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

by Tom Kizzia

  The next time I called, Elishaba answered. She was a different person.

  “We were very honest with you,” she said angrily. “These stories you’re talking about, that’s not who we are. And if you don’t know that, then you’re stupid.”

  Her father got on the phone. I asked the questions I had to ask, told him what more I had learned—really just the surface of things in New Mexico and Texas, as I would find out later. I said I wanted to hear his side of the story. Impatiently, he disputed his neighbors’ complaints from the Sangre de Cristos, but as he talked about Texas, an old sorrow crept into his voice, almost a sob. When he was a teenager he’d lived through his own Romeo and Juliet story. It changed his life forever.

  “Mommy and Daddy didn’t have answers, for the first time in my life. It really scared me,” he said. “I realized nobody had the answers. That’s when I became a pilgrim.”

  I called once again after my stories about the long strange journey of Papa Pilgrim appeared in the newspaper. When I said my name, the line clicked dead.

  Hauling supplies from the Hillbilly Heaven airstrip (photo credit 12.1)

  “WINTER IS near and the situation is becoming dire,” declared a Web alert in the second week of October 2003, as the volunteer airlift to Hillbilly Heaven got under way in McCarthy. Hay bales and windows and insulation were stacked by the Kennicott River. Food, clothing, and money flowed in from around the state and the lower forty-eight. Pilots arrived from Glennallen and Anchorage to combat the government blockade and stand up for the Pilgrims’ rights.

  Chuck Cushman, the longtime leader of the American Land Rights Association, came to Alaska and declared the Pilgrims to be the new poster children for the national property-rights movement. Financial donations were filtered through Rick Kenyon’s church. Laurie Rowland, the wife of the local heavy equipment operator, called the pilots angels of mercy in the Wrangell St. Elias News, where she had shed the sarcasm and secret pen name of McCarthy Annie. She was now in charge of ground logistics for the airlift. She quoted a ninety-year-old widow from Oregon who contributed money to fight the government and was glad her veteran husband never lived to see the day—“Would Hitler have done any worse?”

  The air above McCarthy Creek buzzed with small airplanes and earnest historical analogies. Hitler, jackboots, Ruby Ridge, and Waco came easily to the tongue. Pilgrim, phoning in to a local talk show on the Glennallen radio station, was true to his Texas roots: “If you don’t wake up, you’re going to end up with seventeen dead Pilgrims out here. They want to starve us out, like the Alamo.” But Cushman’s national website provided the metaphor of the day: the Berlin Airlift of 1948, when Harry Truman sent planes to West Berlin after the Soviet Iron Curtain closed road and rail access. “For many months America and other countries joined to keep a starving city alive and supplied with food, fuel and other materials,” said the website, which was actually being run from Anchorage by Ray Kreig. “So now it is time for the citizens of America and especially Alaska to rise up again against a top down command and control heavy handed bureaucracy, the National Park Service, and keep the Pilgrim Family and their animals from being starved out in the Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve. As in Berlin, heavily armed Park Service personnel dressed like a S.W.A.T. team are preventing access for the Pilgrims.” First it was the Pilgrims, the website warned, then it would be everyone else in Alaska, as the environmentalists continued plotting to impose their “Green Iron Curtain of Exclusion.”

  My stories about Papa Pilgrim seemed to stoke the antigovernment fervor. The articles, which along with Marc Lester’s arresting photos filled nine pages in the Anchorage Daily News over two days, had made the Pilgrim Family a subject of general supermarket conversations around Alaska. Their war with the park was getting national coverage, including a front-page story in the Washington Post.

  I worked hard to balance the politics with descriptions of the park’s iron-fist response and Rick Kenyon’s assertion that the Pilgrims’ coming to McCarthy was “a match truly made in heaven.” But the portrayal of Hillbilly Heaven’s claustrophobia, the description of Pilgrim’s efforts to take environmental laws into his own hands, and even a cursory account of Robert Hale’s complicated beginnings and his winding trail through Texas and New Mexico had not added up to an endearing portrait. Our newspaper ran a full page of letters to the editor. A few commended the family’s effort to live by what one writer called ancient “Christian-Israelite values.” Many more readers raised alarms on behalf of the isolated kids and accused Pilgrim of running a welfare scam built around Alaska Permanent Fund dividends.

