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

by Tom Kizzia

  After that, if someone needed to reach the Hales, Scott’s wife, Carolyn, would hang a white sheet from an adobe wall that could be seen with binoculars from up high. She was impressed by how the family could dismount by getting their horses to lie down. If hikers ever got lost in the national forest, she said, Bob or his sons were the ones who could track them down. The children moved so silently through the woods they could show up at the Vails’ door at night without stirring the dogs to bark. The youngest ones, longhaired, wide-eyed, and barefoot, pulled at her heart.

  That first year, the Hales came down for Christmas Eve. They sang carols, and the children played with some of the Vail family toys, though the antique doll collection had to be put away because Bob called them false idols. The oldest Hale daughter, eleven-year-old Elizabeth, disappeared for two hours upstairs in a hot bubble bath. Kurina Rose impressed Carolyn for trying so hard to live “the lifestyle of the original followers of Yahweh.” Bob, with those hypnotic eyes, was harder to handle, she said. Bob and Carolyn argued over certain Bible verses. Carolyn, it turned out, had taught theology at Loyola University. Though the barefoot children continued to come by for snacks, Bob kept his distance from the Vails’ place after that.

  By the 1990s, change was coming fast in the mountains—more Texan summer homes, more backpackers in the federal Pecos Wilderness, more reports of strange encounters with armed hillbillies.

  Hikers reported gunshots and vandalized cars. There were suspicions of illegal hunting and cattle rustling and reports of cabin break-ins where tools were taken and perfectly good electrical appliances left behind. Petitions circulated. State social service agencies, game wardens, and brand inspectors began asking questions. Carolyn Vail noticed hay disappearing from her barn, and discovered that the smallest Hale children were able to sneak into her house at night, through a tunnel built for the dogs, to steal food from the kitchen. She never complained, but others did. The state police and county sheriff were frustrated: There was never enough evidence to begin developing a court case—or even to compel a queasy-making trip up the old Jeep trail and through the family’s crude gate in the aspens.

  One neighbor, the caretaker for a big mountain ranch north of Nicholson’s land, stood up to the man she called Holy Bob. Ana Martinez got annoyed when people talked about Bob Hale like he was some legendary desperado. She claimed expertise in local outlaw folklore: Her great-great-grandfather had been a jailer in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and gave Billy the Kid chewing tobacco when he passed through on his way to Lincoln, where he killed those two deputies and escaped. “People made up Billy the Kid,” she said. “Billy the Kid was a murderer. He wasn’t good. But people remember him, and Holy Bob wanted to be someone people remembered like that.”

  She was a tall, wide-beamed woman with a salty demeanor and the faint barb of a Spanish accent. Her job was to watch out for fires, timber theft, illegal grazing, and broken wire fences, and she kept running into Holy Bob and his sons riding across the property with wire-cutting pliers in their pockets. She called him a “holy terror.”

  “This place was the Wild West when I got here, let me tell you. I had to sit up at night with a shotgun. I had four bears going through the place and also Holy Bob. That family would steal from your freezer or your shed, a little at a time so you wouldn’t notice. A bridle. A shovel. If you had chickens, you didn’t have eggs in the morning. They would steal the horses that were pregnant and send the animal back down the mountain without the colt. Every time you caught him red-handed, it was the Lord this, the Lord that. He would come to preach at somebody’s house and take advantage if they were elderly people and stay for days. The old folks’ kids had to come and make him leave.”

  Hale asked for access down through her property. It would be a third escape route, she figured. She said no way. Then she stood mutely when he tried to draw her into an explanation of how her cooperation would serve God. “He needed conversation to play the game. I don’t conversate,” she said. He rode away when she pulled out a camera.

  The family ran off a logging crew cutting Ponderosa pines in the mountains—the kids passively blocking the logging trucks and stealing batteries from the skidders at night. A scary confrontation developed, Martinez recalled, with the Hales holding rifles and the Mexican loggers holding machetes. The logging company had a legitimate contract but there were no serious consequences, she said, because they had hired illegal immigrants and nobody could show up in court.

