A Bulldozer Runs Through It
By Blaine Harden
September 28, 2003
Psalms sat on Papa Pilgrim's right knee and Lamb
perched on his left. Thirteen more of his children -- all of them with names
from the Bible, several of them packing pistols -- crowded around. So did his
exhausted-looking wife, Country Rose.
It was a late summer's evening in Hillbilly Heaven,
a 410-acre ranch in the high country of eastern Alaska. Outside, the
temperature 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 the 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
and whose past in the U.S. Southwest is as fairy-tale strange as his present in
the Alaskan outback, 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. "With great reluctance, I took the
bulldozer and used the road. I had no idea what was in store."
Pilgrim's passage on the Caterpillar D4 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 park damage and is pursuing criminal and
civil cases against him and members of his family.
The brouhaha over the bulldozer -- a drama still
unfolding inside the largest U.S. park -- has made the Pilgrims actors in a
national dispute over private access to federal land. National environmental
groups are demanding that the Park Service prosecute the Pilgrims to the
fullest extent of the law, while land-rights activists have embraced them as
heroic victims of overzealous federal bureaucrats.
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 are worried about another Ruby Ridge standoff or
another Waco. They are determined, they say, not to use force in a way that
would lead to bloodshed or embarrassing media coverage.
"Our challenge is to avoid confrontation,"
said Gary Candelaria, superintendent of Wrangell-St. Elias, which is six times
larger than Yellowstone National Park.
Still, Park Service rangers admit that they are fed
up with the Pilgrims, especially with 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."
Bulldozing a Right-of-Way
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 known as RS-2477 -- has since inspired right-of-way claims on old roads
across federal land in the red rock country of southern Utah and across the
Mojave National Preserve in California.
Alaska, though, is where the big claims are.
The old mining road that Pilgrim cleared with the
bulldozer 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 made a claim to that road or any road in a national park in Alaska.
Neither the Bush administration nor Gov. Frank H. Murkowski (R), who is a
champion of opening rights of way to create jobs, has since said anything
supportive of Pilgrim's vigilante romp.
Land-rights activists, however, see the Pilgrim case
as a public relations windfall.
"We are going to make the Pilgrims poster
children for abuse of federal power," Chuck Cushman, executive director of
the American Land Rights Association, a group based in Washington state that
supports claims of private landowners in disputes with federal agencies.
"This is a good family that simply does not
know how to deal with bureaucracy," said Cushman, whose group 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 been watching 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 that
monitors the parks. "What I am most afraid of is other people who share
the Pilgrim's outlook on federal and state law and who are watching this
case."
For most of the past year, the Park Service has been
playing a careful game of cat-and-mouse with the Pilgrims.
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 own
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."
A Checkered Past
Robert Hale grew up in affluent circumstances in
Fort Worth, Tex.
His father was I.B. Hale, an All-American tackle at
Texas Christian who in 1939 was the first-round draft pick of the Washington
Redskins. I.B. became an FBI agent and later worked for General Dynamics, the
defense contractor in Fort Worth.
When he was still in high school, Bobby Hale, as
everyone called him then, eloped to Florida with Kathleen Connally. She was 16
and the daughter of John B. Connally, later to become the Texas governor
wounded in the Dallas assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Shortly after the elopement in 1958, 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 an accident. 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, Bobby turned up
in Southern California and insinuated himself into the life of another
well-known figure from the Kennedy era, according to Seymour M. Hersh's book,
"The Dark Side of Camelot."
Citing unreleased FBI documents, Hersh writes that
Bobby joined his twin brother, Billy, in breaking into the Los Angeles
apartment of Judith Exner, a woman who later acknowledged having an affair with
Kennedy. An FBI agent observed the break-in on Aug. 7, 1962, but made no
attempt to arrest the Hale boys, according to Hersh.
In the book, Hersh speculates that the break-in was
part of a successful attempt by the Hales' father, I.B., then chief of security
at General Dynamics, to blackmail Kennedy into giving the company a major
defense contract.
"That is ridiculous," said Pilgrim, when
asked about 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
called himself "Sunstar." He 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 the Southern California desert,
he met Kurina Rose Bresler, a 16-year-old from suburban Los Angeles. She would
become the mother of the 15 children now living with him in Alaska. (Pilgrim
has three other children from two previous marriages.) "My daughter was
running around with friends, and they were into drugs at the time -- that's
when she met Bobby," said Kurina's mother, Betty Freeman, an actress and
singer who lives in Sherman Oaks, Calif. She is married to a producer, Joel
Freeman, whose movies included "Shaft."
Reborn and Renamed
After Bobby and Kurina had had their first two
children together, whom they 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 newborn
children after characters, places and other designations in the Bible.
