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

by Tom Kizzia

  This admission kindled Papa’s wrath. To lust themselves was an abomination. He ordered the boys to take all their meals outdoors, for the Lord said you shall not eat with an adulterer. They slept on the floor in an upright sitting position. In the trees by the cabin, where no mountain hiker might spot them, Papa turned a barrel on its side. One at a time, the five oldest boys hung over the whipping barrel. Papa showed them the seriousness of lusting with a long leather bullwhip until the welts drew blood. Their mother, whom he blamed for these sins, held their hands to feel what they were feeling. If they screamed too loud, she had to thrust a handkerchief in their mouths. When it was her turn, she was allowed to keep her clothes on. The lashing of the boys was repeated twice a day for weeks. Then the punishment stopped. Then it resumed.

  The boys were not particularly surprised at how the corrections turned on and off for more than a year. The way Papa’s rage came and went seemed a natural phenomenon, like the gathering of black clouds that brought lightning to the peaks of the Sangre de Cristos. It would be many years before they learned the real reason their bloody whippings came and went was that Papa had been teaching Elishaba about God’s mercy.

  THEIR NUMBER one prayer was that they would all ascend to the Kingdom together. Elishaba grew up confident she would meet Jesus soon. Each dawn, in fact, might be the day where future and present became one. By the time she turned sixteen, however, she started to worry because she had always counted on heading to the hereafter while she was still young and pretty. What if Jesus didn’t come until she was old?

  She knew she was pretty because her papa told her so. He used to call her his “little sleeping buddy.” She would sing to him a song about never being discouraged. She would bathe beside him in the outdoor tub, and rub his feet till her hands hurt. She would not be discouraged and would devote herself to hard work and pure thought and diligent service until that day when tearful prayers would be answered.

  She felt bitterly rejected when she did something wrong and was not allowed to sleep beside him. It had never been easy to confess her failings, because his discipline could be so harsh. She felt sorry for herself to be deprived of the love that a father feels for his child. To be banished from his side, silenced, cast out of the house. To be beaten and denied mercy. Fed nothing but a bowl of cold boiled oats and sent out to drive a posthole digger into hard ground, chop wood, haul water from the well, milk the cows, clean the stalls, carry buckets into the woods. Asking herself if her father really loved her. Weeping as she worked, remembering how Jesus himself cried out, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

  Did God answer by touching her heart with fear? Elishaba had nowhere else to turn. Her mother had never been close. There was only Papa and his instruction on the modesty and shame that a girl should feel. Yet on the day she turned fourteen and he asked if she was ready to know about relations between a man and a woman, she sensed a fear inside herself. He had invited her along to town in the Jesus Jeep to look for hay, and made her sit in the middle seat beside him. On the way back he turned onto a detour that tunneled picturesquely through big willow trees. Something was not right in her papa’s spirit when he asked that question. She told him she did not want to know, and he drove home. She put him off again at sixteen. Then when she turned eighteen, he told her she was now the proper age before man as before God.

  One night as they bathed together in their long underwear, he rubbed her in places that gave her new feelings. He instructed her not to dress in dry clothes but just to put on her robe and get in the back of the pickup truck where he sometimes slept, and she saw he had a purpose in uncovering her nakedness—the intent to make her feel the need to respond to him in a physical way. She could hardly bear the shame and guilt this laid upon her heart. But he insisted that this was right before God, that God had sent him dreams and confirmations about it ever since she was a baby girl in the desert. All young women went through this, he said.

  It would be many years before she could speak of that first night in the back of the pickup, or how, a few days later, he followed her into the woods and forced her to the ground and tore off her clothes and began pawing her like an animal. It was so disgusting that she pushed him off and ran away. After that, he changed and treated her really sweet. Until one day she thought about those new feelings and felt guilty and confessed it to Papa. He told her it was a sin to touch herself and lust her own body, for that was something that was only right between a father and a daughter.

  Then came the dark weeks when her brothers were getting whipped bloody over the barrel. Papa told her she was the one who could deliver them mercy. It was so confusing that he could be so angry at his family and want nothing to do with them—that he would tell them they were going to hell for answering the cravings of their flesh—but then would take them back again overnight if only she would satisfy his own animal-like desires. It did not seem right when Papa said it was her fault that the corrections continued, and yet it was agony to see her brothers beaten so, and her mama, too. She would sacrifice almost anything to make it stop.

  After this, Elishaba became the exalted one in the household. She was the one Papa consulted on family matters. She was no longer allowed to sleep with the other girls. She called him Lord.

  Whenever she was outside chopping firewood, she was aware of her father in the cabin window, watching her.

  But she began to argue with him more. She told herself if she could get him to say he was wrong about small everyday things, he would see that he might be wrong about how he was treating her. As a consequence, she began to receive harsher correction than anyone else.

  Papa went to elaborate lengths to hide the new relationship from the family. He kept her close at his side when they traveled. He would get her alone in the back of the pickup, and ask her what was wrong and why she didn’t appreciate the beautiful thing they had together. He pointed out the small signs God sent to encourage her.

