December 15, 2025 • 36 mins
While working as a guide in his youth, Walter Harper met and worked for a man named Hudson Stuck. Their friendship would lead to Walter becoming the first person to reach the summit of Denali.
Research:
- Bishop, Click. “Sponsor Statement SB-144 – Walter Harper Day.” Alaska State Legislature. https://www.akleg.gov/basis/get_documents.asp?session=31&docid=58198
- Dean, Patrick. “How Hudson Stuck's Ascent of Denali Boosted Recognition of Indigenous Alaskans.” History News Network. 12/13/2020. https://www.hnn.us/article/how-hudson-stucks-ascent-of-denali-boosted-recogni
- Denali National Park and Preserve. “Superintendent Harry Karstens.” https://www.nps.gov/dena/learn/photosmultimedia/station06a.htm
- Ehrlander, Mary. “Walter Harper, Alaska Native Son.” UAF Summer Sessions & Lifelong Learning. Via YouTube. 7/7/2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-FrvS3gONg
- Farquhar, Francis P. “Henry P. Karstens—1878-1955.” The American Alpine Club. https://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12195611200/Henry-P-Karstens-1878-1955
- Hayes, Alan L. “One Congregation, Two Cultures: St. Mark’s Episcopal Church Nenana, Alaska.” Anglican and Episcopal History, vol. 68, no. 1, 1999, pp. 141–46. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42612013. Accessed 24 Nov. 2025.
- James, David A. “In story of the legendary ‘Walter Harper: Alaska Native Son,’ Denali is just the beginning.” Alaska Daily News. 12/16/2017. https://www.adn.com/arts/books/2017/12/16/in-story-of-the-legendary-walter-harper-alaska-native-son-denali-is-just-the-beginning/
- James, David. “The Brief, But Bright Story of Walter Harper.” Alaska. 5/21/2022. https://alaskamagazine.com/authentic-alaska/the-brief-but-bright-story-of-walter-harper/
- John, Peter. “The Gospel According to Peter John.” Krupa, David J., editor. Alaska Native Knowledge Network. 1996. https://ankn.uaf.edu/publications/Books/Peter_John.pdf
- Johnson, Erik. “Honoring the Unsung Heroes of the 1913 Summit Expedition: Esaias George and John Fredson.” National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/dena-history-unsung-heroes.htm
- Johnson, Erik. “The Ultimate Triumph and Tragedy: Remembering Walter Harper 100 Years Later.” National Park Service. Denali National Park. https://www.nps.gov/articles/dena-history-harper.htm
- Manville, Julie and Ross Maller. “The Influence of Christian Missionaries on Alaskan Indigenous Peoples.” Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion. Vol. 5, Article 8. 2009.
- Miller, Matt. “‘May Light Perpetual Shine Upon Them.’” KTOO. https://www.ktoo.org/2013/10/26/may-light-perpetual-shine-upon-them/
- New York Times. “Yukon Indian Opens Coney Island Eyes.” 6/1/1914.
- Stuck, Hudson. “A winter circuit of our Arctic coast; a narrative of a journey with dog-sleds around the entire Arctic coast of Alaska.” New York. C. Scribner’s Sons. 1920. https://archive.org/details/wintercircuito00stuc/
- Stuck, Hudson. “Ten Thousand Miles With A Dog Sled a Narrative of winter travel in Interior Alaska.” 1917. https://archive.org/details/tenthousandmiles0000huds/
- Stuck, Hudson. “The ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) a narrative of the first complete ascent of the highest peak in North America.” New York, C. Scribner's Sons. 1914. https://archive.org/details/ascentofdenalimo01stuc/
- Stuck, Hudson. “Voyages on the Yukon and its tributaries: a narrative of summer travel in the interior of Alaska.” New York : Charles Scribner's Sons. 1917. https://archive.org/details/cihm_76545/
- Walker, Tom. “A Brief Account of the 1913 Climb of Mount McKinley.” Denali National Park and Preserve. https://www.nps.gov/dena/learn/historyculture/1913ex.htm
- Woodside, Christine. “Who Led the First Ascent of Denali? Hudson Stuck, Archdeacon of the Yukon.” Vol. 63, No., 2 Summer/Fall 2012.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
This episode was inspired by a clip from the PBS
animated TV show Molly of Denali, which an algorithm fed
to me over Halloween. In this clip, Molly's classmate Jake
wants to dress up as Walter Harper for Halloween. Walter
Harper had Athabascan and Irish ancestry, and so Jake's costume
(00:37):
is this homemade outfit that he has made to look
like Regalia.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
But Jake is not Native.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
So this clip is about how regalia is not a
costume and it's not appropriate for non indigenous people to
be dressing up in this way. Walter Harper was the
first person to reach the summit of Denali, so Molly
and her friends put together a more suitable Halloween costume
for him using mountaineering gear. This is a really sweet clip.
