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

by Tom Kizzia

  Shaine is watching the evolution of park policies no less anxiously than Rick Kenyon. Working with the federal bureaucracy is like living in an old cabin in the woods, he says: You fiddle with each problem that comes along using the tools at hand, until you figure out how to jury-rig a solution.

  Lately, a problem in need of jury-rigging has been how to preserve Kennicott—or “Kennecott,” the official and gradually ascendant spelling. Early plans for taking over the ruins called for the national park to retain a lost-world atmosphere. Planners once spoke of a “sense of discovery” and “arrested decay.” Then some park officials began pushing to restore certain buildings as brass-plaqued facsimiles of the 1938 originals and let others vanish into piles of boards. Stability was the goal; change, growth, and decline were problematic. The McCarthy Area Council has expressed fear that Park Service careerists from the lower forty-eight would rebuild the ruins and funnel visitors into tours, a concept derided locally as “Disneyland.” The local council would prefer to see Kennicott preserved somehow in its abandoned, half-fallen state, as a place that reminds visitors of how tenuous great works can be—a place, in the words of an early plan, “still haunted by past residents.”

  TANGLED BRUSH had grown up everywhere when I finally returned to our McCarthy cabin. It was late summer and rained hard for three days. Ethan, in his teens and growing taller, came along to help with roof repairs. A heavy winter snowslide had sheared off our stovepipe. A neighbor, who wrote with the news, had temporarily patched the hole with a sheet of metal roofing and arrested the decay.

  I chainsawed willows out of the clearing and reopened the footpath—making as few cuts as possible, out of respect for Sally’s opinion in such matters. Except for the hole in the roof, the cabin was in remarkably good shape after twenty years. The inside walls were still plastic-sheathed pink insulation, the kitchen counter on sawhorses, everything waiting for someone to come back and finish the job.

  We tried waiting out the storm while visiting friends and neighbors around McCarthy. The first night, with rain drumming on the roof, I pulled out the old guest journals and sat on the cabin’s only piece of real furniture, an empty white iron bed from Sally’s childhood. The place used to be busy with friends staying over, but since her death there had been few visitors. I turned to our last family entry. It was from the summer I met the Pilgrims, when Sally was in her last decline. This is what she wrote:

  August 21, 2003. We leave tomorrow after five fun-filled days. Nine years since we were here—seems like a lifetime ago. In McCarthy time, seems like yesterday. People are still friendly, mostly (really completely). Controversies still brewing.

  The biggest overall impression is the ever changeable landscape. Impermanence—the lesson of life. We want to hold tight to what is good and real in life, but change is inevitable. The Wrangell Mountains are a wonderful reminder of that universal lesson. The teaching continues.

  On a more practical level, I’ve had so much exercise this week—biking and hiking. Now back to real life. Chemo on Tuesday. Love, Sally. P.S. We celebrated Ethan’s 9th birthday here with homer homemade choc. cake w/ white frosting.

  The next day it was still raining and the steep metal roof was running with water. I was glad I’d brought my old climbing gear, retired now and stained ignominiously with roofing tar. Ethan held me on belay with a second rope, standing on the far side of the roof ridge, alert to my calls for tension. My son loved the McCarthy cabin: the hard work, the toasty fire when the stack was rebuilt, the kerosene light and Scrabble at night. He talked about coming out someday to live in McCarthy and go ice climbing and put up siding. His enthusiasm cheered me up.

  On the last morning, the sky cleared and we saw fresh snow on the peaks. I took Ethan exploring on our land. I showed him the point above the canyon where his mom and I had sat that long-ago summer and watched the moon rise. A game trail led to the tree where we cached our food away from bears. The platform was still up there, our crude nailed-together ladder slimy wet on the ground. Somewhere nearby had been a mossy clearing where we pitched our little mountain tent. I thrashed around in the heavy brush. It all seemed so different now. Ethan asked what I was looking for but I didn’t want to say.

  THE SUN was threatening to break through the clouds on the afternoon Joseph Hale and Lolly Buckingham were married in a mountain meadow above the braided Matanuska River.

