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Exclusive Exerpt: Pilgrim’s Wilderness

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Into the Wild meets Helter Skelter in this true story of a modern-day homesteading family in the deepest reaches of the Alaskan wilderness–and the chilling secrets of a maniacal, spellbinding patriarch who called himself Papa Pilgrim.

Tom Kizzia was the perfect writer to tackle this fascinating, horrifying, and very human story that could have happened only in Alaska. His former work as a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News led him to travel extensively throughout Alaska, and to report on a family that would leave a lasting impression on his psyche. The result was his new book, Pilgrim’s Wilderness.

Like many Alaskans, the Pilgrim family came to Alaska seeking something- a refuge, an escape, another chance, and the ability to create a life separated physically from the rest of the world. Papa Pilgrim, his wife Country Rose, and their fifteen children drove from New Mexico to settle in McCarthy in 2002. They portrayed themselves as a happy Christian family, seeking a new and beautiful life in God’s Country, but their true story was anything but happy. What emerged was a story both heroic, desperately sad, and shockingly dark. Kizzia brings to light the madness that plunged the isolated family into a nightmare of physical and sexual abuse, and the heroism of the children who ultimately brought themselves back to the light, and out of the only world they had ever known.

Pilgrim’s Wilderness also has a political twist. We’d like to thank Mr. Kizzia for sharing this portion of his book with readers of The Mudflats.

Pilgrim’s Wilderness was published July 16. On Friday, Aug. 2, it was #17 on the New York Times hardback non-fiction Best Seller list and #9 on the non-fiction list for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association.

Tom Kizzia will be speaking about the book at 7 pm Tuesday, Aug. 13, in the Wilda Marston Auditorium at the Loussac Library in Anchorage, and at 7 pm Thursday, Aug. 15, at the Kennecott Recreation Hall in McCarthy/Kennecott.

Intro: In 2004, Joseph Hale, the oldest son in the Pilgrim Family, attended a political meeting in Delta Junction and was chosen as a district delegate to the state Republican convention. Though relations with their neighbors in McCarthy were deteriorating, their wider fame was spreading, through their fight against the National Park Service, and a musical tour in Portland, Oregon. In a way, the moment represented the family’s high-water mark….

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 [performing and recording in Portland, Oregon], 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 eighteen 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.

Reprinted from the book Pilgrim’s Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier by Tom Kizzia.  Copyright © 2013 by Tom Kizzia.  Published by Crown, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company.

Tom Kizzia’s stories about the Pilgrim Family won a President’s Award from McClatchy Newspapers. His work has appeared in The Washington Post and been featured on CNN. Tom is a former Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University and a graduate of Hampshire College. His first book, The Wake of the Unseen Object, was named one of the best all-time non-fiction books about Alaska by the state historical society. He lives in Homer, Alaska. 

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11 Responses to “Exclusive Exerpt: Pilgrim’s Wilderness”
  1. Steve says:

    I am reading this book, Wow! I knew his twin Billy, in Fort Worth, TX. Billy’s wife, Patsy wrote a book ” He Heard His Brother Call His Name”. It is has info about Bobby Hale’s early life.

  2. StElias says:

    When I received my copy and started reading, it kept me up until 2:30AM one night.

    Actually, I have a cabin in McCarthy and spend my summers there. We live in Anchorage but I have a long history with Kennecott and McCarthy, being almost born there. I knew Pilgrim but didn’t really care for him so I stayed away, primarily due his manipulative nature with scripture. I did however, interact with two of the boys on a number of occasions and did like them. Having said that, it caught me by surprise when the incest and brutality revelations surfaced.

    I believe that nobody could have written a better book on this human debacle than Kizzia. He has some experience in the area and was one who had more objective interface with them than anyone else. He did an excellent job using exhaustive research. This is a sordid bit of Alaska history that should not be ignored, Alaskans should read it.

    In it I found a lot of stuff I didn’t know about the Pilgrim story and where Kizzia related events that had occurred, which I was familiar with based on other sources, I found his version to be consistent.

    I do disagree with him in a number of areas though:

    1. In his intensity to be unbiased with respect to ideological opinion of both the proponents and opponents involved in the Pilgrim chronicle I believe he did not give the National Park Service role a fair assessment. Being in neither camp myself I look back on the events before Pilgrim’s fall from grace and demise and agonize over the vindictive and vitriolic treatment some of the NPS personnel received from the three principal government hating benefactors of the Pilgrim incursion into the nations largest national park. True, the park service could have handled things differently on more than one occasion but one has to recognize that initially they were under extreme pressure and being tormented by demagogues who slandered them, using falsehoods and blatant lies did not make their job easier. I believe Kizzia should have indicated that these proponents of the Pilgrim indiscretions at least owe partial apology to a few of the public servants they so cheerily denigrated at the time.

    2. Kizzia was correct in painting a picture of the area’s historicity and environment in order to make it easier for the lay reader to understand the story. In some areas though his history leaves much to be desired.

