Papa Pilgrim/Robert Hale

The man who calls himself Papa Pilgrim is the lead figure in Pilgrim's Wilderness. He was born Robert Hale and grew up with his upscale family in Ft. Worth, Texas. He often got into trouble as a teenager and eventually became a wandering hippie, deeply immersed in the 1960s drug culture. After marrying Kurina Rose, he underwent a religious conversion and began a nomadic life that took him, Rose, and their growing brood of children to New Mexico and eventually Alaska.

As time passed, despite his outward piety, Papa increasingly turned to theft and deception as a means of supporting his family. He taught his children to do the same. He expressed a keen desire to enter heaven and have his wife and children do the same, but he twisted the words of the Bible and his favorite book, The Pilgrim's Progress, to suit...