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CHAPTER 1
Childhood and Adolescence
When Walter Harper arrived in the world in December 1892 at Nuchelawoya, his parents, Jenny Albert and Arthur Harper, had been married eighteen years. She had borne seven other children — five boys followed by two girls. The family had traveled extensively along the middle and upper Yukon River, establishing trading posts at sites near gold discoveries. Jenny and Arthur's relationship bore the strains of many separations during his long prospecting journeys. Jenny and the children suffered separations from one another as well. Arthur sent each child Outside, as Alaskans called the continental United States, to boarding school in Ross, California, at the age of six or seven, against Jenny's objections. She wanted her children at home with her. The couple separated just a few years after Walter's birth, and Jenny returned to her native region at Nuchelawoya to raise her youngest child in the Athabascan tradition.
Seentaána, as Jenny's Koyukon Athabascan people knew her, may have been part Kobuk River Iñupiaq. Oral histories told of Athabascans on the Koyukuk River raiding the encampments of Kobuk River Iñupiat to the north for wives and vice versa. Some said Jenny's heritage was thus mixed. However, she grew up according to Koyukon Athabascan tradition, learning to cut, dry, and smoke fish, snare rabbits, and gather berries.
The Irish potato famine had driven twelve-year-old Arthur Harper to emigrate in 1847. Harper lived with an uncle's family in Brooklyn, New York, for several years. He then made his way to California at the age of twenty and prospected for minerals in the American West, eventually migrating northward into British Columbia. In 1872 Harper began an odyssey that would define the final decades of his life in Alaska and the Yukon Territory, Canada. He became a legendary figure, credited as the first to recognize the region's potential for gold mining.
Harper traveled more than two thousand miles, living off the land with three other men. Starting near the head of the Peace River at Munson Creek, they followed the Liard, Mackenzie, Peel, and Porcupine Rivers to Alaska. No non-Natives, except for Hudson Bay Company (HBC) traders, had yet entered much of the land they crossed. The men arrived at Fort Yukon, Alaska, a former HBC trading post where the Porcupine entered the Yukon River, in July 1873. Harper later told William Ogilvie, who was a surveyor and the commissioner of the Yukon Territory, that they had seen gold in many locations. On the Yukon River they had found "prospects everywhere."
A month after Harper reached Fort Yukon, Jack McQuesten and Alfred Mayo arrived there, having followed some of the route Harper had taken. Harper, McQuesten, and Mayo formed a decades-long partnership as traders in Alaska and the Yukon. Always maintaining his interest in prospecting, Harper spent much of his time in the last three decades of the nineteenth century scouting for signs of gold.
In the summer of 1874 just thirty-two white persons lived along the Yukon River and its tributaries, including Harper at Nuchelawoya. In the Athabascan language that place-name meant "where the rivers meet," referring to the confluence of the Tanana and Yukon Rivers. Alaska Natives came from far up the Tanana River, from the upper and lower Yukon River, and from the upper Kuskokwim River to trade goods and furs at Nuchelawoya. Later the community where Walter was born became known as Tanana.
On one of Harper, McQuesten, and Mayo's first excursions down the Yukon River in 1874 a fall freezeup trapped their boat. Unable to proceed downriver they inquired in the area about eligible marriage partners. According to family history, residents at Koyukuk Station chose three "deficient" women for the men. The residents considered Seentaána deficient because she was tall. Her cousin Margaret, who married Al Mayo, was said to have inadequate sewing skills. Arthur Harper was thirty-nine and Seentaána, or Jenny, was fourteen when they met that fall. Euro-American migrants to Alaska and the Yukon often entered into common-law or legal marriages with Indigenous women, and children often were born of these unions. During the gold rush era many men abandoned their Native partners and children when they left the north country, regardless of whether they were legally married. Jenny and Arthur Harper's marriage endured much longer than most, despite their incompatibilities. Al and Margaret Mayo's marriage was much more harmonious. It produced eleven children, ten of whom survived to adulthood, and lasted until 1924, when he passed away.
The summer after they were married Jenny and Arthur poled up the Yukon River 1,050 miles to Fort Selkirk, well within Canada. They moved often as Harper established and operated trading posts at various locations in Alaska and the Yukon. Sites included Fort Selkirk, Eagle, Nuchelawoya/Tanana, the mouths of the Stewart, Fortymile, and Sixtymile Rivers, and Fort Reliance. Harper developed a reputation as a trusted and honorable trader who provided miners with supplies according to need and regardless of whether they could pay for the goods. Natives and non-Natives alike respected him.
Although Arthur Harper's activities are rather well documented, almost no written records shed light on Arthur and Jenny's relationship. The successive separations from her children no doubt caused Jenny anxiety, as well as loneliness, especially considering Arthur's frequent absences. Jenny's cousin Margaret reportedly adapted well to Western lifeways. She and her husband, Al, sent their children Outside, to boarding schools in Wisconsin and Buxton Mission, Ontario, with Margaret's approval. After they settled in Rampart at the turn of the twentieth century she served as a liaison between Native and non-Native residents. The great age difference between Jenny and Arthur Harper may have contributed to their discord.
