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

by Tom Kizzia

  The boys had been snowmachining down the valley in a heavy wet snowfall. David was driving, with Joshua holding a towline on a pair of old downhill skis. Two of them on the machine would have bogged down in the fresh snow. Even as it was, David got stuck. They were by the creek, digging at the machine with shovels. The snow was falling in big, thick flakes, and they could see nothing in the gray darkness but they could hear the long roll of thunder. It was a familiar sound in this valley, though there was no telling where this avalanche was coming down. Suddenly an enormous wind struck them, thick with powder and crusty snow and leaves from the decimated woods. They crouched behind the machine, gasping for air as the whirlwind engulfed them, their hearts bursting with repentance, as they waited for the crush of snow to end their lives.

  Then there was silence. After crashing through the trees, the wall of snow had stopped several hundred yards short of where the brothers waited. But they had felt the breath of God.

  IN THE cabin’s tight quarters that winter, the fighting between Elishaba and Papa was getting worse. Elishaba’s brothers pressed her to give up her bitterness toward their father. She was making life impossible for everyone. Papa punished her, when his diabetes and leg pains got worse, by choosing Jerusalem to accompany him during another hospital stay in Anchorage. Papa had warned Elishaba that her younger sister could always take her place—that Elishaba could be reduced to servitude in the family. He had stirred Elishaba’s jealousy this way from the time Jerusalem was born.

  Elishaba was left behind to work with her brothers at the portable sawmill in McCarthy. She had so many emotions as she worked, she couldn’t keep them straight—relief being away from her father, dread on behalf of her fifteen-year-old sister, and envy over the trip to town.

  Country Rose went along to the hospital as well. The family was thus spread all over the landscape when, on the seventeenth day of the Third Month, Abraham caught his finger in the generator at Hillbilly Heaven.

  The last joint of the nine-year-old’s middle finger was stripped clean off. The children looked all over the shed but couldn’t find the fleshy tip until someone thought to check inside Abraham’s work glove. David, left in charge of the homestead, put Abraham on the back of a snowmachine and rushed him down the valley, the finger fragment in a bag of snow. They were flown to Anchorage where their parents waited. But the doctors at Providence Hospital seemed cold and unfriendly. They were less concerned about Abraham’s finger than about lateral welts they discovered on his back.

  Papa called the homestead and told the children there to run into the woods and hide because social workers might be on their way. He slipped into Abraham’s hospital room and forgave his son for the theft of candy that had made his whipping necessary. These were the times he had often warned about, Papa said, when the family had to stick together. The state troopers were summoned to the hospital. Each family member was interviewed separately, but everyone told the same story about Abraham falling down some stairs at the homestead.

  Meanwhile, Country Rose found a doctor in Portland, Oregon, who agreed to try to reattach the fingertip. Abraham was allowed to leave and was medevaced to the Pacific Northwest. Papa went along on the plane to care for his son. Jerusalem followed on a commercial flight to take care of Papa.

  It turned out to be too late for Abraham’s finger. But as they camped in Abraham’s room in the Portland hospital, they had a visitor. Chuck Cushman, the beefy, white-bearded property-rights advocate who had helped organize the Wrangells airlift, lived right across the Columbia River in southern Washington.

  And that was how the Lord revealed His plan in their dark hour, Papa Pilgrim told an audience a few days later when he took the microphone on stage.

  It turned out that Cushman, the political activist known by the nickname “Rent-a-Riot,” was also a musician. He played autoharp in a bluegrass-style band. He took Papa and Jerusalem to an open-mike concert and encouraged them to perform. He was astounded to watch their bashful country manner blossom into stage charisma before an audience. Pilgrim turned out to be a sly showman. Jerusalem was a mandolin prodigy. Their tunes were so well received that night, and the next when they played at another show, that Cushman proposed a real concert to raise funds for their return trip north.

  The onstage authenticity of Cushman’s land-rights icons could not have been more pleasing. He moved Pilgrim into his home and arranged for more of the family to head south and join the band. He called a friend with ties to a local recording studio. Like many others before and after him, Cushman was moved to help this family that seemed a little troubled and lost in the world. But he was excited, too, to think this could be the missing piece at last—the romantic family whose struggle against the National Park Service would become a national rallying cause.

