Pilgrim’s Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier Audiobook (Free)

Into the Wild meets Helter Skelter in this riveting true story of the modern-day homesteading family in the deepest gets to 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 kids in tow, his new 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 Faith and Madness over the Alaska Frontier Christian ideal, with their very pleased piety and gorgeous old-timey music, but their true story ran dark and deep. Within weeks, Papa acquired bulldozed a road through the mountains to the brand new house at an empty copper mine, sparking a tense confrontation with the National Park Provider and forcing his ghost city neighbors to take sides within an ever-more volatile fight 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 the charismatic spinner of American misconceptions who was not what he appeared, the townspeople caught in his thrall, as well as the family he taken to the brink of spoil. As Kizzia uncovered, Papa Pilgrim was in fact the son of the rich Texas family with ties to Hoover’s FBI and unusual, oblique connections towards the Kennedy assassination as well as the movie stars of Easy Rider. And as his fight with the federal government in Alaska grew even more intense, the turmoil in his brood managed to get increasingly difficult to tell whether his kids were messianic fans or hostages in eager need of rescue. In this powerful piece of Americana, created with uncommon grace and high theatre, Kizzia uses his unparalleled access to capture an era-defining clash between environmentalists and pioneers ignited by a mesmerizing sociopath who held a city and a family captive.