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

by Tom Kizzia

  The old truck sputtered and spit as she tried to negotiate those steep hills. “Oh Lord, help us make it up this hill please,” I prayed in desperation and yet I felt somehow lazy; because I didn’t want to budge, and if the truck stalled on a hill I would have to jump out quick to block the rear tires to keep the truck from careening back down the hill. Then it happened: “Oh no, the truck is going to die right in the middle of the hill!!!”

  “Elizabeth, Joseph, get out quick, and put some rocks behind the tires,” Papa said. While he sat there holding the brakes we secured the big truck with blocks. Then Pa cranked the engine over and over, but that didn’t work so we finally came up with another solution. Joseph would sit on the front wheel well, hold the end of a gas line in the top of the carburetor while I stood on the running board holding up a gas can so the line could siphon enough gas out to keep the truck from dying. So off we went with Mama singing “Praise the Lord, hallelujah, I don’t care what the Devil’s gonna do.” Papa tried to keep the truck on the road and bouncing off a big tree here and there while he peered over Joseph’s shoulders. I was hanging on for dear life and trying not to drop the gas, when all of a sudden the truck starts sputtering again! “Joseph, keep that gas line in don’t take it out.” Papa’s voice pierced my ears as he was shouting from right beside me. Joseph then began to cry, “I didn’t mean to! It came out, I’m trying!” but the truck came to another halting stop. “Mother hold the brakes,” Father commanded. It was emotionally hard as my Papa got out filled with anger, yelling at Joseph, blaming him as though it was his fault that it was taking us all night to get back home. My Pa was not able to accept the fact that it was his fault because he didn’t plan the apple-harvesting trip any better. So everything felt hopeless and I could hear the children in the back waking up and crying.

  The more Papa read the Bible, the more concerned he grew that the family was doing wrong. He would go on about how they would be thrown in the lake of fire, where people cry out and gnash their teeth and the burning never stops. He told them about a rich man who went to hell and could not buy so much as a small drop of water to ease the anguish of his tongue. It seemed Papa knew most of the Bible by heart. He painted verses on signs and quoted from Hebrews, where God says we must love our father who chastens us. He quoted from Timothy, about the disobedience to parents that will come as a sign of the last days. He said they could only understand the Lord through their own father. He taught that the children cannot know if they are among the saved—only God knows that, who knows all things—but they could confess their sins right away to their father and seek his forgiveness, and they could accumulate good works and follow the laws of God over the laws of man, and in this way they could hope someday to awaken, as their father had, to the joyful knowledge of their own righteousness.

  Elizabeth took comfort from a dream in which she walked beside God unafraid, holding the tip of a giant finger that could easily have squished her. But when her father caught Elizabeth committing what he called a “forbidden sin”—lying or disobeying—it was an angry God who demanded discipline.

  Once I lied about something for fear of getting in trouble, so my father had me get some willow branches off a tree. As he had done so many times before, he was going to use them to whip me. After that he had me go up into our little attic, which was musty, dirty, and mice infested. I was commanded to lie down in one spot and not to get up. For the next several days, he would call me to him throughout the day for another whipping and mama would bring me whatever leftovers there were from breakfast. I will never forget the long, long hours of torment as I lay there. I was a little girl with much energy and I could hardly sit in one place for very long. I became so hungry that I would lay there dreaming of the leftovers that mama would bring to me wondering what time of the day it was. Oh, the fear of those footsteps that sounded like Daddy coming up the ladder into the attic, as I knew punishment was on its way again. My heart would pound hoping just to see someone else, but “oh not this way again!”

  As he beat me I would cry out for Jesus, but if I cried out too loud he would whip me on my head and the end of that willow switch would rap around my face leaving me with welts across my cheeks. I would then lay back down in relief that this one was over for a little while, but my little heart ached with hurt and confusion asking the question over and over again in my mind, “How can my Daddy love me and do this to me at the same time?” On the other hand it felt good, because my father would tell me that God is angry when we do wrong and if he didn’t beat the devil out of me then I would go to hell. I had also learned that hell was a place where all the liars and rebellious people go. This left me with such a fear because I knew that I was full of evil and if my father really knew it he wouldn’t have any hope for me.