(01:05):
It's about friendship and about being respectful of people's cultures
and traditions. But my first thought was, hey, do we
have an episode about Walter Harper? Now we are about
to have two since This is a two parter. Walter
Harper's parents were Arthur Harper, who was born in Ireland,
and Sintana, who was Koyakon Athabaskan. In some accounts, Sintana
(01:28):
is also referred to as Jenny. Arthur Harper had immigrated
to the United States in the wake of the Great
Famine in Ireland, and he and Santana had met in
eighteen seventy four. Arthur was kind of a larger than
life figure. He was a prospector and trader who Hudson
Stuck later described as quote the first man ever to
come to the Yukon country seeking gold. And we're going
(01:52):
to talk about Hudson Stuck a lot more in just
a bit. Arthur and Sintana had eight children together, and
Walter was their youngest. His exact birth date is not known,
but it was probably sometime in the winter of eighteen
ninety two to eighteen ninety three, and his upbringing was
a lot different from that of his older siblings. Arthur
(02:14):
had wanted all of his children to be sent outside,
meaning out of Alaska to be educated. For Walter's siblings,
that meant that they were sent as far away as California,
once they reached school age, but Arthur and Santana separated
when Walter was just a toddler. Sintana moved to the
village of Tanana and she raised Walter according to Athabaskan
(02:36):
traditions that included him speaking Koyacon Athabaskan as his first language.
He was the only one of his siblings to be
raised in this way, rather than being sent away to
an English language school. Arthur Harper died in eighteen ninety
seven when Walter was about five, so Walter never really
knew his father, and that happened just as the Klondike
(02:59):
gold rush was sweeping through Alaska and neighboring parts of Canada.
About one hundred thousand people rushed to the area, and
at first many of them were passing through Alaska to
get to the Klondike in northwestern Canada. Soon people were
looking for gold in Alaska as well. This, of course,
brought just enormous changes to Alaska, and those changes also
(03:23):
built on things that had been happening over the previous decades.
The United States had purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire
in eighteen sixty seven, but didn't start trying to organize
it or implement a civil government until almost two decades later.
The establishment of the District of Alaska and its civil
(03:43):
government was in part motivated by federal efforts to establish
mining laws in the territory.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
More than fifty gold mining camps were established in Alaska
between eighteen ninety seven and nineteen oh seven. This was
very similar to other oil and precious metal booms that
we've talked about on the show before. If someone struck gold,
a huge influx of people came to the area, and
there was a corresponding spike in crime, lawlessness, and alcohol misuse.
(04:15):
Some of these camps were temporary and they were abandoned
when the gold ran out, but others grew into permanent
towns and cities. This gold rush also brought more missionaries
to Alaska. There had been religious missions in Alaska going
back to before the United States purchased it from Russia,
but starting in the eighteen eighties, multiple Christian denominations in
(04:38):
the United States basically divided Alaska up among themselves. They
entered into comedy agreements that gave each denomination the exclusive
right to operate in a particular region. In theory, this
was supposed to reduce conflicts and prevent misunderstandings among the
various denominations and missionary societ But it also meant that
(05:02):
the local people had absolutely no say in which denomination
was available to them if they wanted missionaries to be
involved in their lives and the place that they lived
at all. The Episcopal Church took responsibility for the part
of interior Alaska where Walter Harper grew up, possibly because
(05:23):
the Anglican Church had missions in neighboring parts of Canada.
If you're not aware, the Episcopal Church is the name
for the Anglican Church in the United States. One of
the Episcopal missionaries who came to Alaska during all of
this was Hudson Stuck, who had become a huge part
of Walter Harper's life. Stuck had been born in London
(05:44):
and immigrated to the US state of Texas in eighteen
eighty five. He seems to have been at least partially
seeking adventure. He and some friends flipped a coin when
they decided whether to go to Texas or Australia. Stuck
worked as a cowboy and as a teacher and school
principle before getting a scholarship to study at the University
(06:04):
of the South in Swanee, Tennessee. He studied theology and
was ordained in eighteen ninety two.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
Stuck initially went back to Texas, where he became the
dean of Saint Matthew's Cathedral in Dallas. He was also
a social reformer. He campaigned for one of Texas's first
child labor laws and established a night school for mill
workers and a home for impoverished women, but eventually he
did not think his work in Texas was challenging enough.
(06:35):
In a letter, he wrote that quote, I design, quite
frankly and honestly, to give some years of my life
to the work of the missionary field, and I want
it to be hard and remote work. In nineteen oh four,
he was named arch deacon of the Yukon and of
the Arctic regions to the north, and he moved to Alaska.