  For true believers, though, the series was just one more example of issue manipulation by the liberal media.

  Things actually seemed to be turning out pretty well for the outcast of the Sangre de Cristos. Sixty ten-minute angel flights from McCarthy over the course of a few weeks shunted supplies to the family’s citadel at the Mother Lode. The cabin’s attic was now stuffed with a multiyear supply of toilet paper. A shed by the airstrip had filled with vacuum-sealed buckets of Y2K provisions that survivalists, having safely reached the new millennium, were happy to donate to a new cause.

  Kenyon was given space to respond in the Anchorage Daily News, where he bemoaned the government’s “willing allies in the press.” He told a story of how two Pilgrim boys put out a fire at the church that summer and then on their own accord rebuilt the damaged church themselves. The family, he said, “epitomizes gentleness, strength born of faith, and a respect for all about them.” An e-mail alert circulated by Cushman asserted that the press was being spoon-fed “character assassination” material by the Park Service. It wasn’t true—whatever the park knew about the family past, they wouldn’t tell me anything. I called up Cushman, who ran the national property-rights organization out of his home in Battle Ground, Washington. He was cheerfully combative. He told me that emphasizing the strangeness of the family’s dress and way of life made it easier for the government to go after them. “Well, America was settled by people who were persecuted,” he reminded me.

  THERE WAS a story in McCarthy of a tourist who spotted some younger Pilgrim children up at Kennicott and told them they looked like a line of little penguins. A blank look from the youngest prompted a question to each child up the line. None of them had any idea what a penguin was.

  Alaska’s homeschooling laws are the most lax in the nation. In New Mexico, the family at least had to fake participation in an organized correspondence program. Alaska does not require children to be part of any approved program. Parents have complete authority.

  When the Anchorage Daily News stories about the family appeared, the children could do no more than look at the pictures. Papa Pilgrim gathered them around and read the newspaper out loud. He paused from time to time to ask rhetorically why the newspaper would tell such lies about them.

  Joseph chimed in that it sounded like the reporter had just written down whatever the family told him.

  Alone among the children, Joseph would sometimes speak up in an earnest and naïve way, as if his first few years as Nava Sunstar, before the Lord touched their family and changed his name, had left a mark of waywardness. Papa dealt with this by mocking and marginalizing his twenty-six-year-old son, calling Joseph “the family two-year-old.” When the newspaper people came, he had sent the more reliable Elishaba and Joshua to serve as trail guides.

  Papa ignored Joseph now and continued reading. He was incensed by a quote in the story from Rose’s mother in Los Angeles, who had called the family a brainwashed cult. How ironic, he said, because it’s the NPS that’s the tree-worshipping cult. The reporter didn’t have to pass along such a bitter comment, he said. It showed where his heart was.

  Joseph tried to respond lightly: “Maybe we are brainwashed. How would we know?”

  Papa exploded. It was nothing to make light of, he said. He forced Joseph to apologize. The oldest Pilgrim son never forgot that moment, surprised at such an overreaction—h
e thought it was a pretty good joke. How, indeed, would anyone know?

  THE AIRLIFT—a beautiful act of love, in Pilgrim’s words to an Associated Press reporter—nearly produced a martyr. The landing gear on a Cessna 180 buckled when it hit the Hillbilly Heaven airstrip, causing a strut to dig in the gravel and the plane to pivot and flip—a crash known to pilots as a “ground loop.” The angel of mercy, a fifty-two-year-old real estate developer from Anchorage named Kurt Stenehjem, walked away from the wreck and was welcomed into the Pilgrim fold. Stenehjem spent a week at the Mother Lode, and upon his return to civilization published a story, “An Angel Falls to Heaven,” in the Wrangell St. Elias News. He said it would be the first chapter of an inside-view book about the family.