  This process continued, until one day we heard a car or a four-wheeler coming up the mountain. In a hurry not knowing whom it might be they told me to come down from the attic, fast. I learned two things, first was that my parents didn’t want others to know about my discipline, and second that my father would put on a front with others that wasn’t his real self when it was just the family at home.

  VISITORS WERE rare. So were trips off the mountain. Therefore the children were excited when a small inheritance came the family’s way from their grandmother in Texas, and Preacher Bob decided to take them out in the world.

  He bought a used passenger bus and painted it with calls to love Jesus, and they set out on a tour of the Southwest. The gospel bus spilling with cute kids was received warmly wherever it stopped. But Preacher Bob had a hard doctrine all his own and quickly wore out his welcome in theological disputes with local church leaders. His talk about predestination reminded people of the Massachusetts Bay Calvinists. Frustrated and rejected, Preacher Bob turned for home, leaving one of his disputants a map of intricate detail, with a shining cross at the top, titled “Last Days Map to Rainbow Cross—A Refuge from the Storm that is certainly to come—In Jesus Name.”

  He returned to the mountain above Mora to study the Book of Revelation and the stories of the flood and a government pamphlet about protecting yourself from nuclear radiation. He dug out a cliff cave beneath an overhanging rock. Here the family would wait out the tribulation as heirs to righteousness. In the meantime they could hide if persecutors came looking because the children were not in school. “Where there is no vision,” Papa quoted, “the people perish.” He added a heavy door with a tiny window. He bought a fallout meter and began caching buckets of food.

  The children dug and toted rubble and waited for the annihilation of the world. It was a secret project. They learned to run like wild animals if they saw a stranger coming. They prayed that they would finish in time. One day an enormous rock emerged in the pit they were digging. They wrapped it with chains and cables, but it was too heavy to extract with a come-along jack. It was Elizabeth’s job to loosen the dirt and rocks underneath with a pick and pass out buckets to her brothers. Just as she stepped out into the sunlight to rest, the cables slipped and the boulder crashed down. When her heart stopped pounding, Elizabeth took comfort from the close call, telling herself that God loved her enough to reach down and push her out of the slaughtering path of that evil rock.

  Meanwhile, Papa reminded Mama about those cosmic visions singling him out as a prophet, years ago, in the mountains of South America, the ones he later rejected as temptations from the Devil. He was thinking that maybe they had come from God after all.

  Joshua Hale on the McCarthy Creek road, 2003 (photo credit 7.1)

  IN THE first daylight hours of February 11, 2003, three U.S. park rangers set out from town on snowmachines through the cold mountain shadows of the McCarthy Creek valley. Leading the party was Hunter Sharp, chief ranger for Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve. Their destination, thirteen miles away, was the Marvelous Millsite property owned by the Hale-Sunstar family, known locally as the Pilgrims.

  According to the official case incident report, the rangers’ purp
ose was “to evaluate the extent of resource damage done by the Hale-Sunstar family’s bulldozer work on federal public lands, approximately locate public/private land boundaries within the drainage, and to determine the Hale-Sunstar family’s level of hostility to our legal presence in the McCarthy Creek drainage.” Park officials had begun referring to the family strictly by the names on their land deeds, as if to sweep away any cobwebby romanticism clinging already to their local reputation.

  The valley was not well known to the rangers. Old equipment was scattered along the way, and they weren’t sure which were rusting monuments from pre-park days and which had been left there by the Pilgrims. They stopped to examine a green army-surplus trailer with wheels. As they talked, they could hear snowmachines coming up the trail behind them. Three unidentified members of the Hale-Sunstar family appeared. The rangers asked if they’d like to pass on the trail. One of the youths shook his head. “All three individuals would not verbally reply when spoken to or questioned,” the report said. “They would not speak to us. Their intentions were unclear.”