Jenny's Koyukon Athabascan people and other Athabascan tribes had inhabited interior Alaska for thousands of years. The Brooks Range to the north and the Alaska Range to the south bordered their traditional region in the forested Interior. The Yukon River united Athabascans on either side of the Alaska-Canada border, which Russia and Great Britain settled at the 141st meridian in 1825. Beyond the Athabascan homeland lived Alaska's several other Indigenous peoples. The various Athabascan tribes, dispersed over Alaska's vast Interior, spoke one of more than ten languages.
The Interior landscape varied dramatically. For instance, in the broad flat area at the Arctic Circle known as the Yukon Flats, the Yukon River separated into a complex web of streams. To the west, as the terrain rose toward the Ray Mountains, the multiple channels rejoined, and the Yukon flowed through towering ramparts.
Bands of a few Athabascan families moved in seasonal rounds to harvest the nutrient-rich foods that nature provided. In the Tanana region, Walter Harper's homeland, the people relied heavily on fish, primarily salmon, whitefish, and grayling, or Arctic trout. They caught large numbers during the summer and dried and smoked them for use throughout the winter. They also hunted moose, caribou, and smaller mammals and birds, but fish sustained the people and their dogs more reliably. Various commodities, including guns, ammunition, axes, files, knives, needles, pails, pipes, tobacco, snuff, and beads, had entered Alaska's Interior through trade routes from the east and west before white explorers and settlers entered the region. Athabascans incorporated these items into their daily routines and pursuits.
In addition to supplying fish, rivers formed travel routes in Alaska's Interior region, in both summer and winter. Rivers connected villages, allowing people, goods, and supplies to be transported in and people and goods to travel out. Athabascans traveled in birch-bark canoes, sharp at both ends and sometimes decorated with beads or porcupine quills. The canoes were so light that a man could carry one with one hand.
Millennia after Alaska's Indigenous peoples settled in the region Russian explorers and fur traders arrived. Alaska's Russian era began in 1741 with Aleksey Chirikov's sighting of Prince of Wales Island and with Vitus Bering's arrival at Kayak Island. Subsequently Russian fur hunters exploited Alaska's waters and Native peoples, especially the Aleut, Alutiiq, and Tlingit. In 1799 Emperor Paul I granted a monopoly on the Alaska fur trade to the Russian American Company (RAC). The RAC established a fort at Nulato on the lower Yukon River in 1839, and a Russian explorer traveled upriver into the heart of Athabascan country as far as the Tanana River. But Russians exerted no control over Athabascans in the Interior.
In 1847 the Hudson Bay Company built a trading post at Fort Yukon, on the Arctic Circle, well within Alaska's eastern boundary, and HBC employees traveled down the Yukon River to buy furs. At Nuchelawoya they met RAC traders. But the RAC seems not to have been troubled by the HBC's activity in Alaska. Because Russian traders and later administrators generally ignored Alaska's Interior, Athabascan lifeways remained largely unchanged during the Russian era.
By the mid-nineteenth century Russia's American holdings were losing their appeal. Harvests of sea mammals had declined, and the far-off territory became more of a burden than an asset to Russia. Preferring to focus on internal modernization, Tsar Alexander II decided to sell Alaska. The United States was in an expansionist era following the Civil War, and Americans saw potential in the region's natural resources. In 1867 the two countries settled on a sale price of $7.2 million. Following the transfer of the territory, merchants established several trading posts in the Nuchelawoya area. By 1870 the Alaska Commercial Company had come to dominate trade in Alaska.
Soon after the United States purchased Alaska, surveyors discovered that the HBC post at Fort Yukon lay within American territory. The Alaska Commercial Company therefore bought the post. Before long, steamships regularly plied the Yukon's waters during summers, carrying people and trade goods upriver and returning with people and furs. This economic activity opened some wage-labor opportunities to Iñupiat in the coastal region and Athabascans in the Interior. Alaska Natives worked as pilots, firemen, assistant engineers, and wood choppers on the steamers. Athabascans supplied beaver, fox, marten, wolverine, bear, and wolf skins to traders in return for tea, flour, cotton cloth, and other sought-after household items. As river traffic increased, interaction with migrants and the habits they introduced dramatically altered traditional lifeways along the Yukon.
By the late 1800s the preferred means of travel in winter was by dogsled. Dogs reportedly outnumbered people in some villages. The U.S. government provided mail service throughout Alaska, in summer by boat and in winter by dogsled. Arthur and Jenny Harper at one time owned forty to fifty "Eskimo dogs," a husky-malamute mix, which they kept at Nuchelawoya and used for winter transportation. Each dog ate a chum salmon a day, when they were available. The Harpers and other dog owners typically fished intensively during summers and dried the salmon to use during the winter. Feeding dogs through the winter was burdensome; owners sometimes had to destroy the hungry animals when it was impossible to feed both their families and the dogs.