  His account of the family of “Civil War throwbacks” was unambivalent in its support of the property-rights cause and its depictions of the father’s “southern country charm” and the kids’ maturity and empathy. Beyond that, the chapter published in Kenyon’s paper focused on two topics: the tedious cargo details of Stenehjem’s mercy flights, and an equally detailed critique of my stories in the Anchorage Daily News, which had introduced Stenehjem to the Pilgrims and their struggle.

  He opened his piece disdainfully: “I don’t have the habit of reading the newspaper. I used to, but I’ve lost my stomach for it.” He went on to say he was sucked into reading the big story about this family of cowboy characters—“I sat down, hooked.… The fact that the local paper didn’t like them assured me these people were all right and I searched for a way I might find to help them.” He described how his own insightful deconstruction of the stories had taught naïve Papa Pilgrim to recognize the “verbal land mines” strewn by the liberal media to demonize the family and discredit their cause. When the story said Pilgrim made the down payment for his land with a pocket full of hundred-dollar bills from the state’s Permanent Fund Dividend, the reporter was trying “to fan the flames of jealousy among other PFD recipients.” When mentioning the biblical names of the children, their closely guarded virginity, or how Papa followed the word of God, the writer was clearly trying to make them sound dangerously eccentric.

  Papa was shocked. He had read the article without realizing the hot buttons that would be pushed for many people over the many points the reporter was raising. “A hundred years ago everyone lived like this,” [he said]. “We know the world is different now but we never imagined these things would provoke people to hate us.”

  Stenehjem never said much to me about what really happened during his week at the Mother Lode. The family later told me the pilot had been cast out for trying to woo Elishaba. They said the airplane accident happened when Stenehjem tried a fancy landing to impress Pilgrim’s eldest daughter. Elishaba conceded it was hard not to wonder about the young-looking visitor suddenly in their midst. Papa noticed her making eye contact and when they were alone socked her because of it. Stenehjem eventually told a magazine reporter that he noticed strange things: The Pilgrim children were ordered not to peer into his laptop computer, and Papa had led a prayer saying “Lord, if they come at us with guns, we pray that they would have a bullet for each one of us.” Stenehjem failed to mention such odd details in his published account that fall, however, which served as one more laudatory testimonial to the last American pioneers.

  THE WRANGELL–ST. ELIAS National Park superintendent, Gary Candelaria, was in a cheerful mood the day I stopped by the new visitor center at Copper Center. He had distributed an angry letter to curious visitors during the summer, defending his actions and accusing the Pilgrims of breaking the law “openly, deliberately, repeatedly.” SUPERINTENDENT DEFAMES INHOLDERS was the headline on Rick Kenyon’s rebuttal. But the superintendent did not seem racked with regret about the publicity and the escalating confrontation on his watch. If anything, he embraced the opportunity to clarify lines of authority in a period of historical transition.

  Candelaria would eventually receive a prestigious national award for defending park resources against local political pressures, and in our interview he happily enumerated the trespasses of the Pilgrims. The speech went on for some time.

  “The thing is,” he concluded, “we have a pretty good record when people come to us and have a need and follow the rules. The Pilgrims might not have gotten everything they wanted, but all this trouble could have been avoided. If this were Yellowstone, would there be a question?”

  Indeed, it was hard to imagine someone driving a bulldozer through a national park in the lower forty-eight and not suffering consequences. But wasn’t Alaska supposed to be different?

  “It does mean we have to take a light touch,” the superintendent said. “But the thing about the park is it’s here forever. Right now, people say, ‘I used to do things this way and didn’t have to bother with a permit.’ In another twenty years, people will say, ‘My mother never used to need a permit.’ Over time, you remove that mind-set. You have more people who never had anything to lose in the first place. Like the Hale family. I know, we still have people in the Shenandoah Valley arguing that ‘my great-great-grandfather lost his farm’ when the Park Service came in there. But things change. Times change.”