(06:55):
At this point, the US government's policy toward the indigenous
peoples of the Last Asca was that they should be
brought under the influence of Christian missionaries. Most of the
schools in Alaska were being run by missionaries, and even
as the government started establishing other schools, the teachers there
were often missionaries, or they were people the nearest mission
(07:16):
had vetted. This included the creation of schools for Indigenous
children under the Federal Boarding School Program, which we've talked
about in a number of previous episodes. Many of Alaska's
hospitals and medical clinics were also established and run by missionaries.
We have multiple previous episodes in which we've talked about
(07:36):
ways in which these kinds of missionary efforts could harm
Indigenous peoples, even when the missionaries involved had the best
intentions and were trying to help. This dividing up of
Alaska among the various religious denominations was rooted in colonialism
and imperialism. The Federal boarding school program was an attempt
(07:57):
to separate Indigenous children from their faith families and their
cultures and to force them to assimilate with white society,
making it an act of cultural genocide.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
At the same time. Exactly how much the different missions
in Alaska were focused on assimilation and proselytizing really varied
from one denomination to another, and even from mission to
mission within a denomination. Hudson Stuck in particular.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Did not see any value in the idea of forcing
Alaska's Native peoples to assimilate. In his book Voyages on
the Yukon, he wrote quote, I find myself perhaps too
easily vexed by the calm assumption of the infinite distance
that separates the Indian from the white man merely because
he is a white man. I am no foe to
(08:44):
racial distinctions anymore than I am to social distinctions, and
certainly no friend to the admixture of bloods. I do
not view with complacency the solution of racial problems by
the absorption of the lesser breeds into the overwhelming white race.
I hate the thing, even though I cannot shut my
eyes to it. I do not see why different races
(09:05):
should not perpetuate themselves with their special cultures and their
special tongues. And I think the world will be a
much less interesting world, and not on that score, one
with the better world, when all the little people shall
have been absorbed, all picturesque distinction of custom and costume
broken down, and a thousand vigorous, elastic indigenous languages superseded
(09:27):
by pigeon English. From some points of view, the vaunted
march of civilization is to me a mere apes march
to nowhere, just for the sake of clarity. He had
the terms lesser breeds, pigeon English, and March of Civilization,
all in scare quotes, as though he was saying so
called before each of those terms. Later on in the
(09:50):
same book, he denounced the idea of forcing Indigenous students
to speak only English, saying that such efforts involved quote
a great deal of s stamping without much stamping out.
He went on to say, quote, it is probable that
the English speech will prevail over the native speech of
these peoples by natural process, though in many places it
(10:12):
will be a long time yet, And I cannot see,
to save my life, why it is so devoutly to
be wished. But there is no sort of advantage in
seeking to expedite the process beyond its natural rate, nor
in repressing the Indian's tongue by speaking contemptuously of it,
and as far as may be, proscribing its use. Stuck
(10:36):
also saw the influx of miners and mining camps to
Alaska as sources of harm to the indigenous population, bringing
alcohol and its associated problems, and debasing Indigenous women. At
various points during his time in Alaska, he went on
speaking tours in the lower forty eight both to raise
money and to try to advocate for Alaska's Native peoples,
(11:00):
including raising awareness about how new industries in Alaska, like
commercial salmon canning, could harm indigenous communities. So he was
not a flawless man by any means, and the language
he used could definitely be underpinned by the prejudices of
the time he was living in. But he does seem
to have been more supportive of Alaska Native people's cultures
(11:21):
and sovereignty than a lot of other religious and missionary
figures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We'll of
course be talking more about Hudson Stuck, but for now.
About five years after he arrived in Alaska, he met
Walter Harper at a fish camp. Harper was about sixteen.
We'll talk more about that after a sponsor break. When
(11:51):
Hudson Stuck met Walter Harper at a fish camp in
nineteen oh nine, Stuck was immediately impressed. Was deeply knowledgeable
in Athabascan traditions and ways of living, including how to
survive and live off the land. He was also relentlessly optimistic, charismatic,
and personable. People also thought of him as very handsome.
(12:16):
Stuck convinced Walter's mother, Sentana, to send him to Saint
Mark's Mission School in Nanana. While Stuck doesn't seem to
have been focused on the idea of forcing Alaska Native
children to assimilate with white culture, that wasn't necessarily the
case for the teachers at this mission school. For example,
Athabaskan chief Peter John, who died in two thousand and three,
(12:37):
spent about five years at this school, and in his
adult life he talked about being hit with a switch
if he spoke Athabaskan and of not being allowed to
do things the Athabaskan way. He said the school taught
him the basics of subjects like reading and writing, but
that he mostly did manual labor there and he taught
himself English later on. Walter didn't attend Saint Mark's Mission
(13:01):
School for very long, but while he was there he
was well liked by the other students. A lot of
them were also impressed by his knowledge of the outdoors
and of Athabaskan traditions.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
When Harper was seventeen, Stuck hired him for help with
his missionary work. For about the next three years, Harper
acted as a guide a riverboat pilot in the summer
and a sled dog handler in the winter. He was
also an interpreter and a liaison with Alaska's indigenous communities,
acting as a bridge between Stuck and his missionary work
(13:33):
and the indigenous communities that he was trying to help.