    I realize it is virtually impossible to get pertinent historical facts down with 100% accuracy, however, Kizzia runs into a pet peeve of mine. Shortly after the turn of the century the Alaska Syndicate was created by financiers comprised mainly of the JP Morgan Bank and the Guggenheim mining interests in order to develop the copper ore discoveries in Alaska next to the Kennicott Glacier. In order to accomplish this, three corporations were established. The primary one being the Kennecott Copper Corporation. The misspelling occurred back then either as a mistake or a deliberate action. Whatever, Kennecott became the name of the world’s largest copper producing company. At no time was there a town or community named Kennicott. The corporation established its Alaska headquarter community alongside the Kennicott Glacier and located its processing facilities there and it was called “Kennecott”. One can look at numerous newspapers, dating all the way back to the early years of the 20th century and find hundreds of articles and accounts referencing “Kennecott”. No where can I find a spelling “Kennicott” unless it be a reference to the glacier or the river. That is, until about 1971 when the environmental studies office of the University of California developed an “Environmental plan for the Wrangell Mountains” wherein they gave reference to the “Townsite of Kennicott” i.e. pages 20 & 56. Now, it is understandable that environmental purists resent the one time introduction of heavy mining industry into such a beautiful pristine mountain wilderness area, but attempt to rewrite history is not professional nor does it give credibility to such studies. To this day, even the contemporary museum at McCarthy gets caught up in this renaming effort by referencing the “Kennicott Townsite” in its by-laws. Nevertheless, Kizzia, intentionally or otherwise, also gets hooked and says this on page 12: “Some of the old buildings at Kennicott were in private hands, but the park Service had started buying up the properties and calling everything “Kennecott,” with an “e.” Local people had always spelled it with an “i,” Nothing could be farther from the truth.

    3. Most of us were not aware of Pilgrim’s real name, Robert Hale, and that he had been directly involved in Governor John Connally’s pregnant daughter, Kathleen’s, death until the Washington Post came out with a very revealing article regarding Robert and his famous football player father. It is my understanding that Kizzia may have been the first to discover this relationship and passed it on to the Post reporter who also went up to the Pilgrim’s Marvelous Millsite. Unfortunately, Kizzia’s Anchorage Daily News must have not seen fit to run with the story until the Post beat them to the punch. Nevertheless, one should give credit where credit is due. Unless I missed something here, Tom did not do that.

  3. AKblue says:

    Robert Hale (Papa Pilgrim) was not a product of Alaska. He migrated here, as many creeps seem to do so they can escape detection. (Or so they think.)
    I don’t know how much of his background is in the book, but it’s worth a read if you are interested in his Alaska years.
    http://www.rickross.com/reference/general/general999.html

  4. Law Dog says:

    The State of Alaska is the worst in the nation for crimes against children and women…

    We are also the richest in revenue value in the nation…

    So why Sean is pretending he cares is beyond me…choose respect he did not!

    And that is going to cost the State of Alaska in the United Nations Courts…

    For ignoring a child rapist on the loose…raped a girl starting at age 4…then his own son…then drives a school bus in the Valley and solicits minors but keeps working anyways…

    The poor mother has to live in the “house of horrors” because the State is too cheap to compensate for documented lost wages and no child support…uses the shower the boy was raped in everyday…

    These kind of monsters are allowed to thrive in Alaska and that has to stop…

    Looks like global attention will be drawn to Alaska for the History of it’s motto to Choose Respect…

    How’s that working for you Captain Zero?

    What is in it for you?

    Well…it’s HUGE…

  5. JaneE says:

    I have reserved this book at my local library. I’m not too far down on the list. We’ll see if I read it completely. I try to avoid things that raise my blood pressure and based on the alluded child abuse it may be a story I will research more before I actually check the book out. It’s not that I am burying my head, it’s just that I get so riled up and saddened when hearing of these things.

  6. Carol says:

    Whenever I see something touted as “could happen only in XXXX”, I wonder. In this case, I could see it happening pretty easily in Idaho or Montana, maybe even other states. Other than that miniscule snip, I plan to get this book from my local bookseller.

  7. mike from iowa says:

    So what is it about the rethuglican party that acts as a pheromone to draw religious quacks from all over? Nothing makes sense. These are two identical entities that attract each other-in direct conflict with laws of nature. Both are hell-bent on the destruction of civilization in the name of god.

  8. Alaska Pi says:

    I have very mixed feelings about the Pilgrim family story.
    There are multiple cautionary tales to be found there, not the least of which has to do with too many folks accepting the BS about land rights at face value because it fit a personal social narrative. A failure which bites most of us at some time or other if we aren’t paying close attention – MRs Gillam and Hackney and anti-Pebble stuff comes to mind…
    That Mr Hale/Papa Pilgrim turned out to be a sorrier sicker excuse for a human than I wondered clear back to the bulldozer crap still makes me sick to my stomach.
    Not sure I want to know more about the harm he visited on his family. May they heal in peace.

  9. akbatgirly says:

    I think that I will buy this book when I see it at the bookstore. At the time that the Pilgrims first started showing up in the newspaper, I thought that there was something hinky going on with them. I also wondered how a couple, especially the mother, of their advanced ages could be so darn fertile. I have always wondered if she really gave birth to the youngest kids.

    The whole thing was tragic, and I’m glad that the children finally got away and appear to be living healthy lifestyles. People complain about the invasiveness of government, and yet, it’s too bad that the government couldn’t put a stop to this situation when the children were younger. It would have prevented a lot of suffering.

    The one thing that surprises me…………………….that the family members appear to have kept their religious beliefs. Personally, I would have questioned everything that Papa Pilgrim ever told me, including his religion. I think that I’d have either become a Buddhist or an Atheist, after what they all went through.

  10. Kath the Scrappy says:

    Wow, what a story! Looks to be a great read. I had heard of Papa Pilgrim via Shannyn Moore, but had no idea the story was in such recent years. Had thought it was decades ago. Will be looking for this book!