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

by Tom Kizzia

  The Pilgrims did not follow through. Instead, on November 2, 2003, the Pacific Legal Foundation sued for access in federal court.

  WHILE THE Wrangell Mountain airlift continued that fall, my phone rang with calls from individuals and officials who had read the Anchorage Daily News stories and wanted to talk about their own brushes with the family.

  In Fairbanks, where the family had commenced their footloose period in Alaska, a Catholic charity had found them to be aggressively helpful in the local soup kitchen. The charity loaded them down with winter gear, but after frequent resupply requests finally had to turn them away, sensing they might be selling the gear they’d been given. At that point, I was told, the family swarmed, some of them distracting the warehouse employees, others walking off with sleeping bags and hand tools.

  A state Fish and Wildlife protection officer on the Kenai Peninsula had ticketed Joshua 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 perched charmingly on the courtroom railings, but Joshua was convicted anyway.

  In the conservative small town of Anchor Point, a senior citizens’ thrift store instituted a policy limiting individuals to one bag of clothing per visit because of the Pilgrims. The family had a local reputation, two volunteers said, for deploying their underclothed children “like gypsies” to arouse sympathy. “This isn’t another Ruby Ridge, as those people thought they had a cause,” the thrift store’s bookkeeper wrote in a letter to the paper. “The Pilgrims just want everything handed to them and will take advantage of every situation that comes up and they are not always sweetness and kindness. There is a lot of anger there. Just beware.”

  There was far more than I could print in the newspaper—not without repeating myself and seeming to pile on unfairly, especially given the political overtones around the state and the stony silence from Hillbilly Heaven.

  A small-time gypo logger in Anchor Point had hired the Pilgrims and then got in a fight over pay. The dispute resulted in numerous calls to the state troopers and one of the Pilgrims’ trucks getting buried in gravel by the logger’s backhoe. A story about the fracas in a local weekly paper drew an angry rebuttal letter signed by Elishaba:

  We in no wise pointed no weapons at no one’s head.… You cut off the whole story that we told you, just to make us out to sound bad.… He grabbed my papa by the beard, and drug him across the room. My little brothers and sisters crying, Buz! Buz!—please don’t hurt PAPA!! He hitting my little brother and stomping on my sister’s toes.… He with a big Golden ring on his finger, broke PAPA’s nose in two!

  Like other callers, the logger told me he’d gone to the local child protection office to report the family. He described walking in on the daughters as they bathed their naked father. He said the state office chased him away for slandering such fine Christians. (The state agency, citing its usual policy of confidentiality, would tell me nothing.)

  “They know how to ride this Welcome Wagon. They have it down pat,” the logger said.

  Every new story had a weird twist. The Pilgrims had lived for a short while in a gravel pit near Homer on the coast. They’d helped a local commercial fisherman repair a wooden boat that had been run onto the rocks. A swarm of Pilgrims replaced the keel, and in exchange the fisherman agreed to take four of the older sons along as deckhands on a commercial halibut trip. They were in the Barren Islands, hours from Homer, when four additional children climbed out of the hold. The skipper was angry to have his boat overloaded with stowaways, but the weather was flat calm and they made it back to Homer with twelve thousand pounds of fish.

  Pilgrim was a Texas plainsman but maritime living and the bounty of the sea must have looked pretty good at that point. The family climbed in a flat-bottomed boat they’d hauled down from Fairbanks, where they’d traded for it with thoughts of living along the Yukon River. It was a riverboat not meant for sailing on the sea. They headed out of the harbor with eight passengers to look at remote waterfront property. On the mudflats at the head of the bay, they were stranded for half a day when the area’s immense tide sucked out. Floating again, they made their way to a cove with land for sale, tied their boat off a rocky point, and returned at the next low tide to find the skiff dangling from a cliff, its stern submerged, their contents drifting away. They hit a big northwest swell in a snowstorm coming back and were bailing fast until they found refuge behind an anchored oil tanker. That was it—the Pilgrims left Homer and moved inland.

  I tracked down the lawyer who represented them in the dispute with the gypo logger. He gave them a place to stay in a subdivision he owned in Soldotna, a town north of Homer. The lawyer and his wife came from Mennonite backgrounds and had been moved by sympathy and charity. They soon found themselves in the awkward position of enforcing strict covenants against all the new homes in the subdivision while overlooking the growing piles of junk around the original homestead house they’d loaned the Pilgrims. There were many happy gatherings with food and music, the lawyer told me. But no attention was paid to the future of the children, several of whom he thought brilliant. He attributed this to Papa’s belief that they were living in the end days. After many months, the couple began to push more firmly to arrange formal schooling. Pilgrim left without warning, calling to inform the lawyer he was no longer welcome in their family’s life. They hadn’t been in touch since.