Harper also came to trust Stuck, and he let other
indigenous people know that he thought Stuck was worthy of trust.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Stuck was also Harper's tutor and became a father figure
to him. This paternalism is totally understandable, since Harper was
sixteen when they met and only seventeen when they started
working and traveling together. But Stuck would also repeatedly acknowledged
that he had trouble thinking of Harper as a grown
man once Harper reached adulthood. This was probably complicated by
(14:08):
the fact that Stuck was still teaching and tutoring Harper
in multiple subjects when Harper was in his twenties and
was preparing to go to college. Stuck's writings describe Harper
as smart and resourceful like once they were traveling on
the mission's riverboat called the Pelican, and the Pelican had
a four cylinder engine and a cast iron bracket that
(14:29):
was holding one of the cylinders in place broke. Stuck
and the crew talked about hobbling back to the last
town that they had been to on three cylinders to
try to find a repair. But Harper thought that if
he had a piece of very hard wood, he could
fashion a new bracket and mount it onto the boat
with wire. Stuck was so confident in Harper's abilities that
(14:50):
he allowed him to use the one piece of hardwood
that they had that was the stock of their shotgun,
and this solution worked. In Stuck's words, quote, there are
no limits to Walter's ingenuity. I don't remember if he
specifically said, but I am assuming that later, when they
got to the next town or village, they were able
(15:13):
to replace that stock somehow. In nineteen thirteen, when Harper
was twenty or twenty one, he became part of an
expedition Stuck was funding to try to summit Denali. That
name comes from Athamascan for great. One probably also heard
it called Mount McKinley. In eighteen ninety six, a gold
(15:33):
prospector named William Dickey had proposed to call Denali Mount McKinley,
after then US presidential candidate William McKinley. William McKinley had
no connection to the mountain or to Alaska, but the
name Mount McKinley started to gain popularity after he had
been elected president and then assassinated, which was in nineteen
(15:54):
oh one. Although that name was not yet formally recognized
by the federal government, it was one that a lot
of people, especially outside of Alaska, were using. By the
time this expedition was being planned. Hudson Stuck objected to
the name Mount McKinley, as well as to the naming
of a neighboring peak as Mount Foricker, after Ohio Senator
(16:17):
Joseph B.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
Forcker.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Stuck wrote that Mount Forker's name in Athabaskan translated to
the woman or Denali's wife. He said, of the names
McKinley and Foricker, quote, they should stand no longer, since
if there be right and reason in these matters, they
should not have been placed there at all.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
He went on to say, quote, it is probably true
of every great mountain that it bears diverse native names,
as one tribe or another on this side or on
that of its mighty bulk speaks of it. But the
area in which and the people by whom this mountain
is now known as Denali, preponderate so greatly as to
leave no question which native name it should bear. Later,
(17:00):
he wrote quote, there is to the author's mind a
certain ruthless arrogance that grows more offensive to him as
the years pass by. In the temper, that comes to
a new land and contemptuously ignores the native names of
conspicuous natural objects, almost always appropriate and significant, and overlays
them with names that are commonly neither the one nor
(17:23):
the other. The learned societies of the world, the geographical societies,
the ethnological societies, have set their faces against this practice
these many years passed, and to them the writer confidently appeals.
Denali is the highest mountain peak in North America, with
an elevation of twenty thousand, three hundred ten feet above
(17:46):
sea level. It's also thousands of feet taller than most
of the other mountains in the Alaska Range. Because of
its massive size and the relative isolation of the Alaska
Range from other mountain ranges, and the way that Danali
interacts with prevailing winds and air currents, it is sometimes
described as creating its own weather.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
There have been several known attempts to summit Denali in
the early twentieth century. Doctor Frederick Cook had launched an
expedition in nineteen oh six, and he claimed to have
reached the summit alone while the rest of his team
had stayed at a lower elevation. His claims were quickly discredited,
and he later made other claims that ranged from dubious
(18:27):
to straightforwardly fraudulent. He wound up being convicted of an
unrelated mail fraud in nineteen twenty three.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
A team known as the Sourdough Party, made up of
Tom Lloyd, Peter Anderson, Billy Taylor, and Charles McGonagall tried
to summit Denali in nineteen ten. They probably did reach
a summit, but it was the North Peak, which is
about eight hundred and fifty feet lower in elevation than
the South peak. That is something they did not know
(18:55):
at the time. Hudson's Stuck's Expedition spotted a pull that
the Sourdough Party left on the lower summit through binoculars. Then,
in nineteen twelve, a team led by Belmore Brown and
Herschel Parker tried to reach the South summit of Denali.