  One time in the high wilderness, he sent her in search of two lost donkeys and told her to watch as well for a seven-point elk horn. He had seen the horn in a dream as a sign that God blessed their being together. She crept through the woods, terrified the antler would suddenly appear. It never did. The next day Joseph rode into camp with an elk horn he’d found. It had only six points, but Papa showed them where he said a seventh had broken off. Elishaba saw bitterly that he was making it up. She was too afraid to say anything—though whether it was fear of her earthly or heavenly father, she could not have said.

  She cried when she was with him and reminded him it was important to the Lord that she remain a virgin. He told her she was still a virgin because he was always careful not to penetrate fully, careful to spill his seed outside. Everything would turn out fine, he said, if she prayed for a perfect husband to be waiting in the Kingdom of God, a virgin like her without sin.

  But it didn’t sound to Elishaba like he wanted to let her go even in the Kingdom. Because Papa reminded her of the family’s prayer that they will all live together or die together with the coming of the Lord. When his time came, he said, even if the others were not called, he prayed that she would be ready to come along.

  THE YEARS passed in the mountains of New Mexico. Papa had started drinking again. He learned he had diabetes, and his moods rose and fell. And then, after a rebellion among the neighbors was quelled by Papa’s eloquence during the community meeting at the Bartley ranch, an old idea of moving to Alaska came back.

  Mama and Papa had talked of moving north as long ago as the early 1980s, when they heard it was still possible to homestead in Alaska for free—perhaps picking up on publicity at the time surrounding Interior secretary James Watt’s land disposal in the Wrangells. They had studied maps to see if they could make the journey on horseback, following the spine of the Canadian Rockies. But life with toddlers in the Alaska wilderness could be dangerous, they reasoned, if a bear came along and all they had was a muzzle-loading black powder rifle. They decided to wait until the childre
n were older.

  By 1996, their New Mexico mountains were feeling crowded and so, to be sure, was their cabin. Then a tall, tough-talking Texan showed up to build a summer home. Bill Leonard had bought an open parklike expanse of land in the valley above the Vails’. On the mountain farther up, he’d been told, there lived a big family headed by some ex-hippie from Texas who was “crazier than a shithouse rat.” Leonard was no fan of the government—“They’ll piss on your boot and tell you it’s raining”—but he had worked for federal law enforcement himself and had connections back home. The name “Bob Hale” rang a bell, and he made some calls to check. His contacts told him that after John Connally became governor in 1962, the Texas Rangers summoned Bobby Hale and told him to get out of Texas.

  It’s a story that Hale’s family would later deny. Certainly it’s true that, before too many more years, Bob Hale would be coming and going from Texas again. But Leonard did know the story of John Connally’s daughter before the family came down the mountain.

  “Here comes this old boy in some gosh-almighty wagon full of kids and goats, and they stop in my stream to wash their dishes. I ask him, ‘Are you Bob Hale?’ and he says, ‘No, I’m not.’ I told him I know who you are and I don’t have a problem with it. Just don’t mess with me, and I won’t mess with you. But if you try to pull anything around here I’ll goddamn kill you.”

  It must have been a shock to have his past closing in. The family started leaving the mountain more frequently. When he toned down the religious talk, Papa noticed, people responded more favorably to his clan. They went to several black-powder festivals, mountain-man reenactments where the Hales’ buckskin attire didn’t stand out. At a bluegrass festival in Santa Fe, musicians were taken with the way the children picked up old-time stringed instruments and sawed away unself-consciously. The musicians showed the children some basics, and the kids practiced on thirdhand instruments. The family made a very appealing presentation, Bob Hale decided proudly.

  They traveled with three ravens taken from a nest and raised as pets: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, named for the three servants of God rescued from the fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar. They visited cities as far away as Lubbock and Amarillo, where their colorful-looking truck would invariably break down and the family would perform in public to raise funds for repairs. Sometimes they didn’t even need the music: The ragged blond children deployed on street corners with PLEASE HELP signs seemed to be all it took for God to direct contributions their way.

  Then Papa’s twin brother, Uncle Billy, showed up and start nosing around.

  Other kin had been cut off for years. Rose’s mother, Betty Freeman, recalled the last words she heard over the phone from her daughter: “He is my lord and master, and if you want to talk to me you have to go through him.” Papa remained in touch only with Billy, a respected veterinarian in Fort Worth. In 1993, however, Bobby visited Texas to give his brother a gift of The Pilgrim’s Progress and Billy caught a religious fever. His wife, Patsy, came home one day to find her clothes and belongings and other devil’s playthings burned in a backyard pyre. “Bobby was always the dominant twin,” said Patsy, whose children blamed their uncle for the destruction of their family. “He had ways of doing things with people that no one else could do.” Billy gave up his veterinary practice and left to become an itinerant preacher in the Great Plains, occasionally ascending the Jeep trail from Mora to visit his twin.

  Billy’s final visit came in early 1997. Bobby, Rose, and the children were all camped high in the Pecos Wilderness with their sheep. Billy saw what was going on—as he later told Patsy—though what he saw remained between the brothers. Elishaba thought maybe Uncle Billy had come to rescue her, but the next thing she knew he’d been banished. Papa ordered Joseph and Joshua to take their uncle to a high promontory in the national forest and leave him alone in the unfamiliar mountains at dusk. Billy hid under a boulder for the night, finally making his way to a rural barn for safety. They never saw him again. He traveled to Central America to evangelize, and died in Nicaragua, probably from complications of diabetes.

