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...