They had previously made other expeditions on the mountain, including
(19:16):
one to conclusively disprove Cook's claims of having summited, and
on their final attempt they almost made it. They were
probably within about one hundred and twenty five feet of
the summit when they were forced to turn back due
to a storm with total whiteout conditions and extreme cold.
The snow was falling so fast that it filled their footprints,
(19:37):
so they could barely make out a return route to
their camp. They tried again, but they were again forced
to turn around because of a blizzard, and by that
point they were running out of food that they could eat.
Their most calorie dense food was pemmican, which is a
food developed by the indigenous peoples of the Far North
that's typically made from dried meat, animal fat, and sometimes berries.
(19:59):
Pemmic as a frequent flyer on the podcast Lately. Yeah,
it became a staple food for a lot of nineteenth
century expeditions.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Oh, I meant we just mentioned it on the Cranberry episode.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
We did do that.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
We've mentioned it in other episodes also, which is what
I was thinking of. Yeah, their canned pemmican had started
to disagree with their digestive systems at very high altitudes,
and they had given up on trying to eat it
near the summit. They pretty much were like, we're not
getting any value from the food anymore because it makes us.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
It's doing more harm than good.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Accounts from the Parker Brown expedition made it sound like
reaching the summit of Denali could be possible if the
weather cooperated, and Hudson Stuck was one of the people
who wanted to try. Another was Henry P. Carstons, known
as Harry. Carstons, had been born in Chicago in eighteen
seventy eight and had come to Alaska at the age
(20:53):
of nineteen during the Klondike Gold Rush. His prospecting along
the seventy Mile River had earned him the nickname the
seventy Mile Kid. In addition to being a prospector and
a trader, Carston's had become an expert dog sled handler.
He had helped establish a trail between Fairbanks and Valdez,
and then had operated a private mail service along that
(21:17):
route while the government was still getting an official mail
service established. Carston's had done a lot of work with
naturalist and big game hunter Charles Sheldon, and initially had
hoped to plan a Dinali expedition with Sheldon. That didn't
work out, though, and he started working with Hudson Stuck.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Carston's was the one who did most of the tactical
planning and scouting of their route. He really led the expedition,
with Walter Harper being a big help in those efforts.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Day to day.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Stuck provided most of the money for food, equipment, and
miscellaneous expenses, which was an amount he characterized as quote
not far short of one thousand dollars, a mere fraction
of the cost of previous expeditions. It is true, but
a matter of long scraping together for a missionary.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Other people who were part of the Carston Stuck expedition
included Robert G. Tatum, a postulant to the Episcopal Priesthood
who was originally from Tennessee and was working at the
mission in Nanana. He had arrived in Alaska in nineteen eleven.
There were also two Alaska native teenagers named John Fredson
and Issias George, who were selected from the oldest boys
(22:29):
at the Nanana School. With the exception of Robert Tatum,
these men were all either native to Alaska or had
spent a significant number of years there. While Tatum was
a relative newcomer, he had lived through two winters in
Nanana and had various experience surveying and doing other work
in the back country. He also did a lot of
(22:50):
wintertime hiking. In preparation for the expedition, everyone involved had
experienced traveling by boat, by dog sled, and on foot
and survey in remote parts of the Alaskan interior. The
one thing they hadn't experienced was the high altitudes of Denali. Yeah,
I would say that as a group they were more
(23:11):
experienced and prepared than some of the other expeditions we've.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
Talked about on the show.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
We will get some more detail about their preparations for
this expedition after a sponsor break. Getting shipments from other
parts of the world can be challenging in Alaska today,
(23:38):
and that was an even bigger issue when Hudson Stuck
and Harry Carston started trying to provision an expedition to
Denali in the early nineteen teens. Stuck described the ice
axes that they ordered as quote, gold painted toys with
detachable heads and broomstick handles. When they arrived, they wound
(23:59):
up having ice axes custom made in Fairbanks, Alaska, from
steel and hickory. They also needed crampons and wound up
having to have those made for them as well. The
resulting contraptions were again, in Stuck's words, quote, terribly heavy, clumsy,
rat trap affairs, and they.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Had real trouble getting suitable boots. They ordered alpine boots
that turned out to be much too small for their purposes.