  That same summer, a case involving the state police and Preacher Bob’s first nonfamily disciples brought the Alaska decision to a head.

  Short on hay during a summer drought, the Hales moved their livestock to southern New Mexico to graze on open range in the Gila River country near Silver City. They lived semi-nomadically in a twenty-two-foot teepee, where Rose gave birth to another daughter, Psalms. They attracted the sympathetic attention of a local couple with an eleven-year-old daughter. The young mother became infatuated with the family’s lifestyle and holy mission, and soon ran off with her daughter to join them. The angry husband summoned the state police, who staked out the arroyos and searched the national forest by helicopter. The runaway wife was sought on a charge of custodial interference, though a flyer distributed by the husband trumpeted a much bigger concern:

  We fear that this is a satanic cult.… The mother, Elizabeth, does not have legal custody of the child, and we are afraid that she is being drugged. This cult could be part of a larger group, that could lead up to the level of movie star involvement, or even higher! We have evidence that could indicate a possible “Jon Benet Ramsey” type situation evolving.

  Papa was happier than anyone could remember, persecuted and on the run with disciples. He renamed his followers Naomi and Ruth. Rose and the youngest children hid with their guests in the end-of-the-world cave in the cliffs. Meanwhile, a private posse ransacked the Rainbow Cross cabin. The chase continued for months as the family drove around in their fleet of hillbilly vehicles, drawing their New Mexico acquaintances into the drama. Carolyn Vail warned Elishaba over the phone that a deputy was watching the canyon with binoculars. Bill Leonard, the tough-talking Texan, declined a sheriff’s request that he go up and look for Hale, recalling his pledge to live and let live. Joseph escaped the police by darting out the back door of their accountant friend’s house in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Through it all, the legend of Preacher Bob and his family grew: Supposedly they had slipped over the high-country trails into the headwaters of the Pecos River and found temporary shelter in an Indian village. In fact, they had left the area altogether, hiding out in Idaho.

  In the end, mother and child left of their own accord, husband and wife were reconciled, and no charges were filed against the “cult leader.” But the commotion made it hard to ignore God’s reminders of Alaska. They bought a small bus in Wyoming. The seller’s business, painted on the side, was Alaska Sled Dog Tours.

  Preacher Bob’s children were more excited than they dared express about the talk of moving. It would be their passage out of Egypt, their Conestoga wagon across the plains, their journey through the Delectable Mountains to the Celestial City. With innocent pioneer fervor, Elishaba prayed for a chance to start over. She imagined a simpler world where it would be possible to have friends and a father who was happy.

  There were details to attend to. The older children needed driver’s licenses, which meant digging out birth certificates. Elishaba was mortified to discover that she would be known on her license as Butterfly Sunstar. Attention turned to fixing their vehicles. They pulled the seats out of the small Alaska bus and rebuilt it as a camper. They outfitted the two trucks with hand-built shacks on back, finding new windows at the little cabin of their neighbor Karen Brown. Brown was furious to discover her windows missing. Long annoyed by the pious verses Bob Hale posted on signs around his place, she marched down to where the trucks were parked and used a nail to scratch across her glass: THOU SHALT NOT STEAL.

  They could not bring everything on this first expedition. They would crowd into the Alaska bus. After a winter scouting possibilities in Fairbanks, they would return to New Mexico to gather up their other vehicles and two decades’ worth of squirreled-away material. They cut the horses loose to forage and be rescued by neighbors. The maroon Jesus Jeep was abandoned next to the cabin, to be cannibalized for parts by cowboys.

  In the Eight
h Month of 1998, Bob Hale and his family left the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and headed for Alaska. He had started calling himself Pilgrim. The small bus with the family of fourteen bounced across the mountain meadow, past the tall timber cross defended with 777 teeth, down past the aspens, and out through the crude Wicket Gate, where a last Bible lesson remains to this day written in the footing of concrete: TO LOVE HIM YOU MUST OBEY HIM.

  The Farthest-Out Place

  These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.

  —Hebrews 11:13

  Papa Pilgrim and daughters in the kitchen at Hillbilly Heaven (photo credit 11.1)

  NOT LONG after the Pilgrims reached McCarthy in early 2002, I started hearing stories. I had friends in the Wrangells and a long-standing journalist’s interest in the place. Moreover, given events of the preceding decade, the words “Ruby Ridge” could not be brandished in rural America without someone in the media taking notice. I finally made some phone calls in June 2003 and wrote a front-page story in the Anchorage Daily News about Papa Pilgrim and his bulldozer.

  “We could see down the road that they were trying to set up some kind of Ruby Ridge type thing,” Pilgrim told me helpfully in our first phone conversation. He recounted a rumor, supposedly spread by park employees, about the Pilgrim children hiding ammunition in a fiddle case, like Chicago mobsters. “We prayed and the Lord just told us to stay away from them.”