In to the Wild meets Helter Skelter with this riveting true story of the modern-day homesteading family in the deepest reaches from 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 kids in tow, his fresh neighbors had small idea of the difficulty to arrive. The Pilgrim Family members presented themselves being a shining exemplory case of the homespun about Pilgrim’s Wilderness: A True Story of Trust and Madness around the Alaska Frontier Christian ideal, with their very pleased piety and beautiful old-timey music, but their true story went dark and deep. Within weeks, Papa acquired bulldozed a road through the mountains to the new house at an abandoned copper mine, sparking a tense confrontation with the Country wide Park Services and forcing his ghost city neighbors to take sides within an ever-more volatile battle over in which a citizen’s rights end as well as the government’s power begins.

In Pilgrim’s Wilderness, veteran Alaska journalist Tom Kizzia unfolds the exceptional, at times harrowing, story of a charismatic spinner of American myths who was not really what he appeared, the townspeople captured in his thrall, as well as the family members he taken to the brink of mess up. As Kizzia found out, Papa Pilgrim was actually the son of a rich Texas family members with ties to Hoover’s FBI and unusual, oblique connections towards the Kennedy assassination as well as the celebrities of Easy Rider. So that as his combat with the government in Alaska grew even more extreme, the turmoil in his brood managed to get increasingly difficult to tell whether his kids were messianic followers or hostages in desperate need of recovery. In this powerful little bit of Americana, created with uncommon grace and high crisis, Kizzia uses his unequalled access to capture an era-defining clash between environmentalists and pioneers ignited with a mesmerizing sociopath who kept a town and a family group captive.