  All the Hales and Buckinghams dressed alike that summer day—the boys in matching handmade shirts, the girls in dresses of cornflower blue gingham. They sang hymns while more than a hundred guests gathered on log benches arrayed in the Lazy Mountain field. Jim Buckingham, sporting a trim salt-and-pepper beard to mark his retirement from the military, rose to speak of the sovereign orchestration of God. He said Joseph and Lolly had purposed to be clean and pure before God and man, and had expressed this by having no physical contact during their engagement. Their younger siblings had followed them around as constant chaperones.

  The children sang “Peaceful Harbor.” Joseph appeared far across the hayfield and began striding toward the guests. He wore a white shirt, vest, and Stetson hat. He seemed unhurried for a young man who had waited twenty-nine years for this daydream scenario to unfold. Lolly came from the other direction, wearing white crepe and a wreath of mountain blue gentians in her long brown hair. It felt like the last chapter of a Jane Austen novel when the rolling clouds parted felicitously to bathe the couple in sunlight as they met. Joseph removed his cowboy hat and kissed a flower in his hand and gave it to Lolly, and they embraced.

  Among those looking on was Lolly’s sister, Sharia, who had once been teased by her father about marrying one of the Pilgrim boys. At Sharia’s side was her husband, Joshua.

  Four months earlier they had been the first in their families to marry. The children had been coatless that cold day at the Buckinghams’, in homemade burgundy shirts, and Martha Buckingham later joked that it was a mistake to let her husband officiate outdoors in a sweater, as he warmed to the subject of God’s grace and had quite a lot to say about it. He instructed the couple on their roles in a Christian marriage, telling his daughter she was only to disobey her husband if asked to do something God forbids. Joshua and Sharia rode off from the reception on horseback.

  As I write this, the two young couples live in homes they have built for themselves on Lazy Mountain outside Palmer, not far from their brothers and sisters. They are contributing a new understory of children to family gatherings. Joshua, the family’s horseman, has a business as a farrier, and Joseph is a building contractor who employs many family members. Because of their poor educations, the brothers rely on their wives to handle more of the businesses than might normally be comfortable in the gender roles of their tradition. But the businesses are doing well. Joseph has sent his brothers north as far as Nome on government contracts with, among other agencies, the National Park Service.

  Kurina Rose Hale lives down the road from the Buckinghams. She lives alone—the younger Hale children remain under the close care of the family that rescued them. Jerusalem and Hosanna swiftly earned their high school diplomas through a correspondence program, and their siblings continue to homeschool. The older boys work in construction in the bustling Wasilla-Palmer area, sometimes alongside the Buckingham sons. David Hale also volunteered in prison ministry, and others talk of becoming missionaries. Jim and Martha Buckingham report that the children continue to struggle, but none have abandoned their faith. They still believe Jesus is coming. But there are lives to be led in the meantime.

  THE THIRD Pilgrim to marry was Elishaba. She had met her husband several years earlier, when she and her sibling musicians were turned back from the Canada border with a broken windshield and sought refuge with Christians in Delta Junction. The meeting was, to them, one more example of how a providential hand had guided her way.

  At first, Matthew Doerksen had strong misgivings about the Pilgrim Family. He shared his concerns with the Buckinghams when he moved to Palmer and set
tled in an outbuilding at their place. The Buckinghams persuaded Matthew that the children of Papa Pilgrim were sincerely trying to change their hearts. After Elishaba’s escape, it took two years to move beyond stern judgment on Matthew’s part and defensive anger on hers. On their wedding day, Matthew described Elishaba as a beautiful flower beaten by a terrible storm and restored by the Lord. She said his tender compassion had “opened wide the floodgates of joy in my life.”

  During their honeymoon, Matthew and Elishaba traveled to places that had been important in her past, including McCarthy Creek and the mountains of New Mexico. She looked up old acquaintances and asked for forgiveness. People were incredibly warm and consoling. The journey was an exorcism. At Hillbilly Heaven, Matthew found pious words of Scripture burned into the wood of the bathhouse. He tore down the boards and used an old crutch of Papa Pilgrim’s to break them into pieces.

  ELISHABA GAVE birth to a daughter. Matthew and Elishaba named their child Esther Grace.