  But the logging confrontation was much discussed around Mora, and in December 1995 a community meeting about Preacher Bob and his family was convened in Editha Bartley’s living room. Hispanic residents in nearby LeDoux had sent a petition to landowner “John Nicholson” asking that the Hales be barred from moving onto the lower part of his ranch near town, citing physical and verbal threats to anyone who came across the family in the Pecos Wilderness. “They do not respect property rights,” the villagers wrote. “We believe them to be a menace that will disrupt our community.”

  The Bartleys, meanwhile, had sent a letter asking that Nicholson revoke the family’s right to use the upper place as well. The ranching neighbors, once charmed by the family’s innocence, now contended the Hales had overgrazed Nicholson’s place with their sheep, goats, and burros, and were leaving gates open and cutting fences to graze them on the Bartleys’ land as well. The family was suspected in the disappearance of cattle and the poaching of game, the Bartleys wrote. “None of their children have ever been to school, their living conditions are squalid, and they all are aggressive—we now consider them dangerous,” they wrote. “We regret we have to send such bad news, but we don’t break the laws of the land and we don’t like when our neighbors do.”

  The Bartley house was full for the December meeting, not just with neighbors and Hales but also with representatives from the state police, the state Game and Fish department, the livestock brand inspection board, and the Forest Service. As eleven hungry Hale children helped themselves to cookies, everyone was polite, explaining the laws and regulations. Bob Hale was especially sorry about so many misunderstandings and the false and slanderous accusations made by people not in attendance. There were all these vague suspicions, he said, but when you looked at anything specific you could see the explanation. A storm had blown a tree down across the fence, letting their livestock stray. Those branded horses in their pen had been found by his sons in the wild, injured—they were being nursed back to health so they could be safely returned. Sometimes the young men might seem unfriendly to hikers, but that’s because so many people came into the forest to steal Christmas trees.

  The charm offensive worked. Editha Bartley wrote a letter to Hale, carefully spelling out an understanding about fences and such. Then she sent a follow-up letter to Jack Nicholson’s agent, saying the family could stay:

  The lifestyle the Hales have chosen obviously works well for them. They have a big happy family and we have no criticism—they should live the way they have chosen. Until now our very limited communication with them led us to believe our property was involved in various law-breaking activities. We now realize we have no proof of this.… To quote Bob Hale: “As we work together for a loving and peaceful community all of us shall put these things behind, encouraging our friends to do the same, and move onward to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.” Very well said!

  Ana Martinez had stirred restlessly in the Bartley home, fuming as Holy Bob addressed the government officials and well-meaning local residents. “He made a fool out of them,” she said.

  Left to right: Elishaba, Moses, and Joshua on the way to Hillbilly Heaven, August 2003 (photo credit 9.1)

  IT WAS once a point of local pride that no government ranger ever slept overnight in McCarthy. For the first few years of Wrangell–St. Elias National Park, staff made diplomatic visits, as if to an independent principality, but kept them short. Over time, however, this strict policy eased in face of the elements and the local custom of hospitality. The first rangers
to sleep over arrived one dusk in a winter storm, wet and shivering, and even then had to be talked out of riding their snowmachines another two hours in the dark to reach their trucks. Eventually, the Park Service bought a cabin to house its traveling employees. By the start of 2003, when the three park rangers made their reconnaissance run up McCarthy Creek, the government had finally decided to base a full-time ranger in the biggest national park’s only town.

  They had somebody in mind with just the right mix of local credibility, backbone, easygoing nature, and federal work experience. He was a young man with a neatly groomed beard and wire-rim glasses who lived with his girlfriend in a tidy cabin two woodsy blocks from the McCarthy Lodge. The only problem with hiring Stephens Harper was that he lived right next door to the Pilgrim Family’s camp in town.

  Stephens Harper remembered running into the Pilgrims for the first time at the mail shack by the airstrip. In their Davy Crockett fur hats and prairie dresses, they were buttonholing locals to ask where they lived and how they got their land. People grumbled at the time about the family’s presumption—it seemed the complete opposite of the painstaking process by which Harper himself had been vetted, interviewed, and admitted to McCarthy three years earlier.