  Then there were really dark and troubling allegations. A woman who knew Pilgrim when he first arrived in Fairbanks called to tell me he beat his children and physically “corrected” Country Rose when she failed to call him “My Lord.” Papa told others to call him Abraham, and went about with a live raven on his shoulder. She also alleged Pilgrim had tried grooming her for some future role and brainwashed her husband. He took her small son away and made her kneel and ask forgiveness to get him back. “That was the worst feeling in the world, having his hand on my head,” she said. A Christian woman in Ninilchik who took the family in said Pilgrim would show up at her home smelling of alcohol—“a little wine for my diabetes,” he explained. Whispering in bed, the littlest Pilgrims asked the woman’s children if their older sister slept at night with their father.

  There were allegations of thievery, and repeated rumors that one of the daughters had been pregnant. It got to be overwhelming. Much of what I was hearing was “off the record” or not for attribution, which meant it was deemed unusable by my newspaper’s strict sourcing standards. Or it was potentially slanderous and difficult to substantiate. My editors pressed me to move on to other subjects. Pilgrim still wouldn’t come to the phone—though he was now speaking to other journalists, and even to television cameras.

  I reported some of the new anecdotes and allegations, but in stories balanced by endorsements from their political supporters.

  “They’re wonderful, loving people who I find to have a high degree of integrity,” Kenyon insisted.

  I asked Cushman about all the complaints.

  “We keep tracing down these things and finding there wasn’t much to them,” he said.

  Laurie Rowland had been explicit on the subject during the summer, talking to a reporter from the conservative website WorldNetDaily:

  They had to prove themselves to us. When we first saw them we were wondering who are these people. They looked so different. Do they have an agenda? Are they trying to prove something? Are they a cult? We couldn’t figure them out at first, and we wanted to be 100 percent sure of them. But we got to know them, and we found out they’re OK right down the line, straight up, nothing cultish about them. Nothing strange. That’s what we were worried about, and these people had to prove to us who they were just by living their lives in front of us.

  PILGRIM DID finally take my call. He was frosty, but also concerned that
I had published a story without talking to him. When I asked about the thrift shops, he had elaborate explanations. They had a vanload of gear stolen in Fairbanks, by someone they had trusted. “We worked really, really hard in Anchor Point. Folding and hanging clothes, hauling out the trash. We donated more to them than we ever took.” He said his friend, the store’s bookkeeper, would vouch for him. I told him about the letter she’d written, warning people to beware.

  Then I started into the harder things. I said I’d been told the family had a contingency plan in which everyone would commit suicide when he died.

  “Oh my goodness,” he said. “That’s not what I’m talking about at all. It’s a prayer for a blessing. We ask you, Lord, to make our way safe together or let us die for you together.”

  Angry now, he refused to respond to other allegations. There was no more ingratiating chatter about traditional music and cabin living. At last, I locked horns with the Papa Pilgrim other people described.

  “If you wanted to treat us fairly, you would have to go into the details of the national parks and their past abuse, as well as the details of a mistake a man makes when he’s seventeen.”

  He pushed back hard. They had gotten in only one-quarter of the supplies they needed. The hay and lumber were impossible to transport without a bulldozer. The park would never back down now, after I wrote that the Pilgrims were bad people. Pilots were risking their lives because of the park—and because of things I’d written.

  “Just one mistake and someone could be dead. Before God, you’ll have to answer for that.”

  He dragged other details from my stories before a heavenly tribunal. He threatened lawsuits against the Catholic church in Fairbanks and against the Anchorage Daily News. He started after the “rumors and gossip” I’d reported from New Mexico. He described extenuating circumstances that, had I known them, would have explained his actions. How could I have let myself be so misled? he wanted to know.

  “If you can’t read character better than that, you’re in the wrong business,” he said.

  He was turning the stories inside out, finding vulnerable spots, exposing small uncertainties, worming his way in. I should have taken another week before rushing to print. Had I misunderstood, misjudged him, jumped to a conclusion? Should I have made another call to triple-check some accusation?

  Was this what it felt like to be trapped in a cult?

  “Those things the troopers told you. They never once came up to my place. Did you ask them for the police report? You never checked after false stories,” he said. “There’s no way you can prove that I done wrong. Jesus said, ‘If I’ve done wrong, prove it. If I didn’t, why did you hit me?’ ”

  I told him the main issue had always been access through the park. That was why I’d come to McCarthy Creek. It was a political story. “Both sides make some good arguments,” I said, lamely toeing a professional line.

  “That’s what you told us—you were there to write about the road. What you told us was the opposite of what you did,” he said. “I can’t believe I did this to my family, in the name of love and trust. The whole article looks like you were hired by the Park Service. It’s really obvious. I understand why. We all saw where your wife works for the Sierra Club and just won a big environmental award.”

  “My wife is dying of cancer,” I hissed. “She had nothing to do with this.”

  Pilgrim fell silent.

  I was horrified by my own words. To wield Sally’s illness as a weapon was unthinkable. My whole career, I had kept her separate from my work, avoiding any story in which she had a direct professional interest. It was my own little religion. She hadn’t worked on national park issues in many years. In fact, she hadn’t worked at all since she’d been sick. If Papa Pilgrim only knew—her affection for McCarthy had contributed as much as anything to my interest in his story.

