Pilgrim's Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00DENM4JK | Format: EPUB
Pilgrim's Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier Description
Into the Wild meets Helter Skelter in this riveting true story of a modern-day homesteading family in the deepest reaches of the Alaskan wilderness - and of the chilling secrets of its maniacal, spellbinding patriarch.
When Papa Pilgrim appeared in the Alaska frontier outpost of McCarthy with his wife and fifteen children in tow, his new neighbors had little idea of the trouble to come. The Pilgrim Family presented themselves as a shining example of the homespun Christian ideal, with their proud piety and beautiful old-timey music, but their true story ran dark and deep. Within weeks, Papa had bulldozed a road through the mountains to the new family home at an abandoned copper mine, sparking a tense confrontation with the National Park Service and forcing his ghost town neighbors to take sides in an ever-more volatile battle over where a citizen's rights end and the government's power begins.
In Pilgrim's Wilderness, veteran Alaska journalist Tom Kizzia unfolds the remarkable, at times harrowing, story of a charismatic spinner of American myths who was not what he seemed, the townspeople caught in his thrall, and the family he brought to the brink of ruin. As Kizzia discovered, Papa Pilgrim was in fact the son of a rich Texas family with ties to Hoover's FBI and strange, oblique connections to the Kennedy assassination and the movie stars of Easy Rider. And as his fight with the government in Alaska grew more intense, the turmoil in his brood made it increasingly difficult to tell whether his children were messianic followers or hostages in desperate need of rescue. In this powerful piece of Americana, written with uncommon grace and high drama, Kizzia uses his unparalleled access to capture an era-defining clash between environmentalists and pioneers ignited by a mesmerizing sociopath who held a town and a family captive.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 10 hours and 15 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Random House Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: July 16, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00DENM4JK
Alaska tends to attract eccentric people. It's a frontier and there are communities that are actually the end of the road. To go further, one must traverse rivers, streams, mountains and brush - all without roads or regular access. It happened in 2002 that a man calling himself Papa Pilgrim arrived in McCarthy, Alaska with his wife and thirteen children. McCarthy, a very small community in the summer and a nearly empty community in the winter is, indeed, the end of the road and the entrance to the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, the largest national park in the United States.
Papa Pilgrim, once known in Texas as Robert Hale, had a sketchy background. He was married once to a woman named Kathleen who died with a shotgun blast to the back of her head. The gun had no fingerprints on it and Robert was let go with the death deemed accidental. Kathleen was pregnant at the time of her death. Robert married two more times and fathered four children before he met 16 year-old Kurana Rose who he married when he was 33. By this time he had found religion and was a bible thumping Christian who interpreted the scriptures in his own profoundly arrogant way. He traveled to New Mexico but ran into troubles with his neighbors and the law there. He ended up in Alaska finding Fairbanks and Anchorage too urban and big, and running into trouble in both places.
When he arrived in McCarthy with his then 13 children, he ended up bulldozing a road into the National Park. A long and contentious legal battle ensued with the park because he was said not to have gotten the correct licenses to clear the land. He settled in a remote area of the park near an abandoned copper mine that he called the Mother Lode.
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