Alaska clan clashes with Park Service
It was a late summer's evening in Hillbilly Heaven, a 410-acre ranch in eastern Alaska. The temperature outside dipped below freezing, and the encircling mountains had a fresh dusting of snow. Inside the family cabin, potato soup was steaming on the stove and apple pies bubbled in a wood-burning oven. Supper, though, was on hold.
Papa was talking about abuses heaped upon his family by the National Park Service. His children and wife listened in worshipful silence. No one dared eat.
Pilgrim, 62, whose legal name is Robert Allan Hale, explained how it came to pass last winter that he drove a bulldozer 14 miles across the national park that encircles his land. The Lord, Pilgrim said, told him that clearing a derelict mining road through the park was a loving thing to do.
"In order for me to love my children, I have to be a provider," Pilgrim said.
Pilgrim's act has resulted in an edgy standoff between his well-armed family and the federal government. The National Park Service has shut down the bulldozed road to his property, dispatched armed rangers to assess damage and is pursuing criminal and civil cases against him and members of his family.
The lines are drawn
The brouhaha has made the Pilgrims actors in a national dispute over private access to federal land. National environmental groups want the Park Service to prosecute the Pilgrims, while land-rights activists have embraced them.
Papa Pilgrim seems to relish the mismatch between the National Park Service, with its helicopters and bulletproof vests, and his "simple family that never knew anything but how to live in the wilderness."
"If the government doesn't let us use that road with a bulldozer, then all they are trying to do is starve us out," Pilgrim said. "It is like the Alamo."
Park Service officials say the last thing they want is violence and that they're worried about another Ruby Ridge standoff or another Waco.
"Our challenge is to avoid confrontation," said Gary Candelaria, superintendent of Wrangell-St. Elias, the largest U.S. park. Still, Park Service rangers admit being fed up with the Pilgrims, especially the boys who carry revolvers and rifles.
"What they tend to do is surround you," said Hunter Sharp, chief ranger in the park. "When they do that, cops get nervous. We have had it. We are not going to back off. We represent the people of the United States."
In a sense, Pilgrim drove the bulldozer through a bureaucratic gap opened by the Bush administration. Over objections from environmentalists, the Interior Department published a rule in January that opened federal land to motorized access in places where roads once existed.
The rule — a reassertion of an obscure 1866 mining law — has inspired right-of-way claims on old roads across federal land in southern Utah and California's Mojave National Preserve.
'Poster children'
Alaska, though, is where the big claims are.
The old mining road Pilgrim cleared appears on a list of routes that the state of Alaska could claim as a right of way. Pilgrim, though, fired up his bulldozer before the state claimed any road in its national parks.
Land-rights activists see Pilgrim as a public-relations windfall.
"We are going to make the Pilgrims poster children for abuse of federal power," said Chuck Cushman, executive director of the American Land Rights Association, a Washington state-based group that is helping Pilgrim pay for a lawyer and publicizing his legal problems on its Web site. "They did not knowingly break the law. You have to look into people's hearts."
Environmental groups have watched the Pilgrims in pained disbelief.
"You just can't take the law into your hands with a bulldozer," said Jim Stratton, Alaska regional director of the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonprofit advocacy group monitoring the parks.
Both sides seem media-savvy. When they encounter each other, park rangers and the Pilgrims monitor each other with video cameras.
After months of negotiations, Candelaria, the park superintendent, said he has become convinced that "the Pilgrims are not what they appear." The family wears homemade clothes, tans its leather, never watches TV and reads only the Bible. "They will give you this simple, homespun, Christian, living-off-the-land act," he said. "But it doesn't ring true."
Robert Hale grew up in affluent circumstances in Fort Worth, Texas.
His father was I.B. Hale, an FBI agent who later worked for defense contractor General Dynamics.
While in high school, Bobby Hale eloped to Florida with Kathleen Connally. She was 16 and the daughter of John Connally, later to become the Texas governor wounded in the Dallas assassination of President Kennedy.
Shortly after the 1958 elopement, Kathleen died of a gunshot wound. A Florida deputy sheriff told Connally, as he wrote in his autobiography, "there may have been a suicide pact, and Bobby backed out."
Asked about Connally's book, Pilgrim denied any suicide pact and said Kathleen's death was accidental. He said he was in the hotel room when she died but declined to give details about how she supposedly fired a shotgun into her face.
Five years after Kathleen's death, according to Seymour Hersh's book "The Dark Side of Camelot," Bobby joined his twin brother, Billy, in breaking into the Los Angeles apartment of Judith Exner, who later acknowledged an affair with President Kennedy. An FBI agent observed the Aug. 7, 1962, break-in but made no attempt to arrest the Hale boys, according to Hersh.
Hersh speculates that the break-in was part of a successful attempt by I.B. Hale, then chief of security at General Dynamics, to blackmail Kennedy into giving the company a major defense contract.