  THE PILGRIMS’ most avid angels weren’t ready to concede Candelaria’s point, however. Their fundamentalism was not necessarily the religious kind. They longed for a return to fundamental American virtues supposedly prevalent at the time of the continent’s settling. Government was stripping these freedoms away. Alaska was a last redoubt.

  There were signs of this bigger agenda when Papa Pilgrim, pressed by his new handlers to work with the system long enough to establish a legal case, finally applied for an “emergency” access permit from the park. He said they needed to haul in equipment by bulldozer before the deep winter snows. The small planes had not been able to carry all the building supplies they needed. The family submitted an eight-page handwritten letter, in which Pilgrim said they had been prepared to take care of themselves until the iron curtain came crashing down.

  As a wilderness family from day one we exemplify “traditional and customary way.” The road itself expresses the historic and personability of a road that pioneered this country, “The Last Frontier,” a land of extremes, hardship and dangers, blood, tears and laughter of its peoples—To wipe out its people and access, would not only make it virtually unenjoyable for 99.9% of this country’s people, but would as in the case of “Cades Cove” rid the wilderness of such beauty and flavor of love, that its true nature and meaning would be lost.

  It was telling that Pilgrim invoked the name of Cades Cove. The story of that vanished Appalachian community was a prominent grievance in the decades-long battle waged by Cushman and Kreig and their allies against the “broken promises, abuse, and misconduct” of the National Park Service. Theirs was an important front in the broader counterrevolution centered in the American West, known at various times as the “Wise Use” movement and the “Sagebrush Rebellion,” aimed at beating back the rise of environmentalism as a national political force.

  The people of Cades Cove, Tennessee, were uprooted during the Great Depression to make way for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Then, having swept aside the old rural way of life, park officials became alarmed as brush choked the farm fields and the depopulated valley lost its rustic appeal. Federal funds were spent to reconstitute a museum-version farming landscape that is now a major park attraction. In spring, they say, observant tourists may notice jonquils and roses blooming in the midst of empty meadows, a last trace of the old homesteads.

  And so the stories went, in a string of cases in which property-rights groups accused the National Park Service and other agencies of corrupting “America’s Best Idea.” The government protected treasured vistas by clearing out ranchers and family farmers who were there first—to say nothing of Native American tribes. It was a tragic view of America, where the rural landscape seemed unstable, doomed to change. Either the countryside was to be paved over for shopping malls and tract homes or ro
lled back in the name of conservation to its primordial presettled state. (It must be said that development of new shopping malls was not seen as the bigger problem to most of these private-property rebels, land speculation having always been the very pulse of America’s westward expansion.)

  In any event, and unfortunately for Cushman and his fellow Sagebrush Rebels, their rural-rights movement had never found much national traction. The federal inholders were few, they lived in distant valleys, they could too easily be dismissed as tools of big resource corporations or greedy right-wing nuts. The media reflex had been to treat the National Park Service deferentially. And no galvanizing romantic injustice had given the movement a public face.

  Until now.

  The Park Service had spent twenty years since the passage of the Alaska conservation act treading lightly on local sensitivities in the forty-ninth state. That agreeable attitude had clearly reached its limits in the Pilgrim case. The park’s advice to the family on how to obtain an emergency access permit was at first vague—the system for such things was still being worked out—but grew more insistent, and more onerous, with each new exchange. The park declared that “emergencies” under federal regulations had to be unanticipated. The approach of winter in Alaska was, by contrast, entirely foreseeable, something other inholders dealt with, and not a basis for emergency action.

  Government biologists had put out a net in McCarthy Creek and found some Dolly Varden trout in the glacial water. Given that each of the Pilgrims’ trips would require at least a dozen crossings of this fishy stream, an environmental study would be necessary before even a temporary access route could be approved. The Pilgrims would not be forced to pay for the study themselves, but even an expedited study would mean a sixty-day delay. Officials also suggested contacting the Army Corps of Engineers and the state Department of Natural Resources for additional permits.