Book: Pilgrim's Wilderness by Tom Kizzia

A True Story of Faith and Madness in the Alaska Frontier

The tiny town of McCarthy, Alaska, is about 150 miles east of Anchorage and 50 miles west of the Yukon. It is in the Wrangell - St. Elias National Park and Preserve which, at over 8 million acres, is our largest national park.  In January of 2002, a man who called himself Papa Pilgrim (but who was born as Robert Hale) moved his family first to McCarthy and then a dozen or so miles north up the McCarthy Creek valley to an in-holding homestead in the Park away from the corruption of society as he knew it.

What a compelling and fascinating tale. Papa Pilgrim, his wife Country Rose and their 15 kids were a sight to behold as they invaded this sweet spot in the Alaskan wilderness. But sadly the story is fraught with darkness, evoking other tales of cults and misguided religiosity, megalomania and abuse, the psychology and sorrows of submission to a powerful visionary.

The author lives in Alaska. He and his wife had a cabin near McCarthy and he reported for the Anchorage Daily News. He tells of Robert Hale's earlier years including a teenage marriage to John Connally's daughter Kathleen. The couple ran away from home, got married in Oklahoma and settled in Florida…and 44 days later, Kathleen was dead of a gunshot wound. Bobby Hale testified that it was an accident and passed a lie-detector test. He was cleared. "Connally wrote that the death of his vivacious daughter left a burden or sorrow more profound than any tragedy in his life--his later bribery trial, his bankruptcy, even the assassination of a president."

Hale then spent several years as a hippie…Summer of Love in San Francisco, drugs, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Transcendental Mediation, communes, South American, more LSD and finally, on a visit to Texas in his 30s, he goes to a Baptist church. He and Rose were legally named Sunlight and Firefly Sunstar by this time. The church members "told Bobby they'd been praying for him for twenty years...He tore free and strode to the front of the church to receive Jesus…He removed his bag of marijuana from the bus and sprinkled it over a field. He cut his hair and shaved his beard and renounced the name Sunstar and lit a bonfire to burn their eagle feathers and tarot cards."

So, he now had religion and a family and new babies arriving yearly. They settle in New Mexico for several years before heading to Alaska. Tensions build over the years that the Pilgrim family live in the Sangre de Cristos mountains. The oldest daughter, Elishaba later would write of that time:

"As we huddled in the lean-to, my father actually built our log cabin around us. I will never forget the picture of him driving long spikes into the logs as the snowstorm hurled huge snowflakes all around us. At the end of each day, we would crawl into a our little lean-to, lit with only a bare oil-burning lamp, where we snuggled up just to stay warm. I looked toward to cuddling with my daddy each night, as he felt so big, safe and secure."

Weirdly, this land belonged to Jack Nicholson, and Papa Pilgrim and his family were caretakers for a $10 a month lease. The only two books the family owned were the King James Bible and and Pilgrim's Progress. The kids did not go to school.

They move to Alaska both fleeing authorities and seeking a place where Hale would not have to answer to any human higher powers. While the town of McCarthy first accepted them, the family was soon embroiled in a long dispute with the National Park Service over various issues. Papa Pilgrim was not averse to handouts, to creative stealing, to manipulation, to using his charming kids as wandering minstrels, to ingratiating himself with susceptible folks in the guise of one more wanderer who finds refuge in the wilds of Alaska and only wants to be left alone.

"A state Fish and Wildlife protection officer on the Kenai Peninsula had ticketed Joshua (one of the kids) for illegally shooting two Dall sheep along the Resurrection Pass Trail. Eight children at the scene wept pitiably as Papa Pilgrim described their poverty and begged for mercy. When the trooper wouldn't relent, Pilgrim turned red and told him he was going to hell. The family was all sweetness again by the time they got to court, with the smallest children fetched charmingly on the courtroom railing, but Joshua was convicted anyway."

The author becomes interested in this story and asks if he could visit the Pilgrims in an effort to learn more about the "conflicts between the national park and the community. Many citizens in McCarthy staunchly defend Papa Pilgrim for years, seeing the issue as heavy-handed prerogatives of big government versus the rights of individuals, especially the charismatic (to some at least) clan of Papa and his large family. The author says that Papa "thought about it a minute. He decided I should see the historic road to Hillbilly Heaven for myself. 'Come on by, neighbor, ' he said. 'You'll see we're just modest simple folks, not some strange religion.'" Kizzia does visit and continues researching and writing.

Eventually, it all comes around in awful disturbing ways. The family became non grata; the children grew older; the dreams and plans and ideals of Papa Pilgrim mature into evil and disillusion.

It is an amazing story of the romance of Alaska and the way it seduces people, along with Robert Hale's journey there, and his subsequent violation of everyone who wanted so desperately to believe and trust him.