  At that point in Harper’s life, a decade of rootless seasonal work around Alaska—part-time park ranger in summer, remote lodge caretaker in winter—had drawn to an end, along with his first marriage. He had looked for a place to put down roots and begin again. He was intrigued seeing McCarthy on a map, a wilderness town at the toe of a glacier. After a visit to look around, he focused on a log cabin built by a longtime resident, a local seamstress and dog musher, who had been one of the few survivors of the murders back in 1983. One of her dogs had been in heat that morning so she hadn’t waited by the runway with her friends. She moved away afterward, saying the place never felt the same, but she had kept her cabin.

  Careful about who took her place, she had already turned down a number of prospective buyers. Stephens Harper seemed to have the right values, but in light of past events she had concerns about a single, bearded, bespectacled young man fleeing a broken marriage who would choose to spend his winters in one of the most isolated communities in Alaska—a pretty fair description of the mail-day killer, Lou Hastings. To his credit, Harper found these concerns reasonable. He agreed to fly out on the mail plane in winter, stay at her cabin for two weeks, and visit a dozen people whose names she wrote down. When her McCarthy neighbors reported back that Harper seemed all right, he was allowed to buy her cabin.

  In the summer of 2002, Harper was away working as a seasonal ranger at Katmai National Park when he got a letter from his renter saying a big family had moved in right next door. Their cow was blocking the path to the outhouse. Harper knew it had to be the Pilgrims. He recalled that Walt Wigger had parked his wanigan trailer in a clearing near Harper’s house. Wigger told the Pilgrims they could use the wanigan when they came to town on mail-plane days once he removed the old dynamite stored inside. The family didn’t wait, taking over the wanigan as their in-town base camp. What happened with the dynamite, they never said.

  The cow was gone when Harper returned home in the fall. His new neighbors had moved themselves and their livestock up to the Mother Lode. Harper settled in with his girlfriend, Tamara, a Peace Corps veteran with a master’s degree in resource conservation. That winter, they traveled in South America. But when they returned in March 2003 to get ready for Harper’s new full-time job with the Park Service, they discovered rusty trucks parked around the wanigan, a bus that had been pulled across the river, horses, goats, stacks of recycled construction materials, and a swarm of busy Pilgrims.

  Elishaba and her brothers were friendly. Harper introduced himself to their father, who described his family’s joy at completing their first year in McCarthy. The two spoke pleasantly regarding plans for the material strewn in front of Harper’s cabin. Papa Pilgrim assured him that by mid-April they would be hauling everything by bulldozer and sled up the road to their land. Then Pilgrim asked Harper what he did for a living. Harper said he was going to be a ranger for the park.

  Pilgrim turned on the spot and disappeared into the wanigan. Moments later he returned, with a small daughter at his elbow, and launched into an angry tirade about government snooping.

  Within days, the Pilgrims had posted notices around town accusing the Park Service of planting a spy next to their camp.

  Harper realized it was not going to be easy to separate his new job and his home life because the Pilgrims were going to be part of both—morning, noon, and night.

  COMPASSIONATE NEIGHBORS were the last thing Papa Pilgrim expected when they moved deep into the Alaska wilderness. The citizens of McCarthy were not their friends, Papa told his family. The way the community pulled together in times of need, helped one another out, and wanted to get to know the Pilgrim children better—these things might seem like good Christian behavior, but in fact they were dangerous temptations. He warned his children against becoming man pleasers. They needed to turn their attention inward again toward God. His old fighting instincts were aroused. Once he finished bulldozing open the road along McCarthy Creek, he said, his family would see how nosy and angry and unsupportive the people in McCarthy really were.

  The government had certainly responded according to plan. The Park Service was aghast, the family under a state of siege, the children inspired and indignant. Papa’s dramatic unmasking of a police spy on their doorstep helped raise the level of tension. Any lone impulse to mutinous dissent could be more easily suppressed during wartime. When Elishaba suggested God might be opening a door through Stephens Harper, Papa accused her of selling the family out.