Eventually Arthur Harper and Jack McQuesten reported their gold discoveries to the officers of the Alaska Commercial Company's steamer, the St. Paul. The news spread to San Francisco, and several prospectors arrived in the St. Michael district in western Alaska in 1882. Both Harper and McQuesten also reported the discoveries in letters to miner friends in southern Alaska. These letters lured miners into the Interior via the Chilkoot Pass. Harper's widespread prospecting, numerous discoveries, and communication to outsiders about the area's gold prospects won him recognition as the discoverer of gold in the region. Yukon commissioner William Ogilvie credited Harper with being the first to consider the Alaska-Yukon region as a "mining field." By the time tens of thousands rushed to the Klondike in 1898 Harper and others had done much to ease the journey and support the mining process.
Meanwhile in 1884 Congress created Alaska's first civil government. It was a bare-bones system, with a weak appointed governor and no elected legislature. Prospectors hailed from nearly every country in the world. They tended to be hardy characters, and many were rough around the edges. More than a few were "wanted" by the law elsewhere. With no formal law enforcement in the Interior, people relied on direct democracy, or "miners' meetings," to promote order and solve crimes. Miners in a given region would gather to consider the evidence surrounding a crime. They would then vote on the guilt or innocence of the accused and impose a punishment. Depending on the severity of the crime, the penalty might be banishment, restitution, or, in the case of murder, death by hanging.
Norms centered on the golden rule, officially adopted as the emblem of the Yukon Order of Pioneers. The Canadian historian Pierre Berton described the code in The Klondike Fever. Anyone who discovered gold shared the good news with others. Any miner could use an empty cabin he found, but he was expected to replenish the wood supply before leaving. And no miners went hungry. Harper, McQuesten, and Mayo grubstaked, or supplied, miners regardless of whether they could pay for the items.
The 1886 discovery of coarse gold on the Fortymile River, just inside the Alaska border, sparked the first gold rush into Alaska's Interior. Harper, McQuesten, and Mayo built a trading post at the mouth of the Fortymile River, on the Canadian side of the border, and a settlement sprang up there. In 1889 Arthur and Jenny Harper established a new trading post at the mouth of the Pelly River, well within the Yukon territory. The geologist Israel Russell met the Harpers and their "several interesting children," as they traveled to the new trading post site opposite old Fort Selkirk. He described Harper as "one of the most genial and best informed men that I met in Central Alaska." In the early 1890s a settlement grew around the Fort Selkirk trading post, and the Anglican Church built a mission there.
By 1893, when Walter Harper was born, Circle City, Alaska, was the largest settlement and supply point on the Yukon, with a population of five hundred. A sawmill at Circle City, and another at Fortymile, owned by Arthur Harper and Joe Ladue, provided lumber to those who could purchase it. However, many miners personally sawed the boards for their cabins and their sluice boxes, the standard device miners used to separate gold from other earthen matter. The miners shoveled promising gravel and soil, or pay dirt, into the long wooden boxes with slats, or riffles, in the bottom. As they flushed water over the dirt, the lighter contents washed away, while the riffles caught the gold.
By this time Tanana had become a bustling trade and transfer point for freight and passengers traveling along Interior rivers. Steamships regularly supplied trading posts that served both Natives and miners. Just one government official was stationed along the length of the Yukon River in Alaska; he was the tax collector at Circle City. But because most of the miners in the region were American, thoroughly American and democratic communities developed in the mining camps on the upper Yukon.
In 1895, when Walter Harper was not yet three years old, Arthur and Jenny Harper separated. She returned with Walter to Tanana, where she raised him in the Athabascan tradition and he spoke the Koyukon Athabascan language. He became adept at hunting and other subsistence activities well before beginning his Western education and acculturation. In stark contrast his brothers, after spending their formative years Outside at boarding school, had to readjust to their mother's culture during adolescence. They returned home when their father could no longer pay their tuition, in the mid- to late 1890s. The boys found their homecoming as disorienting as their arrival at boarding school had been. They had forgotten their mother's language and had grown accustomed to indoor plumbing and electricity. They disliked the odors of the animal hides and tanning solutions that permeated Jenny's crowded cabin. The disruptions of their childhood years left the older Harper brothers stranded between Native and non-Native cultures. Discrimination against mixed-race individuals deepened their sense of alienation. Walter's sisters, Marianne (known as Jessie) and Margaret, continued their studies in California. They eventually graduated from San Francisco Teachers College. Having marketable skills eased their homecoming.
In August 1896 George Carmack and his Indigenous companions Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie found gold on Bonanza Creek in the Yukon territory. The creek flowed into a river the local Natives called Tron Deg, which non-Natives mispronounced as "Klondike." Word of the gold strike spread quickly. In early September Harper and Joe Ladue built a trading post and sawmill at the mouth of the Klondike River that provided them a good income. The business partners established a town site there and named it Dawson.
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Excerpted from "Walter Harper, Alaska Native Son"
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