They were going to be climbing through deep snow and
expected temperatures near the summit of Denali to be so
cold that they would need multiple layers of socks. Their
alpine boots just were not gonna accommodate many extra layers.
(24:42):
They bought rubber boots that were big enough for extra socks,
and they had leather soles nailed to them, but that
didn't work either. They were passing through the Cantishna region
on the way to Denali when they found their most
workable option. That was moccasins with five layers of socks underneath.
YEA say, cold like many tens of degrees below zero
(25:05):
and also very.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Windy, no thank you.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
In addition to those challenges, some of the equipment that
they ordered from outside of Alaska did not arrive in
time for their largest advanced shipment to their staging point
in Nanana. That advanced shipment was sent to Nanana the
autumn before the expedition, before the rivers froze over. Some
of what they ordered also just never showed up in
(25:30):
Alaska at all. Stuck said of all this, quote, such
are the difficulties of any undertaking in Alaska, despite all
the precautions that foresight may dictate. But some of their
gear actually worked better than expected. Members of the expedition
had previously used glasses with blue or smoked glass lenses
to try to prevent snowblindness that hadn't been entirely effective.
(25:54):
Some of the treatments for snowblindness at the time included
eye washes made with boric acid zinc sulfate. They were
prepared with these eye washes, but they also acquired new
glasses with amber lenses, which seemed to work much better
than anything they had worn before. In Stuck's words, quote,
the invention of the amber snowglass is an even greater
(26:15):
blessing to the traveler in the North than the invention
of the thermos bottle. Other supplies included a huge amount
of food. They had seventy to four ounce packages of herbsworst,
which is a ready to eat sausage like preparation of
pea flour, pork belly fat, onions, and spices from Germany
(26:38):
that can also be dissolved in water to make a soup.
They also had twenty pounds of milk chocolate, five pounds
of Chinese tea and tablets, ten pounds of figs, and
ten pounds of sugared almonds.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
All of this was meant.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
To be saved for the highest altitude parts of the expedition.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
They had a large silk tent for use at low
elevations and smaller ones for later in the journey. There
were also stoves, dishes, down quilts, camel's hair blankets, and
a sleeping bag lined with down and camel's hair. Carstons
contributed a wolf robe that weighed about twenty five pounds.
They also had various weather instruments to take readings on
(27:20):
the mountain, and cameras to record their journey. In March
of nineteen thirteen, Hudson Stuck, Harry Carston's, and Walter Harper
made their way to Nanana, Alaska, where they met up
with Robert Tatum, John Fredson, and Assias George. The six
of them needed to.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Arrive at Denali late enough in the spring to have
a chance of milder weather at the summit, but they
also needed everything to be frozen enough to travel by
dog sled on the way there and during their initial ascent.
They wound up setting out from Nanana on Saint Patrick's Day,
which was actually a couple of weeks later than they planned.
(28:00):
Arrived at Eureka in the Cantieshna region on March twenty first,
which was Good Friday, and a few days later arrived
at Diamond City on the Bearpaw River.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Along the way, they picked up caches of food and
supplies that had been shipped ahead of them. In total,
they wound up with about one and a half tons
of food and supplies that had to be carried to
the foot of the mountain in a relay. They would
take a load ahead and cash it at the midway
point of the day's journey, then double back and take
a second load all the way to where they were
(28:30):
stopping for the night, then go back and get what
they had cashed. To do this, they used two dog
sleds and two teams of seven dogs, each following a
path that had been laid out by the Sourdough Expedition.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
The Carston Stuck Expedition made a series of camps on
their way to the mountain, either to support them as
they tried to cross various geographic features, or to provide
for their return journey after they came down from the summit.
One of their earlier camps was at about four four
one thousand feet in elevation, and it had an additional
purpose and Stuck's words quote, Our prime concern at this
(29:07):
camp was the gathering and preserving of a sufficient meat
supply for our subsistence on the mountain. It was an
easy task. First Carston's killed a cariboo, and then Walter
a mountain sheep. Then Asiahs happened into the midst of
a herd of cariboo as he climbed over a ridge
and killed three. That was all we needed. Then we
(29:28):
went to work preparing the meat. Why should anyone haul
canned pemmican hundreds of miles into the greatest game country
in the world. We made our own pemmican of the
choice parts of this tender, juicy meat and we never
lost appetite for it or failed to enjoy and assimilate it.
I feel like he is throwing some shade here at
(29:51):
the earlier expedition.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
Like, oh, you wusses. You know it's the homemade versus
canned cranberry debate of mountaineers.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Yeah, well, there have been other expeditions where their plan
was like, oh, we will just hunt for food when
we get there.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
That really did not work out for them. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
So the fact that they did, which you know, was expected.
They knew what they were doing and they knew the landscape.