  Folksy and acerbic, Cushman had once sold insurance in Los Angeles. But he was the son of a seasonal park ranger, and he often told audiences that he was inspired to start the National Park Inholders Association in 1978 by memories of how his father was blackmailed into selling the family’s inholding cabin to keep his job in Yosemite. Expanding his mission to include miners, ranchers, and Forest Service cabin owners, Cushman traveled the country to advise local groups—usually for a fee—on the perils of new proposals for parks, wildlife refuges, or “scenic river” designations that could interfere with their property rights. On one such barnstorming tour of Alaska in 1979, on the eve of the Alaska conservation act vote, he had flown into McCarthy. Rick Kenyon would later describe that visit as his own moment of political awakening. The jingoistic spirit of those times, and the infighting that hobbled the anti-environmentalist opposition, was nicely evoked by the names of the four groups that sponsored Cushman’s trip but couldn’t combine into a single organization: the Real Alaskan Coalition, Alaskans for Alaska, Alaskans United, and Alaskans Unite.

  Cushman’s stump speech invoked the values of salt-of-the-earth rural Americans whose bucolic real estate dreams were threatened by affluent urban elites seeking new playgrounds. Even his critics conceded Cushman helped force the Park Service to rethink a highhanded preference for secret land acquisitions and condemnations. But they accused him of a divisive, shoot-from-the-hip style that tore communities apart and relied on exaggeration—equating, for instance, park policies to genocide in the Balkans. When I spoke with Cushman, he chuckled about the Rent-a-Riot nickname, saying he often used it himself. “In my world, controversy is a friend,” he said. “If I can create enough controversy, I can move a bureaucracy.”

  American roots music, though, could move public opinion. And as the Pilgrims’ music caught on, there was also good news back in Alaska on the legal and political fronts. The federal courts agreed to hear an appeal of Judge Beistline’s decision. Then the federal magistrate ruled narrowly in the Mother Lode mineshaft case, imposing a mere three-hundred-dollar fine on Joseph for breaking the government’s padlock and lecturing the Park Service about being a better neighbor. The day after his sentencing, Joseph went to a meeting in the eastern Alaska crossroads of Delta Junction and was asked to serve as district delegate to the state Republican Party convention in May.

  Papa Pilgrim’s allies were being rewarded and his enemies vanquished. After five years of butting heads with local critics, park superintendent Gary Candelaria was moving on to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. The new NPS Alaska regional director told staff they needed to come up with better access rules to accommodate well-meaning park inholders. Internet traffic was flooding the “War in the Wrangells” website put up by Kreig’s organization, the Alaska Land Rights Coalition. Kurt Stenehjem, the fallen airlift angel turned correspondent, wrote a story for Rick Kenyon’s paper about Cades Cove. Neil Darish at the McCarthy Lodge won attention for a levelheaded opinion piece in the Anchorage Daily News that called for preserving McCarthy’s “remote wilderness culture” in light of new thinking around the world regarding ways to engage indigenous communities in conservation. Darish argued that part of the appeal of Alaska’s
national parks was the lingering opportunity for self-reliant living, which sometimes included “driving funky vehicles somewhere unpopulated” over old roads and trails.

  Summoned south by Papa, family members loaded their instruments and sleeping bags in the back of one such funky vehicle, a seatless, windowless panel van usually parked by the Kennicott River. Hosanna, David, Joshua, Lamb, and Elishaba were turned back at the Canada border because of a badly cracked windshield. But help from a Christian family in Delta Junction got them back on the road. They made it to Portland in time for the concert.

