indian settlements. In Mora, the seat of the poorest county in New Mexico, many people assumed that the hippie preacher was squatting in the national forest or on somebody else’s land.

  One neighbor who knew exactly where the young family had settled was Editha Bartley, who owned a sawmill and a four-thousand-acre cattle-and-guest ranch just over the ridge from their cabin. Bartley had grown up in a prominent local Anglo family—her grandfather, a doctor, started a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Mora area. Looking rather like Barbara Stanwyck in the old television series The Big Valley, she continued after her husband’s death to manage their ranch with the help of her son.

  The hippie migration to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains had not gone well for the Bartleys. Their first neighbors in the high country beyond their back fence weren’t exactly flower children. They looked like hippies, as Editha Bartley tells the story, but they were drug runners, cattle rustlers, and game poachers off the adjacent Santa Fe National Forest. Several dozen lived in a tent city and an early Spanish shepherd’s cabin made of hand-hewn aspen logs. They called it a commune, but to Bartley it seemed more like a hideout.

  The outlaws knew to stay on reasonably good terms with the Bartleys, who hired an ex–Green Beret to ride their north fence. Editha’s son, John, rode up to the tent camp on horseback one time with the Vietnam War vet and glimpsed an arsenal that included two machine guns. One of the renegades was lying by a campfire, groaning, his leg wounded badly by an ax. His gangrene was being treated with marijuana, peyote, and alcohol. Eventually, he was rolled into a blanket and carried down the mountain to an emergency room, but it was too late. His friends carried him back and built a huge pyre in the meadow, and hundreds of hippies from all over the mountain range showed up for the funeral.

  The party ended when several of the longhairs, caught poaching a deer, backed a forest ranger off the mountain at gunpoint. Three nights later, a posse of state police and federal marshals drove their horse trailers to the Bartleys’ ranch and rode out at four a.m. to climb the ridge and descend into the outlaw camp at first light. They marched the backwoodsmen out of the mountains and arrested nine on various charges.

  Compared to that, Bob and Kurina Rose Hale seemed a blessing, Editha Bartley said. At least at first. They showed up in
1979, a few years after the outlaws had been cleared out. In the high mountain meadow surrounded by spruce and fir, Bob Hale had built a crude log cabin for his young wife, still practically a teenager, and their two small children. It wasn’t much—low ceilinged and dark, with rough-sawn boards for shelves—but there was a warmth to the place. At times, Editha Bartley would ride up to visit on her own, stopping for coffee and fresh strawberry muffins. Bob’s ingenuity and energy impressed her. “We had so many problems with the bad hippies, he seemed like a gift of God himself,” Editha Bartley said.

  PREACHER BOB liked to tell how they came to the Sangre de Cristos, a story of heavenly signs and wonders. Soon after coming to know Jesus, while visiting friends in rural Raton, New Mexico, Bob felt a call to visit a dusty outhouse. Tucked in a corner of the ceiling, he discovered a note from somebody called Tin Man, looking for a family to caretake land in the mountains near Mora, south of Cimarron. The Hales ascended a rough Jeep road over rocky ledges, and at nine thousand feet all they found was a run-down lean-to shack. But Bob dug a hole four feet deep and declared that if God filled it with water by morning they would stay. He chose a low, wet spot to dig his hole.

  Their daughter was about to turn four. Many years later, Elishaba sat down to write about her upbringing and recalled the struggle to survive that first winter.

  As we huddled in the lean to, my father actually built our log cabin around us. I will never forget the picture of him driving long spikes into the logs as the snowstorm hurled huge snow-flakes all around us. At the end of each day, we would crawl into our little lean-to, lit with only a bare oil-burning lamp, where we snuggled up just to stay warm. I looked forward to cuddling with my daddy each night, as he felt so big, safe, and secure.

  Tin Man and his friend Papa Bear claimed to be keeping an eye on the high-elevation forest for a local Hispanic elder. They turned out to be log rustlers, cutting and skidding old-growth trees off the land with a big white workhorse, brandishing guns and firing warning shots at the Hales’ cabin to discourage interference. Elishaba remembered lying on the adobe floor of the cabin with her little brother as gunshots rang out, wondering who the “mean people” were. They came from the world below their mountain, was all that she knew. Her daddy sat defiantly at the window with his rifle, refusing to be intimidated. He had Mama check into the land records. That was how they discovered that the Hispanic elder didn’t even own the land anymore. He had sold it to a movie star.

  Jack Nicholson first came to the Taos area while filming Easy Rider. The movie’s writer and director, Dennis Hopper, who also had a starring role, liked what he saw and returned to buy the Taos estate of the 1920s heiress and arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan. Nicholson visited and wound up buying land on the other side of the range, backing the Santa Fe National Forest, from one of Mora’s original Mexican land grant families. The 1977 land sale had been hushed up, not because of the buyer’s celebrity but because the Hispanic community still frowned on selling land to outsiders. When the news finally trickled out, people were surprised the hippie couple had managed to get a ten-dollar-a-month lease to caretake the Hollywood star’s land. Bob Hale claimed it was his eloquent letter about the family’s subsistence pastoralism that won them the invitation to stay. He put an end to Tin Man’s log rustling. The family became guardians of the ancient forest.

  Then they were struck by lightning.

  Bob Hale was turning more and more to the study of God’s word. Rose, pregnant again, was responsible for running the primitive household—cooking on a woodstove, doing laundry by hand. When Rose had visited Beverly Hills, her mother told her she was certainly getting to be “country.” Papa was delighted by that line, and started calling Rose “Country” as a term of endearment.

