Mining News: Reporter offers disappointing biography

Newsman Tom Kizzia details the background of Papa Pilgrim, once the poster child for Alaskans seeking access in the New Parks

By J.P. Tangen

For Mining News

Tom Kizzia has written a biographical account of the life and times of Robert Hale, who some folks will recall was a high-profile figure in the fight of in-holders to secure their statutory right to access their property in the middle of the past decade. Although the relevance of Hale to the history of Alaska was his conflict with the National Park Service in the Wrangell-Saint Elias National Park, Kizzia, unfortunately, takes the reader on a long and torturous frolic and detour into the sociopathic characteristics of the notorious “Papa Pilgrim.”

In the spirit of full disclosure, I need to state that I was engaged by the Pacific Legal Foundation to assist in asserting Hale’s claims before the U.S. District Court in Alaska. It is not my intention in reviewing Kizzia’s book to suggest that the book is poorly done or even wrong in any specific particulars, only that given the availability of the subject matter, the coverage of the central issue is disappointing. It is commonly said that inside every journalist there is a novel waiting to be written, and I suppose Kizzia is no exception. “Pilgrim’s Wilderness” is not a novel because purportedly, at least, most of the factual representations are true. On the other hand, it is fairly inadequate as an historical account because most of the facts are not documented.

Candidly, I don’t take much pleasure in reading reports of people beating up their spouses or children, nor do I find the intricate details of a manic/depressive particularly entertaining. Kizzia is a journalist, and as such, understandably he focuses on the lascivious, because it is axiomatic in the trade that sex sells. My personal preference would have been a more scholarly offering.

In the United States, we have been blessed with huge tracts of public land as the result of purchases, such as the Louisiana Purchase, the Gadsden Purchase and the Purchase of Alaska. We have had separate nations, such as Texas, California and Hawaii, swell our national acreage and we have even gone to war over some land, such as New Mexico and other lands in the Southwest, as well as Indian lands. It was our Manifest Destiny for America to extend from sea to shining sea. A typical motive for acquiring additional territory was to enhance commerce by settling remote areas for resource development.

The national policy was (and theoretically remains today) for Americans to go upon the unreserved public land and develop the abundant resources such as timber and minerals. The mining law of 1872 is an excellent illustration of that policy. The government says to every citizen: “go upon the public domain and look for gold and silver and lead and zinc and many, many other valuable minerals; and, if you do, you can keep and sell what you find.”

We, as a nation, also invited homesteaders, entrepreneurs, farmers, and veterans among others to populate and settle the public land. Slowly, that policy is falling from fashion, probably because we are evolving from a society of makers to a society of servers. However, the venerable policies when in vogue carried with them certain guarantees, among which were the right to use the land for the proposed purpose and the right to access that land for that purpose. When the United States granted someone a patent to land, the reservations and exceptions were detailed in the conveyance document.

In 1980, a strange piece of legislation was enacted at the instance of the Environmental Conflicts Industry. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act — ANILCA — was signed into law, and that law, among other things, doubled the size of the National Park System by establishing a number of new park units in Alaska. The Act assured Alaskans that existing uses and access would not be compromised; however, the National Park Service, aided and abetted by the reviewing courts, has found those promises to be not binding.

One of the parks – the largest of all – was the Wrangell Saint Elias National Park, which was and is chock full of in-holders who want to get to their land and use it. Such was the case of Robert Hale. Hale wanted to reconstruct a washed-out mining road to his patents near McCarthy. This caused the NPS to move heaven and earth to stop him. At one point, they ran up a half-million-dollar bill with the expectation that they would saddle Hale with it for reclaiming a critically-needed way to get to his land.

In all fairness, Kizzia makes note in passing of the access story and the disappointing result; however, he does so in such a fashion as to make it clear that his bias is not supportive of Hale and his family. The book is a good read if you are morbidly curious about eccentric people – Hale certainly qualifies – but it is a waste of $25 American to buy the book if you want some insight into what was possibly going through the heads of the myopic bureaucrats in charge when they chose to send rangers in flak jackets to remote Alaska in order to conduct a simple survey.