  Later, while roller-skating with her brothers and sisters, Elishaba fell and hit her head. Her recovery was so slow that a neurologist was called in to do tests. The doctor found she was suffering from the cumulative effects of many years of undiagnosed and untreated concussions from the beatings by her father. He said Elishaba will have to be extremely careful for the rest of her life.

  AS I was doing research for this book, Kurina Rose Hale joined me one afternoon to tell stories about New Mexico. As we sat and talked, I did some mental math.

  You know, I said to her, if you count the four children he had before he met you, and your fifteen, plus the miscarriage of Hope, and if you count Kathleen Connally’s pregnancy, Pilgrim reached his goal of twenty-one.

  She looked at me, stunned. Apparently no one had ever added things up that way before. A weird smile crossed her face.

  “He’ll thank you for that,” she said.

  NOT IN this life, he wouldn’t. Robert Hale had quit the mortal realm from the medical unit of the Anchorage jail on the evening of May 24, 2008, at the age of sixty-seven.

  After his sentencing, six months earlier, he had gone into rapid decline. The children prayed hard in his final months. But it was not the prayer their father once coached them to utter should he lie near death before Jesus’s return. They did not pray to die at his side.

  Hale’s oldest sons visited him in jail several times and begged him to repent. Whenever the conversation turned this way he withdrew into sulky silence.

  At the last hour, Rose, Joseph, Joshua, David, Moses, and Israel arrived for a visit to find him already unconscious. Eternity! The iron cage had stayed locked shut.

  “To be honest,” Joseph told me, “it’s a relief that he will meet his destiny and we can go on in life without the burden of worrying about praying for him and where he stands before God.”

  IN HIS last days, Robert Hale had written to relatives in the lower forty-eight, begging them to bring his body back to Texas. He asked to be buried next to sweet and innocent Kathleen.

  When Patsy Hale heard the request, she thought: As if the Connallys are going to let you anywhere near the family ranch.

  In fact, the decision was up to the wife and children he had brought north. They chose a graveyard near their new home, far from the wilderness of the Wrangell Mountains. It was the summer of 2008, a presidential election year. In just a few weeks, the town where Papa Pilgrim was buried would give the world an indelible new image of post-frontier Alaska.

  Aurora Cemetery sits on a small hill in Wasilla, where birch trees screen out most of the yard lights and traffic noise. The burial was a private family ceremony of Buckinghams and Hales. Each of the children had a chance again to speak. They did not shy from talking about the meaning of their father’s life.

  After a while, Kurina Rose said, the driver from the funeral home walked away to wait behind the hearse. Apparently he was not used to standing at an open grave and hearing speaker after speaker consign the newly departed to hell.

  SOURCES

  With the exception of two neighbors in New Mexico, who insisted on pseudonyms if they were to be quoted, all names and dates in this book are factual and a matter of record. In addition to the sources named here, I relied on notes and interviews made at the time of my original reporting for the Anchorage Daily News.

  1: The Road to McCarthy

  The history of McCarthy and Kennecott Copper was drawn from many written sources. An excellent overview of the area, including its human and natural history, is Community and Copper in a Wild Land by Shawn Olson and Ben Shaine (McCarthy: Wrangell Mountains Center, 2005). A survey of the historic community for the national park is Keeping Special Places Special by Joseph Sax, an option paper prepared by the Wrangell Mountains Center in 1990. Among the most useful sources on the past were Historic McCarthy: The Town That Copper Built by M.J. Kirchhoff (Juneau: Alaska Cedar Press, 1993); Contested Ground: An Administrative History of Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve by Geoffrey T. Bleakley (Anchorage: National Park Service, 2002); The Copper Spike by Lone Janson (Anchorage: Alaska Northwest, 1975); Big Business in Alaska: The Kennecott Mines, 1898–1938, by Melody Webb Grauman (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1977); and Wesley Earl Dunkle: Alaska’s Flying Miner by Charles Caldwell Hawley (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2006). An interesting take on the ghost town as a subject for environmental history is an essay by the historian William Cronon, “Kennecott Journey: The Paths Out of Town,” reprinted in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).