  The rangers had a camera and started to shoot video of their visitors. The Hale-Sunstar sons pulled out a camera of their own and shot video of the rangers. When the video shooting had died down, the rangers started up the valley again, with the Hale-Sunstars close behind.

  “From this point forward, the Hale-Sunstar family members continually followed us, stopped when we stopped, maintained their silence, and periodically photographed us. They usually remained with their snowmobiles, and continued to stare at us. Again, we believed that this was an attempt to intimidate us.” The report noted that each of the three shadowing sons was armed with a revolver or large hunting knife in makeshift holsters. It referred to the family’s tactics as “passive-aggressive.”

  The rangers stopped near a ninety-year-old tunnel through a stone ridge and examined the ruins of an old bridge buttress. Most of Walt Wigger’s approaches had washed away completely, some bridges having consisted of nothing more than a pair of iron I beams spaced the width of a truck’s axle.

  At this point, one of the family snowmachines shot ahead and took up a high position “where he could have a visible advantage over us.” Two additional snowmachines came down the creek—one driven by a lone teenager, the other by the senior member of the clan, Robert Allen Hale, with a teenage girl and a child who looked about eight years old on a sled behind. Waves from the rangers were not acknowledged. Hale disappeared, and the lone teenager joined the pursuit party. At further stops, the rangers offered to share lunch and attempted to discuss recent avalanche activity. The young men would not speak but were not overtly hostile. “Never, during the entire incident, did any Hale-Sunstar family member reach for, touch, or suggest any motion towards their weapon.”

  As they approached the Marvelous Millsite property, the rangers came upon two hand-painted signs posted on a tree. They could hear a dog barking up ahead. It was clear to the rangers they were still in the park’s jurisdiction, well short of the mining cabins. Hunter Sharp described the scene later in a deposition: “The signs said PRIVATE PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING NPS and PRIVATE PROPERTY NO TRESPASS NPS NOT ALLOWED—BEWARE OF CABLES! These signs were located on Park land. We stopped and photographed the signs. As we photographed, the 4 individuals who had been following us took their snowmachines around us and placed one machine athwart the trail to prevent further travel.”

  THE NATIONAL Park Service has many missions, and some can seem contradictory: to protect park resources, for instance, but also to provide for public access and recreation. To handle its different responsibilities, the agency employs biologists and economists and historians and sociologists. Chief Ranger Hunter Sharp, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the service, was a cop. It was as a law enforcement officer that he considered the challenge posed by Papa Pilgrim.

  Two years earlier, Sharp had received the Harry Yount Award for national ranger of the year. The award was named after an early leatherstocking in the nation’s first park, Yellowstone, who started guarding against elk poachers in 1880 after the Civil War veteran general Phil Sheridan’s cavalry gave up policing the geysers and rode off in pursuit of indigenous tribes. A government press release about Sharp’s national award noted that his job in the Wrangells required overseeing rangers “whose lifestyle and duty requirements hearken back to earlier NPS days,” protecting “wilderness glaciers, rivers, tundra, mountains and forest by aircraft, foot, boat and even dogsled.”

  The press release did not mention that Sharp—and his Wrangells predecessor Jim Hannah, another winner of the national award—spent much of their time on the job, like Yount in nineteenth-century Yellowstone, grappling with demands of local settlers, of whom the Pilgrim Family were only the most extreme case.

  To many locals, the new parks were symbols of big government, not untrammeled nature. Defiance flared up in 1978 when President Jimmy Carter, facing a deadlocked Congress, used an executive order to set aside much of the Alaska parkland as national monuments. Congress finished the job two years later, and as the first park ranger in the area after that, Jim Hannah had it especially tough. A strapping Indiana native who once worked at Grand Canyon National Park, Hannah lived like an Alaskan with his family in a log cabin outside Chitina with no running water, but nobody considered him a local. He lost count of the flat tires he got from nails scattered in the ranger station driveway. During Hannah’s tenure two remote Park Service cabins were burned to the ground. Sheep hunters poached rams from closed areas and issued press releases about it. A Fairbanks taxidermist promised a free mount for any hunter who succeeded in getting arrested. An outlaw faction of the state alpine club staged a “winter desecration climb” of Mount Wrangell, carrying a protest sign to the summit.