"That is ridiculous," Pilgrim said of the Hersh book. "I wasn't there, and neither was my brother. Mr. Hersh is a liar."
Through the 1960s and into the '70s, Bobby Hale lived in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, worked on a commune in Oregon and says that he "rode a horse across South America on my quest to find the answer."
While camping out in California, he met Kurina Rose Bresler, 16, of Los Angeles, who would become the mother of the 15 children now living with him in Alaska. (Pilgrim has three other children from two previous marriages.)
Born again
After Bobby and Kurina had their first two children, named Butterfly and Nava Sunstar, they became born-again Christians. They renamed themselves Papa Pilgrim and Country Rose, renamed their eldest children Elizabeth and Joseph, and began naming newborns after characters, places and other designations in the Bible.
They moved to New Mexico, setting up a subsistence farm on land owned by actor Jack Nicholson. Permission to live there was granted after Country Rose's mother, an actress and singer named Berry Freeman, appealed to Nicholson's business manager. For more than 20 years, the family tanned leather, raised sheep and bred dogs. While they were there, Country Rose cut off all contact with her mother. Said Freeman: "The children have been taught that the devil is in me."
They got into frequent scraps with neighbors, said Mike Francis, retired deputy chief of the New Mexico state police. "We would get calls in regards to him and his family that they were stealing chickens and eggs, and that hay was disappearing," Francis said, noting criminal charges never were filed. "Neighbors were afraid of Bob, and they didn't want to prosecute."
Pilgrim says his family never took anything from anyone. Friction with neighbors, he said, was over religion.
"They called me Preacher Bob, and they didn't want to hear the Gospel from me," he said.
Pilgrim objects to questions about his past.
"My past is gone, and that is not who I am," he said.
North to Alaska
His family moved north, Pilgrim explained, because "Alaska provides."
He was referring to good fishing and hunting, but also to the Permanent Fund Dividend, an annual payment to all state residents. It comes from taxes on North Slope oil and this year is worth $1,107 to each state resident. Since they moved to Alaska in 1998, the dividend has provided the Pilgrims with as much as $30,000 a year in income.
Two years ago, they bought the ranch they call Hillbilly Heaven, about 14 miles north of the small town of McCarthy, from a retired miner for $450,000.
Pilgrim said he was then only vaguely aware that his property was surrounded by a national park. This summer, after a land survey paid for by the Park Service, he learned that two-thirds of his cabin rests on federal property.
By act of Congress, Alaska's national parks are supposed to be different from those in the Lower 48. The 1980 law that created 104 million acres of parks and refuges in the state guaranteed that in-holders, meaning people who own property in the parks, could pursue traditional livelihoods while having "reasonable and feasible" access to their land.
For most of the past 23 years, however, a group of highly vocal Alaska in-holders has complained that the Park Service has been flouting the will of Congress and trying to squeeze them off their land. They see a conspiracy of city people from the Lower 48, environmental zealots and federal bureaucrats who want to replace Alaska's rural culture with a depopulated wilderness.
The Pilgrims bulldozed their way into this ideological land war.
Rick Kenyon, publisher of a virulently anti-Park Service newspaper called the Wrangell St. Elias News, has depicted the Pilgrims as simple folk bedeviled by heavily armed federal agents.
"There is no question but that the Park Service has tunnel vision," Kenyon said. "They are trying to break the Pilgrims and destroy them financially."
Park officials say that's nonsense.
"None of this had to happen," said Candelaria, the park superintendent. "If Pilgrim had come to us before he got on the bulldozer, we probably could have given him some access. Some people may not like it, but this is a national park. Before you get on a bulldozer, you need to get a permit."
Legal maneuvers
The Park Service later this year will ask the U.S. attorney in Alaska to start civil proceedings against the Pilgrims. Candelaria said they probably would be sued to pay for bulldozer damage along the road and around their land. Criminal charges also have been filed against the family for operating a horse-tour business in the park without a license and for damaging public property.
After refusing for months to speak with Candelaria or local rangers, Pilgrim made a written request Sept. 14 for a permit that would allow him vehicular access to the disputed road. He wants to use a bulldozer to haul in food, fuel and other supplies for winter.
The request, though, was hardly conciliatory. He said if the Park Service failed to take advantage of this "wonderful opportunity," it would be proof of its "selfish, greedy and hateful attitude."
"This is progress, I guess," Candelaria said. But the Park Service must make an environmental assessment before allowing passage, he said. The road the Pilgrims want to use crosses a creek 13 times, and the Park Service believes fish could be harmed.
Pilgrim says winter is closing in and their diesel fuel is running low. When snowfall covers the fields around his house, horses that now transport the family to and from town will have no feed.
"We are already cold up here, and we don't have enough blankets," Pilgrim said.