But still there have been other expeditions where that plan
would not have worked. Right, I mean, it fails to
acknowledge that there is a degree of luck to how
well they did.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
Right.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
So here is how they made their Pemmican.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
A fifty pound lard can three parts filled with water,
was set on the stove and kept supplied with joints
of meat. As a batch was cooked, we took it
out and put more into the same water, removed the
flesh from the bones and minced it. Then we melted
a can of butter, added pepper and salt to it,
and rolled a handful of the minced meat in the
butter and molded it with the hands into a ball
(30:51):
about as large as a baseball. We made a couple
of one hundred of such balls and froze them, and
they kept perfectly. When all the boiling done, we put
in the hawks of the animals and boiled down the
liquor into five pounds of the thickest, richest meat extract jelly,
adding the marrow from the bones. With this pemmican and
this extract of cariboo, a package of herbsworst and a
(31:14):
cupful of rice, we concocted every night the stew, which
was our main food in the higher regions.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Here we've talked about pemmican as using dried meat, and
they were able to use it with fresh meat because
everything was staying frozen all the time, which allowed it
to keep on. April fifteenth, the expedition finished their supply
relay Asia as George returned to Nanana with one of
the dog sled teams since they no longer.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
Needed that many dogs.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
The weather at lower elevations had gotten a lot warmer
than it had been when they had set out from
Nanana in March, and so a lot of the time,
George had to travel at night when everything froze back over.
The base camp they had established at this point was remote,
but not so remote that no one else was around.
One day in April, an indigenous family arrived at one
(32:05):
of their camps, hoping Stuck would baptize their child. The
family had tried to catch up with the party before
they left the Cantishna region, but they hadn't been able to,
and the expedition speculated about how far they would have
continued to travel looking for Stuck if they hadn't been
at the base camp. From there, the party established a
cash at the pass that they would use to access
(32:27):
the Muldro Glacier. That glacier was one that earlier expedition
had used to work their way toward the summit. Stuck
wrote of their first view of this glacier, quote, that
day stands out in recollection as one of the notable
days of the whole ascent. Where the glacier stretched away,
broad and level the road to the heart of the mountain,
(32:49):
and as our eyes traced its course, our spirits leapt
up that at last we were entered upon our real task.
One of us at least knew something of the dangers
and difficulties. It's apparently smooth surface concealed, yet to both
of us it had an infinite attractiveness. For it was
the highway of desire. We are going to get to
(33:11):
their crossing of the glacier, and they're continuing to the
summit next time. In the meantime, do you have listener,
mayil I do. It is about outdoorsy things, but in
a very different climate from Denali. This is from Kristin.
Kristin wrote back in October and said, Hi, Holly and Tracy.
I discovered your podcast during the pandemic and shared them
(33:33):
frequently with my kids as I homeschooled them, and now
listen mostly when I am driving or weaving at home
or work. Thanks for everything you do to provide a
deeper dive into so many interesting topics. My ears perked
up when I heard mention of the lime vaccine trial
currently in progress, because I am a participant in this study.
Kristin gets into like where the study was taking place
(33:56):
and how long it took to get there. Actually, the
place that Kristin went would have been perfectly convenient for me.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
It would have been fine.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
It was not a location that I was offered to
get back to the email. This was my first experience
participating in a clinical trial, and I was glad to
be able to contribute. I spend a lot of time
out in the woods as a geocasher. I'm particularly high
risk because I bushwhack off trail more than the average hiker.
When a family member of mine finally realized he had lime,
(34:24):
he was told that every month that goes undiagnosed equals
about a year of recovery. So as important as it
is to have an effective vaccine, it's also crucial to
get tested promptly if you suspect you have a tickborn illness.
I wanted to share a tip that I used to
help prevent tick bites. I keep a lint roller in
my car, and when I'm done with a hike, I
(34:45):
roll it over my clothes to pick up any unwanted travelers.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
It works on dogs too.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
I also keep the lint roller within easy reach in
the car. Ticks like to crawl upwards, so sometimes when
I'm driving, I'll notice a tick crawling up my pain
ance leg. With the roller, I can get it off
me quickly and safely. Our household is currently pet free.
But I'm sharing a photo of my beautiful cat, Phoenix,
who was with me for thirteen years and with such
a princess. I'm also attaching a photo of a stunning
(35:13):
red tailed hawk who swooped in on a critter in
my garden and let me get a few feet away
for a close up before flying off with a snack.
Best to you both, and keep up the good work.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
Kristin.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
We have an adorable orange cat perched on a chessboard, baby,
and man, that is a very beautiful view of that hawk.
This is a great tip with the lin roller. Yeah,
that's a great idea. I don't think I had ever
thought of that or heard anybody suggest that as a
thing to do, but it makes a lot of sense.