  Though Sally had indeed muttered, after the first stories ran, that she worried the Pilgrims would figure out the location of Neighbor Tom’s cabin and burn it down.

  I waited. Despite my horror, I had to suppress a fatuous pride at delivering a blow powerful enough to stop Papa Pilgrim in mid-harangue.

  When he spoke, his drawl was slower. He said his family would pray for my wife. Then he gently ended the call.

  Music in the cabin for visitors (photo credit 13.1)

  PAPA PILGRIM’S surprising rise from recluse to celebrity would continue after that fall’s political mobilization and airlift. The following spring, musical as well as political fame beckoned outside Alaska. Pilgrim said he could see God’s hand in how the whole story was unfolding.

  First, though, there had been a winter of hardship to endure, and trials both physical and legal. Despite dozens of small-plane flights in the fall of 2003, little new construction had been accomplished at Hillbilly Heaven. The family was still penned in the single mining cabin with thin plywood walls. Some children slept in an uninsulated storage shed, or in wall tents by the wanigan in town. They had new buckets of dried food and grains, but hunting went badly and the outdoor pole where they hung their frozen meat was nearly bare. And now the extended hunting season for local subsistence families inside the park had closed.

  Back in New Mexico, a closed hunting season would have struck the family as more of an irritant than a serious imposition on their diet. If God did not want them to eat meat, He would not send animals their way. Lately, however, the older children had been trying to follow the laws against poaching. They were hoping to establish better relations with their neighbors. They felt better about themselves, too—Elishaba, a crack shot, had packed home a legal Dall sheep with her sisters and two little brothers from a summit above the Mile High Cliffs, happy not to have to hide what she was doing.

  Then one morning Papa was riding to town with his daughters and encountered a huge bull moose with a remarkable spread of antlers punching steps along the snowmachine trail.

  The bull turned away and floundered toward the trees. Something caused Papa to pull out his rifle and drop the bull before there could be any argument. Elishaba sensed it was his way of showing the kids who was still in charge. She sat there stunned, counting up the problems this suddenly created: a huge trophy moose, shot in violation of more state and federal laws than she could count, lying in the open on bloody snow in a national park, with only her sisters and small children on hand. Papa refused to let them gut the animal, insisting they continue to McCarthy and take care of the meat on the way home. Using shovels they always carried to maintain ice bridges, the children swarmed the job in Pilgrim style, burying the moose in snow and erasing signs of blood. They drove snowmachines back and forth across the spot to obscure it.

  By the time they got back from town and dug into the snow, the animal was still warm and the meat had gone bad. They cut it up with a chain saw and sledded the quarters home for dog meat.

  Papa hid away the massive antlers. He would have to wait for another legal hunting season before showing them off.

  JOSEPH AND Joshua were in Anchorage. The week before Christmas, they drove in with Mama and stayed at Ray Kreig’s house and reported to federal court. A magistrate fined Joshua one thousand dollars for taking the undercover agent on a horseback ride into the park. The case against Joseph for breaking the lock on the mine tunnel was trickier. The government produced witnesses and experts, and other park officials watched to see how the question of legal access in Alaska through an underground shaft might get sorted out. There was no quick decision when the prosecution rested.

  Carl Bauman, the Motorhead lawyer representing the boys, was being pressed by his firm to wrap up the pro bono work. But the family’s legal needs were growing more and more complicated, as they contested certain handshake portions of the sales agreement with Walt Wigger. The old miner had completely soured on the Pilgrims and was attempting to reclaim his wanigan and bulldozer. The sons produced a secret tape recording of Wigger making promises.

  “They were naïve in a sharp way,” Bauman recalle
d. “They could live with a little ambiguity, if you will.”

  The family’s big headline case, the Pacific Legal Foundation lawsuit, was not going well. The park was winning. A federal judge had ruled that the guarantee of “adequate and feasible” access to inholdings in Alaska was subject to “reasonable regulation” by the park. He said the 1980 Alaska conservation act spelled out this balancing act explicitly.

  The bottom line was that the Pilgrims could not ignore the fact that their road ran through a national park. They had to get a permit, and if the government’s rules seemed too stringent, the family could come back to court seeking relief. The federal judge, Ralph Beistline of Fairbanks, added that the family’s emergency didn’t seem so dire, considering all the help they’d received: “Many Alaskans who choose a wilderness lifestyle routinely experience similar hardships, without the benefit of a large scale airlift of goods.” He lectured both sides about their “showmanship and emotionalism.”

  By the time the judge ruled, winter lay deep in the valley. At that time of year, a pale sun would appear for only an hour or two a day. Many chores got done by moonlight. The Park Service had decided the family could have temporary access by bulldozer—but only during winter, when the creek was frozen and the ground protected by snow. The family refused to sign off. They put their faith in an appeal. They wanted a summer road. Winter travel was too dangerous, they said.

  As if to emphasize the point, a massive avalanche let go from Green Butte that winter with Joshua and David squarely in its path.