Neil Darish was up on the roof shoveling a heavy snow off his McCarthy Lodge when he saw the two well-worn pickups coming down the road. It was a frigid January afternoon in 2002, a time of year when even a single unfamiliar vehicle is a strange sight in McCarthy—almost nobody visits in wintertime, when the 60-mile dirt route to town becomes a continuous, treacherous sheet of ice and the sun rises above the Wrangell Mountains for only a few hours each day. But there they were: two trucks, drifting slowly up the road. As the vehicles drew closer, Darish noticed people riding in the open beds, huddled against the 20-below-zero air. Who the hell rides in the back of a pickup in the dead of the Alaskan winter? he thought as the trucks pulled to a stop in front of the lodge and one of the hunched figures, a young man, sprang out.

"Papa! Papa!" Darish heard him shout. "This is what we thought Fairbanks was gonna be like!"

The others poured out after him: ten or so young men and women, ranging from their teens to late twenties, all clad in rough flannel shirts or flowing homespun dresses, many wearing buckskin holsters carrying Bibles. They called the one driving the first truck Papa. He was older, but his weathered brow made it difficult to tell exactly how old; he seemed tired and world-weary, and had piercing blue eyes, a long white beard, and long white hair spilling from beneath a wide-brimmed hat. When Darish climbed down from the roof to invite the strangers into his lodge's dining room, the man introduced himself as Pilgrim. He said that he and his children had come to McCarthy looking for a new home.

The potential addition of so many new residents was big news for a town of 50 that doesn't often get big news. A seven-hour drive east from Anchorage, McCarthy lies smack in the middle of America's largest wilderness area, 13-million-acre Wrangell–St. Elias National Park. It's the kind of place where the homeschool curriculum still includes trapping and tanning, and where opinions on a subject like religion are shaped by the kind of gratitude toward a creator that one feels after recently—miraculously—escaping from the jaws of a grizzly bear. At the beginning of the 20th century, the area was home to nearly a thousand people and one of the largest copper operations in the world, the McCarthy-Kennecott mine. But after the mine's Depression-era closure, the town languished until 1980, when the creation of Wrangell–St. Elias transformed McCarthy into a minor tourist destination. Today it's about as far away from civilization as one can get by road in North America.

Papa Pilgrim explained that, after a few decades of living off the land and by the Lord in New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo Mountains, his family had come to Alaska to re-create their pious frontier life. They'd lived in Fairbanks and Homer, he said, only to find both too overrun with the sins and vices of ordinary America. But remote and empty McCarthy—now this was the spot they'd been looking for. Why, they liked it so much that Pilgrim's wife, Country Rose, and the rest of their children would certainly join them.

As a gesture of goodwill, Pilgrim sent his children back out to the trucks for their instruments—fiddles, guitars, a mandolin—and soon the sounds of an impromptu bluegrass concert filled the mountain air. Darish made a few phone calls, and about a dozen McCarthyites showed up on snowmobiles to meet the new arrivals. The whole display was a little odd, but those kids sure could play. Most of the residents in attendance that night were taken with the beautiful family, their musical talents, and their reverent, godly manner. No one seemed to notice that the kids didn't make eye contact with strangers or that they spoke only when their father asked them to. No one had any inkling that Papa Pilgrim wasn't exactly who he said he was or that he was even remotely capable of the heinous deeds his family would later accuse him of. Almost no one, that is.

"It was a fun night," remembers Darish, "but my partner Doug—well, he thought all along, from that very first night, that Papa Pilgrim seemed like an obvious con man."