A bulldozer runs through it

WRANGELL-ST. ELIAS NATIONAL PARK - Psalms sat on Papa Pilgrim's right knee and Lamb perched on his left. Thirteen more of his children - all with names from the Bible, several packing pistols - crowded around. So did his exhausted-looking wife, Country Rose.

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It was a late summer's evening in Hillbilly Heaven, a 410-acre ranch in 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 Alaska 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 damage, and is pursuing criminal and civil cases against him and members of his family.

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're 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.

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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 old mining road Pilgrim cleared 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 claimed any road in its national parks. Neither the Bush administration nor Gov. Frank Murkowski, who favors opening rights of way to create jobs, has since said anything supportive of Pilgrim's vigilante romp.

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."

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Robert Hale grew up in affluent circumstances in Fort Worth, Texas.

His father was I.B. Hale, an FBI agent who later worked for defense contractor General Dynamics.

While in high school, Bobby Hale 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 1958 elopement, 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 accidental. 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 insinuated himself into the life of another well-known figure from the Kennedy era, according to Seymour 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, who later acknowledged an affair with Kennedy. An FBI agent observed the Aug. 7, 1962, break-in but made no attempt to arrest the Hale boys, according to Hersh.

Hersh speculates that the break-in was part of a successful attempt by I.B. Hales, then chief of security at General Dynamics, to blackmail Kennedy into giving the company a major defense contract.

"That is ridiculous," Pilgrim said of 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 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 California, he met Kurina Rose Bresler, 16, of Los Angeles, who would become the mother of the 15 children now living with him in Alaska. (Pilgrim has three other children from two previous marriages.)

After Bobby and Kurina had had their first two children, 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 newborns after characters, places and other designations in the Bible.

They moved to New Mexico, setting up a subsistence farm on land owned by actor Jack Nicholson. For more than 20 years, the family tanned leather, raised sheep and bred dogs.

They got into frequent scraps with neighbors, said 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, noting criminal charges were never filed. "Neighbors were afraid of Bob, and they didn't want to prosecute."

Pilgrim says his family never took anything from anyone. Friction with neighbors, he said, was over religion.

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His family moved north, Pilgrim explained, because "Alaska provides."

He was referring to good fishing and hunting, but also to the permanent fund dividend. Since they moved to Alaska in 1998, the dividend has provided the Pilgrims with nearly $30,000 a year in tax-free income.

Two years ago, they bought the ranch they call Hillbilly Heaven, about 14 miles north of the small town of McCarthy, from a retired miner for $450,000.

Pilgrim said he was then only vaguely aware 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.

By act of Congress, Alaska's national parks 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.

"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. 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 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, its inaction would be proof of its "selfish, greedy and hateful attitude."

"This is progress, I guess," Candelaria said. But the Park Service must make an environmental assessment before allowing passage, he said. The road the Pilgrims want to use crosses a creek 13 times, and the Park Service believes the trout could be harmed.

Pilgrim says winter is closing in fast and their 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.