They moved to the Sangre de Cristo mountains in
northern New Mexico, setting up a subsistence farm on land owned by Jack
Nicholson, the actor. Permission to live there was granted after Country Rose's
mother made a personal appeal to Nicholson's business manager, Bob Colbert.
For more than 20 years on Nicholson's land, the
family tanned leather, raised sheep and bred dogs. They made some money playing
bluegrass music at state fairs and festivals. But they also got into frequent
scraps with neighbors, according to 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, adding that criminal charges were never
filed. "Neighbors were afraid of Bob, and they didn't want to
prosecute."
Pilgrim says he and 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. "People for no reason created
stupid rumors about us."
While the family lived in New Mexico, Country Rose
cut off all contact with her mother in Los Angeles, as did her children.
"He won't let me talk to my daughter
directly," said Freeman, referring to her son-in-law. "If I want to
talk to her, I have to talk to him. The children have been taught that the
devil is in me."
Pilgrim objects to questions about his past, and he
especially resents criticism from his mother-in-law.
"My past is gone and that is not who I
am," he said. "My mother-in-law has been trying to break our family
up since the very beginning.
"If you start talking about Jack Nicholson and
Seymour Hersh, John Connally and cults, then people are going to forget about
the real Pilgrim family and the life we live now in Alaska. My family
represents something that is not a problem."
'Alaska Provides'
As Pilgrim explains it, the reason his family moved
north is 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 last year was worth $1,541 to each
state resident. For a big family, the money adds up. Since they moved to Alaska
in 1998, the dividend has provided the Pilgrims with nearly $30,000 a year in
tax-free income.
"That is more money than we ever had in our
entire life," Pilgrim said. "And we went around looking for a place
to spend it."
Two years ago, they bought the ranch they now call
Hillbilly Heaven, which is about 14 miles north of the small town of McCarthy.
They bought it from a retired miner for $450,000 and first visited it by
snowmobile.
Pilgrim said he was only vaguely aware, then, 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. "When we saw this land and decided it would be
our home, I didn't know what the National Park Service was," Pilgrim said.
By act of Congress, national parks in Alaska 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 Alaskan 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
narrow-minded federal bureaucrats who are trying to strip Alaska of its rural
culture and replace it with a depopulated wilderness.
Without quite realizing what they were doing, the
Pilgrims bulldozed their way into this ideological land war, and, in recent
months, they have become its featured attraction.
Rick Kenyon, publisher of a virulently anti-Park
Service newspaper called the Wrangell St. Elias News, has published a series of
hagiographic stories that describe the Pilgrims as simple folk bedeviled by
heavily armed federal agents.
"I think if George Bush found out about this,
he would be very unhappy," Kenyon said. "There is no question but
that the Park Service has tunnel vision. They are trying to break the Pilgrims
and destroy them financially.
Park officials say that is 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."
Later this year, the Park Service will ask the U.S.
attorney in Alaska to start civil proceedings against the Pilgrims. Candelaria
said they would probably be sued to pay for bulldozer damage along the road and
around their land. Criminal charges have also 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 says he has now decided to try to cooperate with the
park. He made a written request on Sept. 14 for a permit that would allow him
vehicular access to the disputed road. He wants to use a bulldozer, with its
blade up, to haul in food, fuel and other supplies for winter.
The request, though, was hardly conciliatory. It
said that if the Park Service doesn't take advantage of this "wonderful
opportunity" to work with his family, then its inaction would be proof of
its "selfish, greedy and hateful attitude."
"This is progress, I guess," said
Candelaria, who said he is considering the request. But he said the Park
Service must make an environmental assessment before allowing passage. The road
the Pilgrims want to use with a bulldozer crosses a creek 13 times, and there
are trout in the creek that the Park Service believes could be harmed.
Out at Hillbilly Heaven, Pilgrim says winter is
closing in fast and the family's supply of diesel fuel is running low. When
snowfall covers the fields that surround 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.
Papa Pilgrim, legally Robert Allan Hale, with
daughter Jerusalem, 14, at the ranch inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park,
Alaska, where he bulldozed a 14-mile road.Papa Pilgrim, top row left, his wife,
Country Rose, third from left, and their 15 children, who range from age 28 to
8 months. Robert Allan Hale, also known as Papa Pilgrim, with daughters Psalms,
6, Lamb, 5, and Elizabeth, 28, the eldest child, in the kitchen of the Pilgrim
house. "In order for me to love my children, I have to be a
provider," Pilgrim said. "With great reluctance, I took the bulldozer
and used the road. I had no idea what was in store." The Pilgrim's road as
seen from horseback at their ranch in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Alaska.
Last winter, Papa Pilgrim drove a bulldozer 14 miles across the park to clear
an old mining road. The National Park Service has shut down the road and filed
charges against the well-armed Pilgrim family.
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