walter harper, alaska native son

2018 Alaskana Award from the Alaska Library Association

Born in 1893, Walter Harper was the youngest child of Jenny Albert and the legendary Irish gold prospector Arthur Harper. His parents separated shortly after his birth, and his mother raised Walter in the Athabascan tradition, speaking her Koyukon Athabascan language. When Walter was seventeen years old, Episcopal archdeacon Hudson Stuck hired the skilled and charismatic youth as his riverboat pilot and winter trail guide. As the two traveled among Interior Alaska’s Episcopal missions, they developed a father-son-like bond and together summited Mount Denali in 1913.

Walter remained grounded in his birth culture as his Western education expanded, and he became a leader and a bridge between Alaska Native peoples and Westerners in the Alaska Territory. He planned to become a medical missionary in Interior Alaska, but his life was cut short at the age of twenty-five, in the SS Princess Sophia disaster near Skagway, Alaska, in 1918.

Harper exemplified resilience in an era when rapid socioeconomic and cultural change were wreaking havoc in Alaska Native villages. Walter Harper, Alaska Native Son illuminates the life of the remarkable Irish Athabascan man who was the first person to summit Mount Denali.

Mary F. Ehrlander is a professor emeritus of history and Arctic and Northern studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She won the 2018 Alaska Historical Society James H. Drucker Alaska Historian of the Year Award. Ehrlander is the coauthor of Hospital and Haven: The Life and Work of Grafton and Clara Burke in Northern Alaska (Nebraska, 2023) and author of Equal Educational Opportunity: Brown’s Elusive Mandate.