  One night in the park’s first year, an Alaska State Trooper called the park superintendent and reported that a ranger had been shot dead in a bar fight along the McCarthy Road. That could only have been Hannah—but it turned out the initial report was wrong. The shooting victim was one of the locals hired the previous summer as a seasonal assistant. That night at the Silver Lake Lodge, the ex-seasonal had argued with a musher from Wasilla about the relative merits of snowmachines versus dogs. The musher exited the lodge, returned with a pistol, and shot the man in the chest. The ex-parkie’s twin brother grabbed a shotgun and blew away part of the killer’s down coat, showering the bar with feathers. Hannah, whose recollections are preserved in an oral history with the University of Alaska, never forgot this story. He was relieved that the killing was not related to the man’s park employment, but incidents like that made a law enforcement officer think twice about stepping into certain situations in this part of the world.

  As career park rangers, Hannah and Sharp were proud of the agency’s history of standing up to rapacious local interests and politicians who wanted to overhunt, sell off, or commercialize the public lands of the American West. But the park rangers had a hard time trying to interpret the special protections for landowners written into the landmark 1980 legislation. Local Alaskans were guaranteed the right to cut firewood, for example, even where the most common tree was the spindly, slow-growing black spruce. Hannah conceded that these privileged locals were few in number, but as the Copper River valley continued growing, he felt conflicts would only increase. Protecting subsistence hunting and fishing was arguably important to rural Native culture, Hannah would concede. But why should some schoolteacher who moves to Glennallen be instantly given the right, as a rural resident, to subsistence hunt for Dall sheep inside a national park?

  Hannah’s job, in the park’s first decade, was further complicated by hostility from above, particularly from President Reagan’s Interior secretary, James Watt, who in 1983 unleashed a mischievous land rush on ten thousand acres of black spruce bogs around Slana, on the north boundary of Wrangell–St. Elias National Park. To Hannah, this was hardly what the park needed: a new food-stamp community of subsistence hunters and tree cutters. It proved to be the last
federal homesteading opportunity in American history, where Jefferson’s agrarian ideal emitted its death gurgle in a mess of muddy muskeg trails and abandoned tar-paper shacks.

  All of this obviously heaped difficulty on federal rangers like Hannah, whose job was otherwise to convince everyone that the pioneer moment in American history was over.

  BY THE morning of Hunter Sharp’s reconnaissance patrol up McCarthy Creek, many of these issues remained unsettled. But there was a new factor very much on the mind of Sharp and his federal superiors in 2003. The escalating confrontation at the Mother Lode was coming at the end of a decade of high-profile armed face-offs between government agents and militia-minded resisters in the American West.

  Foremost in memory was the 1992 Ruby Ridge shootings in Idaho, where a siege had resulted in the death of a federal marshal and two members of an isolated, apocalypse-ready family. Later investigations blamed the deaths on miscommunication, mutual mistrust, and heedless escalation, all now in abundant supply along McCarthy Creek. Ruby Ridge was followed by the tense three-month showdown in eastern Montana between the FBI and the so-called Freemen. At least that one ended nonviolently. Then there was the case of the “mountain man” in Idaho who shot two Fish and Game wardens in the head after they caught him poaching bobcats. Law officers found it distressing that some people treated the fugitive executioner as a folk hero, especially after he broke out of prison and evaded capture for a year. There were also well-known incidents with religious overtones, most prominently the 1993 siege and attack on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, an event that had particularly incensed McCarthy’s pastor and newspaper editor, Rick Kenyon, who was now, in Sharp’s view, encouraging the Hale-Sunstars, using them as allies of convenience in his effort to drive back the federal government.