  I appreciated the work of the McCarthy-Kennicott Historical Museum and the National Park Service. In addition to Geoff Bleakley’s unblinking administrative history of the park, the NPS Alaska Region has produced “The Kennecott Mines: An Investigation of the Mining and Milling Operations at Kennecott, Alaska, 1898–1938” (manuscript draft) by Logan Hovis. Hovis also shared Ocha Potter’s unpublished 1939 memoir, “Sixty Years,” which includes two chapters on his Alaska adventures. Useful mining background can be found in the U.S. Geological Survey bulletin 947-F of 1946, Copper Deposits of the Nizina District, Alaska, by Don J. Miller.

  The account of the Pilgrim Family’s early days in McCarthy is drawn from interviews with family members and McCarthy residents, especially Neil Darish and Walt Wigger, and from The Road to McCarthy: Around the World in Search of Ireland by Pete McCarthy (New York: HarperCollins, 2004). Descriptions of the Chitistone commune and the Hippie Hole were drawn from an unpublished memoir by Curtis Green, “Recollections, Chitina-McCarthy, 1963–1987,” used courtesy of Sally Gibert.

  2: History’s Shadow

  A principal source for this chapter was John Connally’s autobiography, In History’s Shadow: An American Odyssey (New York: Hyperion, 1993). I. B. Hale’s biography was spelled out in a May 15, 1971, obituary in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He has also been the subject of brief biographies by the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the American Society for Industrial Security, where he served as chairman. Additional information was obtained in interviews with surviving Hale family members, including Patsy Hale and Lucy Hale, and with Palmer Newton, a former officer with the Tallahassee, Florida, police department.

  I am indebted to the writer Mark Kirby, who shared notes and newspaper clippings from the Fort Worth Press, the Forth Worth Star-Telegram, the Dallas Morning News, and the Tallahassee Democrat regarding Bobby Hale’s past, and also to Jack Douglas of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for information on Bobby Hale’s Texas years.

  3: The Bollard Wars

  Information on the early contacts between the National Park Service and the Pilgrim Family, including a four-page case incident report for September 29, 2002, was obtained through a 2009 Freedom of Information Act request to the U.S. Department of the Interior. The accounts of the mail-day murders and the death of Chris Richards were drawn from my own reporting for the Anchorage Daily News in 1983 and 2001–2002, and a story about Richards’s memorial in the Wrangell St.
Elias News. The description of the cabin fire seen from the footbridge comes from Tom and Catie Bursch. Joseph and Joshua Hale described for me the bulldozer work in the summer of 2002, and Anne Beaulaurier told me about her backpack trip that fall, an account backed by NPS memos. The story of the Ivy Sect is taken from Curtis Green’s “Recollections.”

  I was in McCarthy during the rebuilding of the tram in the summer of 1983. The story of the subsequent Bollard Wars was drawn from my own contemporaneous reporting in the Anchorage Daily News and from stories in the Wrangell St. Elias News. Rick and Bonnie Kenyon and Ben Shaine provided extensive autobiographical information. In addition to his writing in the Wrangell St. Elias News, Kenyon’s views about national park policies are spelled out in his testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform on August 14, 2006. Shaine’s novel, Alaska Dragon (Fairbanks: Fireweed Press, 1991), provides insight into his thoughts on wilderness and human connection to place. Additional information on the college program at the Hardware Store came from The Wrangell Mountains: Toward an Environmental Plan (Santa Cruz: University of California Environmental Studies Program, 1973), and One Long Summer Day in Alaska: A Documentation of Perspectives in the Wrangell Mountains by Donald C. Defenderfer and Robert B. Walkinshaw (Santa Cruz: University of California Environmental Field Program, 1981).

  4: Sunlight and Firefly

  The original source for the story about John F. Kennedy, Judith Campbell Exner, and General Dynamics is The Dark Side of Camelot by Seymour Hersh (New York: Little, Brown, 1997). In 2003, I interviewed Hersh and several of his sources, including former FBI agent William Carter and Exner researcher Mark Allan, who shared the 1962 FBI reports from the National Archives. Patsy Hale added new details about the brothers’ whereabouts in 1962 and the family’s blue Corvette. Virginia Hale’s contact with Lee Harvey Oswald is noted in volume 23 of the Warren Commission hearings.