  But news that the Pilgrims had started using the old Green Butte Road to travel back and forth from the Mother Lode had not riled people around McCarthy, not even those who might have considered themselves environmentalists. The family struck some neighbors as passing strange and grandiose, their defiance of the Park Service oddly petulant for a cabin full of avowed pacifists. But the use of a bulldozer to clear a grown-over mining trail did not register locally as a flagrant environmental crime.

  For some people, in fact, Papa Pilgrim was now a local hero. And Pilgrim didn’t seem to mind his new stature one bit.

  On the morning of April 11, 2003, a community meeting was convened at the lodge to talk about the McCarthy Road, the footbridge, and the latest bollard extraction. Joining via teleconference were state transportation officials and the local state senator, an Athabaskan woman from the Yukon River village of Rampart, whose sparsely populated legislative district, extending north to the Arctic Circle and west to the Yukon and Kuskokwim River deltas, was the largest in the United States. State officials agreed not to replace the bollards at the footbridge.

  Two park rangers were in McCarthy and listened quietly at the lodge. After it was over, they walked around town and stapled up a public notice at the lodge and on a tree by the trail leading out of town:

  No motorized vehicles are permitted to use the illegal roads bulldozed on federal lands located in the McCarthy Creek Drainage, connecting the state land around the town of McCarthy with the Marvelous Millsite private property. This notice does not apply to the use of snowmachines on adequate snow cover.

  The government notice hit McCarthy like an artillery shell. The decision to close a historic road threatened to undo two decades of peaceful coexistence with the park. Maybe it was true that no one had used the road in recent years—but no one before the Pilgrims had needed to. In a few days, the family planned to bring a bulldozer down from the Mother Lode to get supplies. There was no other way to haul so much material—lumber, insulation, hay for livestock. The sudden road closure seemed cold and heartless. Park critics called it a government blockade.

  And why had the two rangers skulked through town, not telling anyone what they were up to? The notices were torn down and burned.

  Two days later, Stephens Harper was roused from bed on
a Saturday morning. Peering out the cabin door in his underwear, with Tamara watching curiously from behind, he saw two neighbors: Keith Rowland, with a rifle over his shoulder, and Rick Kenyon, brandishing a microphone. They told him they were about to take their four-wheelers up the McCarthy Creek road to go rabbit hunting, in violation of the road closure—did he want to arrest them?

  Harper told them to seek their redress of grievances elsewhere: His job didn’t start for another week and they were trespassing.

  McCarthy Annie retold the incident in the next issue of the Wrangell St. Elias News. The cover photo showed Bethlehem and Lamb perched endearingly on a set of bull-moose antlers, with the title THE PILGRIMS—NEIGHBORS, FRIENDS.

  The story did not name Harper except as a local “parkie” whose voice was a “low, menacing growl.”

  Curious thing, how that door kept slamming shut. Hopefully he’ll get it fixed, or I’m afraid that, after a while, the good folks here in McCarthy may begin to think him an unpleasant sort of guy.… Desperately, the parkies tried to calm the situation, protesting to one caller, “We didn’t mean for the notice to be aimed at your community. It was really just meant for the Pilgrims!” Well, fellas, this was the wrong thing to say, because if there’s one thing that will unify a small, close-knit community in a hurry, it’s this: Big, Bad, Powerful Government Men singling out a peaceable, law-abiding family with lots of adorable, defenseless children, and doing illegal and mean things to try to force them off their land.

  The national park’s road closure boiled into a full town meeting a few days later.

  The park superintendent, Gary Candelaria, showed up with Hunter Sharp and Marshall Neeck to explain the decision. Candelaria was not especially well liked in McCarthy. Critics found him inflexible. Even locals sympathetic to the park’s goals had not warmed to this superintendent during his four years at the Copper Center headquarters near Glennallen. A few previous park bosses had fared better, showing more of a common touch. They had been hunters or fishermen who considered the Alaska assignment a storybook job. Candelaria had been a surprising choice. Officious and slightly pudgy, he was nearing the end of a government career that had concentrated in smaller park units: Saratoga National Historical Park, Ozark National Scenic Riverways, Fort Laramie National Historic Site. When Candelaria arrived to take over the system’s biggest national park, the government’s press release described him as an aspiring bookbinder and an amateur historian.