  They were a hit. The family went on local radio and then played another concert, and then gave six more performances, all of them small-theater sellouts. They developed a following of other large Christian families, high schoolers, and traditional music fans fascinated by the loving and untainted family out of the Alaska wilderness: the father with his wry sparkle, the smiling musicians, the yodeling, the youngest children clogging wildly in their loud tap shoes. People said it was like discovering the Carter Family back in 1927 in rural Virginia. They played the indigenous folk music of America, vernacular hymns born in the populist religious ferment that swept the Jacksonian frontier and took root in the Appalachians. A singer in a popular Portland acoustic quartet helped organize the shows and told a reporter, “It was tempting as a musician to want to offer them a tip, but we would just bite our lips because we didn’t want to contaminate them.”

  A recording studio executive came to one of their shows and opened his doors, so they went in and recorded a compact disc. They called themselves the Pilgrim Family Minstrels, a name that Papa said picked up on the idea of musical “ministry,” of being instruments of God. The CD featured original and traditional gospel tunes of struggle and reward. Elishaba sang solo on one of them, “Pilgrim’s Daughter”:

  I am a pilgrim’s daughter on the way to Heaven’s home

  Gonna hold his hand forever, only one way to go …

  Papa called the CD Put My Name Down and dedicated it to his brother, “Pilgrim Billy,” who “passed over the Jordan River to Glory” while recording was under way. A reviewer for the Anchorage Daily News, waving off their “hillbilly get-ups and well-publicized legal scraps,” called their music “pure as a mountain brook.”

  With successful concerts and glowing reviews, Cushman talked of bringing the family back to the Pacific Northwest for an extended tour. The English writer Pete McCarthy had once predicted “brighter lights than McCarthy can offer” for the family band, and the time did seem nearly at hand.

  There was a moment, though, during their stay at Cushman’s house, when the property-rights activist caught himself wondering about his pure-as-a-mountain-brook poster family. He shared some sheet music with the children, not really expecting they would be able to read the music. But it was worse than that—they couldn’t read the lyrics.

  BY LATE May, the Pilgrims were back in Alaska, arriving in force at the sports arena in Soldotna for Joseph’s debut in state politics. It was the Republican Party’s 2004 state convention, and the Pilgrim Family were the featured entertainment.

  They showed up in a van they’d been given in Washington State—one with windows and actual seats. On the side they’d painted PILGRIM FAMILY MINSTRELS TOUR VAN 2004, and on the back, HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS—WE DO! Papa Pilgrim spoke approvingly to a reporter about the Republican platform, saying it appeared to take a “godly approach.” The family’s homespun manner offered a welcome distraction from the internal warfare tearing at the Alaska Republicans that election year, over ethics charges leveled against the party’s paid chairman by its rising young star, a former mayor of Wasilla.

  Coming off their recent successes, it should have been the performance that established the Pilgrims as darlings of the state’s political conservatives. The family’s down-home values, their religiosity, and their battle against federal landlords all seemed elements of a powerful brand for Alaska Republicanism. But when the big moment came and the Pilgrim Family Minstrels played their gospel tunes, the response from delegates was surprisingly muted. Crevasses were opening in Alaska’s dominant political party at the start of Sarah Palin’s era. Despite the growing influence of Christian churches in the state’s majority party, libertarian Alaska actually ranks low among states in measures of religious piety and church attendance. Some conservatives, especially in the more secular, oil-and-construction business sphere of the party, found the Pilgrims distasteful—probable welfare cheats, creepy in their isolation, newcomers exploiting the state’s beloved Permanent Fund Dividend program.

  One attendee who was especially uncomfortable about the performance was Dallas Massie. In his day job, Massie was an investigator for the Alaska State Troopers. Several months earlier, he had been called to Providence Hospital to examine the welts on Abraham Hale’s back. It didn’t appear to Massie that the boy had fallen down some stairs. But the family’s story had been consistent, and the state couldn’t hold them when they took off for Portland. In Soldotna, he found the music entertaining, but every time his eyes fell on Papa Pilgrim his heart sank. He watched the way the father kept his kids lined up, awaiting his commands, huddled apart from everyone else at the convention. Massie knew something was not right.

