I spent the summer of 2002 living in McCarthy, Alaska, a
small community in the heart of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve,
the largest park (and among the least-visited) in the U.S. system. A few months
earlier, a pair of guys from the class above me at Bowdoin College had given a
presentation on this great summer program out there, which convinced me to sign
up. So I bought a tent, a good pack, and industrial strength hiking boots, and
in late June I deplaned at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport and
walked between a giant stuffed polar bear and a giant stuffed Kodiak bear into
a city conspicuously lacking pigeons (they were replaced by magpies on the
telephone wires), found my hostel, wandered out for a reindeer sausage from a
street vendor, browsed some kitschy shops, and tried to sleep, although I would
not see a dark sky for another six weeks. In the morning a van collected me and
other adventurers and took us five hours east on the highway, then another 60
miles in three hours on “the worst road in the world,” a dusty dirt construction
with some washed out bits and sketchy looking bridges. Lastly, we crossed a
well-built footbridge across a glacier-fed river into town and walked another
mile to the Old Hardware Store, one of the main buildings in a community with a
population of 28 in the most recent census, and the home of the
WrangellMountain Center, in its own words “a private nonprofit institute which fosters
understanding, appreciation, and stewardship of wildlands and mountain culture
in Alaska through scientific and artistic inquiry in the Wrangell Mountains.”
About 15 college kids showed up every summer for an
eight-week program at the Center, which involved hiking over glaciers, forests,
and serious hills (the tall mountains in the area being in the neighborhood of
16,000 feet), the study of biology and geology, and reflections on nature in a
place where nature is unusually dynamic. (I got 2.25 credits in Environmental
Studies and Biology for Bowdoin via San Francisco State University’s School of
Extended Learning, but that was the least rewarding part of the experience). The
local history also plays its part. The copper mining company town of Kennicott
was five miles further beyond the bridge, next to the richest copper veins ever
discovered. The rail bridge connecting the place to civilization would be
destroyed every year by an unusual phenomenon known as a
jökulhlaup, in which a
glacier gets in the way of a river and dams it to form a lake until it doesn’t,
forming a flood. But the copper made rebuilding the bridge annually well worth
the effort. McCarthy the support town was where the miners could get vittles
and visit brothels for trysts with girls with names like “the Beef Trust.” Eventually
the copper was all extracted, though, and Kennicott became a picturesque ruin
of decaying red-painted wooden buildings. McCarthy also became a ghost town
that drew but a few dozen strong personalities to live there in the summer, and
fewer in the winter.
The summer of 2002, however, was the first since a family
with 15 children came to town. The Pilgrims were fundamentalist Christians who
had bought a mining claim and associated private property in the next valley, around
Bonanza Ridge and up McCarthy Creek. My fellow youngsters from Outside and I never
saw the Pilgrims in two months; we were kept apart. The family patriarch, who
styled himself as Papa Pilgrim, had “heard the college students sometimes
camped in the nude. His own children had never been exposed to the naked human
body, he said. In fact, they remained fully dressed even when they bathed, a
practice that kept them from temptation and sin.” So relates longtime
Anchorage Daily News reporter Tom Kizzia
in his 2013 book about the Pilgrims,
Pilgrim’sWilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness in the Alaska Frontier. Therefore,
the students “were no longer welcome to make their annual backpacking trek up
McCarthy Creek.” We did set out on the two-week circuit hike, but only after
unsuccessful negotiations by our director about crossing Pilgrim land, and thus
with restrictions forcing us to try to cross a (relatively) high pass. The
weather ended up making this impossible, as we experienced snow in July and
were camped above the Mile High Cliffs in driving rain for several days but
could not be resupplied by bush plane. So we had to turn around and head back
down the creek rather than make go over the ridge. At one point we were
descending fairly steep terrain and found ourselves looking down on the Pilgrim
compound hundreds of yards away. We heard them fire up their chainsaws. In
fairness to Papa Pilgrim, I do recall several of our group running around naked
on grassy hills in thick mist after a rainstorm at one point on that hike.
While the Pilgrims avoided the collegiate crowd, they had
overall tried to balance homesteading in the wild with building ties in the
tiny town. We’d heard that in their more social moments in McCarthy, the
Pilgrims had revealed themselves to be amazing musicians, playing a joyful and
authentic mountain music. This positive image came across in
The Road to McCarthy, a memoir in which
Pete McCarthy, a humorist from the British Isles, traces his ancestry around
the globe from Morocco to Alaska (after an earlier volume tracing his ancestry through
all the McCarthy’s Bars in Ireland was a big hit). Studying in London in spring
2003, I was shocked to see a photo of the tiny Alaska town where I’d spent the
previous summer on the cover of a paperback, which I naturally bought and devoured.
A decade on from that fantastic summer, I still haven’t made
it back to Alaska. But in the interval Papa Pilgrim continued to attract my
attention with occasional appearances in the national news. He had bulldozed
open a long-abandoned and completely overgrown road (I remembered walking along
the road, and it was wild and hard to find in many places) through the public
parkland in order to supply the family with food in the Alaskan winter. This
opened up a hornet’s nest with the National Park Service, but Pilgrim had
plenty of libertarian supporters on his side. They even launched an airlift to
supply the family. Kizzia’s reporting at the time also revealed that Pilgrim’s
real name was Robert Hale, that his father had been a college football star who
went on to be the chief of the FBI’s Dallas office and a good buddy of J. Edgar
Hoover, and that back in 1959, Bobby Hale had taken the daughter of John
Connelly, future Texas governor and Kennedy assassination bystander/victim, as
his teenage bride and run off to Florida, where she died within two months of a
potentially self-inflicted gunshot wound. Later on, more of the story came out.
In truth, Pilgrim was far from a good Christian. He had not only been asserting
his authority as infallible law in his household, keeping his children from the
world, preventing them from learning to read, and beating them frequently, but
he had also been raping his eldest daughter. Finally, they rebelled and Papa
Pilgrim ended up in jail. When he died not long after in 2008, member after
member of his religious family stood at his open grave (in Wasilla, which “in
just a few weeks… would give the world an indelible new image of post-frontier
Alaska”) and “consign[ed] the newly departed to hell.”
I’ve had a barebones sketch of the true Pilgrim story for
some years, but Kizzia tells the long tale skillfully and comprehensively in
his book, while at a very readable length. I’m glad to know the story as fully as
it can be known, a dozen years after Papa Pilgrim and sons showed up in
McCarthy having driven trucks through a blizzard to find their promised land. The
author visited the Pilgrims when their story was about a Christian family
confronting the federal government over the highly charged Alaskan issues of
land use and the taming of the frontier, dug up Papa Pilgrim’s dark past after
the man himself gave the reporter some hints, and returned to the story to reveal
what happened after the family lost their support in town and Hale lost control
of the children he treated as his property. Pilgrim’s
Wilderness is scrupulously fair to the different family members and their
faith, the townspeople, and others involved in the story. Kizzia has tracked
down helpful sources along the Pilgrims’ road from Texas through New Mexico to
Alaska. He does a good job explaining and exploring the background issues that
originally attracted attention to the Pilgrims without losing the narrative
thread of his yarn. Ultimately, Tom Kizzia has contributed a strange, gripping
story to the literature of true crime and the American West.
I’d also like to thank Kizzia for transporting me back to
McCarthy and an Alaska more authentic than Sarah Palin and more chilling than Northern Exposure, as I read the book
over the course of a week or two. I still hope to take that road to McCarthy again
and return to the Wrangells in person someday.