  He took charge of the family’s spiritual well-being and made his daughter throw away her baby doll. The children took on more chores, learning to milk the cow and not spill it all on the walk back to the cabin. For a while, their days included time for organized homeschooling. Elizabeth—the name they started calling Butterfly after they got saved—loved her daddy’s dramatic readings from a book of animal stories, particularly one about a bear and a wolverine. But before too long he discovered impure doctrines in the books. The reading lessons ended. He threw the books down the family’s hand-dug septic hole in the woods. It was one of Elizabeth’s jobs to carry the family’s toilet bucket up the trail each morning and pour the contents into the hole. She was sad to watch those bright-colored books, the last vestiges of her formal education, subside day by day in the bottom sludge until they vanished.

  After this, the only readings were out of the Bible. As a sign of their righteousness, their father erected a big cross above the ridgepole of the cabin.

  What happened next might have ended the career of many biblical prophets. The direct hit came during one of those black-cloud downpours that often boil through the summits of the Sangre de Cristos. David, their fourth child, was a baby: After they gave up calendars, Rose found, the easiest way to notch the passage of time was by newborns. The whole family was huddled inside the cabin, Papa and Mama and four tykes in two-year increments, praying as thunder ripped and exploded outside. The blast atomized the eighteen-inch barn spike that held the cross together. Rose’s hand, resting on the hearth, flew into the air as a fireball rolled through the cabin. The next thing she knew, she was on the ceiling gazing down indifferently on her own unconscious body, as her husband ran for anointing oil in a torrent of prayer. The family had a houseguest that week—a troubled young man sent their way by a local Pentecostal preacher. He had just been complaining about the nonstop Jesus talk when the lightning hit. He ran out into the downpour and never came back.

  Rose was revived, and once the storm had passed it was necessary to account for the cross lying in smithereens in the grass. Preacher Bob proved equal to the occasion. They had been punished for harboring an unbeliever, he declared. Thereafter, no unbeliever would ever be allowed in their home. They had the cross of their Lord Jesus to thank for absorbing the blast and saving their mama’s life.

  Still, bearing in mind their proximity to a mountaintop in one of the most thermally active regions of New Mexico, he erected the replacement cross a hundred yards away, across the meadow, where it could be seen from distant ridges.

  Thus did the people of Mora first locate where Preacher Bob was living.

  He called his mountain place the Rainbow Cross Ranch, for it came to pass that a rainbow touched down on the cross in the meadow just as another son, Moses, was being born. He had a photograph to prove it. His efforts to document a repeat of the miracle required running down the hill to line up subsequent rainbows. The photos nevertheless were touching affirmations of faith, like the rainbows vouchsafed to Noah after the flood, especially considering how hard Preacher Bob struggled to keep a cross on the mountain.

  The second cross was also hit by lightning, and its replacement was knocked down by wind. At other times, the cross was felled by enemies when the family was away—neighbors, hunters, cattlemen, Hale was never sure—sometimes with chain saws and once with a lariat. Each new cross was bigger than the last. Finally, with help from his growing sons, he erected the biggest cross of all, more than twenty feet tall, sunk eight feet deep in concrete and riddled with 777 nails to discourage chain saw blades. The cross stands above Mora to this day.

  FROM THE Rainbow Cross, a rough Jeep trail led down the mountain to the world. This road was considered their access route, though it could also be described as the barrier that ensured their isolation. In her memories of growing up, Elishaba recalled the trials of getting home:

  The trail leading to our “sanctuary” was often filled with deep ruts and even deeper mud holes. From a little Spanish village, this “road” wound for several miles up the steep mountain hills. One place along the way we called the “Staircase,” because the erosion of a hill had left the rock tiered in steps for us to drive up. The landscape was dotted with little fenced meadows,
tiny shepherd’s shacks and cool mountain streams. As we approached the cabin site, we would encounter tall, full pine trees, interspersed with white aspen and knurly oak. The road at times would turn into a bog, and because it was such a muddy mess, we would have to leave our truck and walk the rest of the way home. On the south side of our quickly constructed lean-to, was a thickly wooded hill; on the other side was a steep slope that ended in a vertical rock face that shot up towards the heavens. Our place was so high in the mountains that the spring and summer seasons were very short, and just a few thousand feet higher, the snow remained all year long. A trail leading up to the top of a snow-capped mountain went to a place that we called “The Wilderness.” It was a vast area with acres and acres of open land, deep valleys, and thickly wooded forests that were frequented by large herds of elk.

  Life on the mountain required constant work. The older Elizabeth got, the more was expected. Among her responsibilities was to care for her younger brothers—five of them by the time she was twelve. She recalled one family expedition, when they drove their truck down the mountain and spent a day filling feed sacks with little red winter apples.

  It was time to make the all night run back up the mountain. Tired and wanting sleep I would find a corner in the back of our truck and curl for a nap. It was difficult to doze off between those incredible bumps, which were so severe that they would throw things flying from one side of the truck to the other. I seemed to grumble in my heart asking why I couldn’t sleep like my brothers could. “Elizabeth, wake up, get Joseph up, get out there and put on the chains. There is no time for sleeping.” It almost felt like I was having a nightmare, hearing my father yell, in the midst of an earthquake. So scrabbling around for a flashlight we crawled out into the cold dark night. It took a long time to untangle the muddy chains that were wrapped around the headlights, and secure them over the big dual tires in the rear; but it was finally accomplished. “Oh, now maybe I can get some sleep,” I sighed, as I tried to find a place to put my muddy self.