  The Pilgrims had come to Soldotna hoping for a timely boost from the Republicans. Governor Frank Murkowski seemed a natural for their cause, steeped in the old antagonisms of Alaska conservation politics. For twenty-two years as a U.S. senator, he had fulminated that the 1980 conservation act was like “waking up one morning to find that the federal government has declared your yard a national park and refused you access across your driveway.” The governor had been coaxed by Ray Kreig to fire off a letter in April to Interior secretary Gale Norton, calling attention to complaints in the Wrangells about red tape, access fees, and arbitrary field decisions by park rangers.

  But Murkowski was slow to follow up on the specifics of the Pilgrim Family’s plight and their federal legal appeal. Key aides inside his administration warned the situation could backfire. The state’s main coordinator of federal lands and conservation issues knew the McCarthy scene particularly well: In a former life, she had hosted Labor Day contra dances at the Hardware Store. Sally Gibert was one of a handful of Santa Cruz graduates who migrated to McCarthy in the 1970s. She later put her perspective on Alaska issues to professional use, serving both Republican and Democratic governors as state federal lands adviser. Gibert and others cautioned Murkowski that the legal arguments in the Pilgrim case were shaky, community support was less solid than activists alleged, and the Pilgrim Family’s belligerence could undermine the state’s long-term interests.

  The Pilgrims’ court battle was turning out to be no one’s idea of a good time. Environmentalists were nervous about a precedent-setting legal challenge over national park access rights involving what was clearly, at one time, a real road. But the state’s resource-development-minded Republicans were equally nervous about how the Pilgrim Family facts might suggest to any judge the need for prudent federal oversight of what goes on inside a national park.

  IT WAS a funny thing about the Pilgrims: The bigger the stage, the better they looked. From the proper distance—in concert, or in the stories of McCarthy Annie—the family’s saga was compelling. Glimpsing them on the front page or the TV news, one couldn’t help be intrigued. But up close, the folk-hero luster wore away quickly.

  That summer of 2004, the family returned from the Pacific Northwest and the state Republican convention to a showdown in the dusty streets of Old McCarthy Town. Back home, the celebrity musicians’ sprawling camp had become an object of universal derision.

  Pilgrim seemed taken aback. His family was exposed to so much more scrutiny here in the vast Alaska wilderness than they ever got in New Mexico. In the Sangre de Cristos, the social divisions were deep and historical. People were more guarded, and resentments built slowly. In the Wrangells, everything was new and out in the open. If folks didn’t like something,
they told you.

  Early on, Pilgrim tried to address local tensions with a letter, apologizing for the horses getting loose but blaming the park blockade for everything else. For seven defensive pages he cautioned people not to believe everything they heard. “I read in the Bible how God speaks about it in this wise: ‘A man’s story sounds good until his neighbor shows up,’ ” Pilgrim wrote. It was reminiscent of the speech he used to spring the family from trouble in New Mexico in 1995. He described how the conscience of a well-respected McCarthy neighbor was awakened upon hearing Pilgrim’s side of things, “released from all his own misunderstandings, his character healed, and we both enjoyed once again the endearment of good neighbor-ship.” It was a contrast, clearly, to the “malicious and uncalled-for harassment” from park rangers. The horse manure that people were complaining about was just “grass soup,” cleaner than “dog poo.” Then he told a story so ghastly that parents hid the letter away: how a Pilgrim horse, tangled in its own rope, was attacked by a town dog: “Sheer terror was in its eyes as the big black dog stood upon its body tearing at its flesh. The blood smeared horse was close to death and shock as it had been eaten alive from anus to its ears.”

  But Pilgrim’s lack of progress toward cleaning up his camp in the public right-of-way had worn out local patience. A heady fragrance of horse manure, burning garbage, and diesel exhaust drifted around town from the Pilgrims’ pied-à-terre. Disdain for the modern world was one thing, disregard for friends and neighbors something very different. With no local government, the only recourse was to mining-camp justice. A committee of property owners passed around a petition and presented the Pilgrims a “Notice of Road Improvement” stating that on August 14, 2004, a bulldozer would undertake a road beautification project at the corner of Barrett Way and Donohoe Avenue, presently the site of a wanigan, a horse corral, wall tents, and sundry pallets and storm windows and oil drums.