ALASKA HAS ALWAYS BEEN A FAMOUS last redoubt for seekers, dreamers, hustlers, and ne'er-do-wells, and the man who appeared in McCarthy as Pilgrim certainly deserved his place among them. Born Robert Allan Hale to an affluent and well-connected Fort Worth, Texas, family in 1941, he arrived in Alaska trailing a lifelong reputation as a mystical and adaptable Svengali who had followed an improbable tour through American political and celebrity culture. His bizarre rap sheet of alleged misdeeds included the murder of his first wife, the daughter of former Texas governor John Connally; a conspiracy to blackmail President John F. Kennedy; and the rumored abduction of a woman he held captive on a New Mexico ranch belonging to the actor Jack Nicholson.

It was places like McCarthy—places where the rules of the civilized world gave way to the freedoms of wilderness—that Hale had always sought. He'd frequented San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district in the late sixties and had run in the same Los Angeles circles as Charles Manson and his Family; he'd taught transcendental meditation on an Oregon commune and had embarked on a vision quest in South America. He thrived wherever people were seeking answers and willing to listen to the ones he offered. Friends, neighbors, and family remember Hale as a master manipulator, possessed of a mesmerizing charisma.

"Bob could've done anything with my life if he wanted to," says Priscilla Wilbourn, who followed Hale's meditation teachings in the early seventies and clearly remains transfixed by his charm. "I swear, once I did see him levitate!"

Given this history, it's hard to believe that Hale didn't know exactly what he was doing that first night in McCarthy when he paraded his children into Darish's lodge: He wanted the gathered residents to trust him, to assume that his huge family's effect on the tiny community would be benign. It had worked. By the end of the evening, Darish and his neighbors had politely encouraged Hale to buy property in the area.

A few months later, he did just that, returning to McCarthy with Country Rose and their 15 children, aged from just a few months to nearly 30, with biblical names like Jerusalem, Psalms, Lamb, and Hosanna. They bought an old mine 14 miles outside of town, up the abandoned McCarthy–Green Butte Road, and christened it Hillbilly Heaven. The sale price for 420 acres and a few weather-worn cabins was $450,000, and Hale made a $30,000 down payment with cash obtained from the Alaska Permanent Fund. (The fund pays dividends to all Alaska residents with proceeds from the Trans-Alaska Pipeline; some years, it amounts to more than $2,000 per person, children included.) Because the McCarthy–Green Butte Road was impassable by truck, Hale arranged for horses and bush pilots to shuttle in his family and deliver supplies.

At first, the abundance of Alaska welcomed the Hales. They had 20 years' practice subsistence living in New Mexico, but here they had fish and game to supplement their chickens, sheep, and goats. The middle children helped Country Rose care for the youngest, while the older sons and daughters attended to chores: chopping wood, tending the garden, maintaining pieces of machinery—tractors, a bulldozer—that had come with the property. To earn cash to help pay the mortgage, the eldest sons—Joseph, 25, Joshua, 22, and David, 20,—began offering McCarthy's summertime tourists guided horseback rides up to their property. The Hales also donated their time and energy to community projects, helping rebuild a church shed that had burned in a small fire and constructing a tourist-information kiosk.

In the fall of 2002, when the family ran short on money to pay for delivering supplies, Hale used the bulldozer to clear the old road to town. The route crossed through Wrangell–St. Elias National Park, and when rangers discovered Hale's work the following spring, after the snow­melt, they began surveying damage in preparation for a lawsuit. Rumors began swirling in the Alaska press that the Hales were armed and unpredictable and that things might go the way of Ruby Ridge. So Hale invited a television crew from an Anchorage station, to let Alaskans see the family's God-fearing lifestyle for themselves.

What the cameras, and the newspaper reporters that followed them, found at Hillbilly Heaven was a time capsule from America's romanticized frontier days. The TV segment, which aired in June 2003, opened with a panning shot of the Wrangell Mountains as Hale's voice, sweet and high, intoned the chorus of a traditional bluegrass song—"In dreams of yesterday I wandered back to my little cabin door . . ." The homestead had a telephone and a generator, but modern amenities ended there. The family never watched television or listened to the radio, and they read only two books: the Holy Bible and John Bunyan's 1678 Christian allegory, The Pilgrim's Progress. When the children bathed in the washtub, they did so with their undergarments on, for, as Hale boasted, none of his children had ever seen a naked human body. Not even their own.

Hale came across as wise and serene, speaking in a gentle, distant voice, while Joseph and Joshua inspected Park Service survey stakes. Hale told reporters that none of his children had ever left home to marry. His eldest daughter, Elishaba, 28, explained why. "Nowadays, everybody's trying everybody else on like a new pair of blue jeans," she said. "And that's not the way we do it. My favorite thing in life is to work and serve my brothers and sisters. I don't know how I could be any happier—I ain't looking for anything else."

Soon, the story of the backwoods "Pilgrims" spread to national and international outlets—The Washington Post, The Economist, the BBC, and CNN. And while reporters uncovered mysterious details about Hale's past, the patriarch seemed to revel in the attention. In the fall of 2003, a group in McCarthy organized a "Berlin airlift": Volunteer bush pilots flew in supplies donated by concerned citizens from across the nation.

"It's just beautiful," Hale remarked to one AP reporter, describing the airlift. "[People have] poured out their hearts."