(35:45):
I also think I have mentioned on the show before
that my doctor's office has a thing on their portal
in my chart where as soon as you log in,
it's like, have you been bitten by a tick?
Speaker 3 (35:59):
Get medical advice.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
So I continue to encourage that if you live in
a place where there are tickboard diseases, if you have
a tick bite, even if you think you're fine, it's
a good idea to speak to a doctor real quick.
See what they think. Thank you so much, Kristen for
this email. If you would like to send us a
note or about this or any other podcast for history
(36:23):
podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and if you can subscribe
to our show on iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd
like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
(36:46):
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
This episode was inspired by a clip from the PBS
animated TV show Molly of Denali, which an algorithm fed
to me over Halloween. In this clip, Molly's classmate Jake
wants to dress up as Walter Harper for Halloween. Walter
Harper had Athabascan and Irish ancestry, and so Jake's costume
(00:37):
is this homemade outfit that he has made to look
like Regalia.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
But Jake is not Native.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
So this clip is about how regalia is not a
costume and it's not appropriate for non indigenous people to
be dressing up in this way. Walter Harper was the
first person to reach the summit of Denali, so Molly
and her friends put together a more suitable Halloween costume
for him using mountaineering gear. This is a really sweet clip.
(01:05):
It's about friendship and about being respectful of people's cultures
and traditions. But my first thought was, hey, do we
have an episode about Walter Harper? Now we are about
to have two since This is a two parter. Walter
Harper's parents were Arthur Harper, who was born in Ireland,
and Sintana, who was Koyakon Athabaskan. In some accounts, Sintana
(01:28):
is also referred to as Jenny. Arthur Harper had immigrated
to the United States in the wake of the Great
Famine in Ireland, and he and Santana had met in
eighteen seventy four. Arthur was kind of a larger than
life figure. He was a prospector and trader who Hudson
Stuck later described as quote the first man ever to
come to the Yukon country seeking gold. And we're going
(01:52):
to talk about Hudson Stuck a lot more in just
a bit. Arthur and Sintana had eight children together, and
Walter was their youngest. His exact birth date is not known,
but it was probably sometime in the winter of eighteen
ninety two to eighteen ninety three, and his upbringing was
a lot different from that of his older siblings. Arthur
(02:14):
had wanted all of his children to be sent outside,
meaning out of Alaska to be educated. For Walter's siblings,
that meant that they were sent as far away as California,
once they reached school age, but Arthur and Santana separated
when Walter was just a toddler. Sintana moved to the
village of Tanana and she raised Walter according to Athabaskan
(02:36):
traditions that included him speaking Koyacon Athabaskan as his first language.
He was the only one of his siblings to be
raised in this way, rather than being sent away to
an English language school. Arthur Harper died in eighteen ninety
seven when Walter was about five, so Walter never really
knew his father, and that happened just as the Klondike
(02:59):
gold rush was sweeping through Alaska and neighboring parts of Canada.
About one hundred thousand people rushed to the area, and
at first many of them were passing through Alaska to
get to the Klondike in northwestern Canada. Soon people were
looking for gold in Alaska as well. This, of course,
brought just enormous changes to Alaska, and those changes also
(03:23):
built on things that had been happening over the previous decades.
The United States had purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire
in eighteen sixty seven, but didn't start trying to organize
it or implement a civil government until almost two decades later.
The establishment of the District of Alaska and its civil
(03:43):
government was in part motivated by federal efforts to establish
mining laws in the territory.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
More than fifty gold mining camps were established in Alaska
between eighteen ninety seven and nineteen oh seven. This was
very similar to other oil and precious metal booms that
we've talked about on the show before. If someone struck gold,
a huge influx of people came to the area, and
there was a corresponding spike in crime, lawlessness, and alcohol misuse.
(04:15):
Some of these camps were temporary and they were abandoned
when the gold ran out, but others grew into permanent
towns and cities. This gold rush also brought more missionaries
to Alaska. There had been religious missions in Alaska going
back to before the United States purchased it from Russia,
but starting in the eighteen eighties, multiple Christian denominations in
(04:38):
the United States basically divided Alaska up among themselves. They
entered into comedy agreements that gave each denomination the exclusive
right to operate in a particular region. In theory, this
was supposed to reduce conflicts and prevent misunderstandings among the
various denominations and missionary societ But it also meant that
(05:02):
the local people had absolutely no say in which denomination
was available to them if they wanted missionaries to be
involved in their lives and the place that they lived
at all. The Episcopal Church took responsibility for the part
of interior Alaska where Walter Harper grew up, possibly because
(05:23):
the Anglican Church had missions in neighboring parts of Canada.
If you're not aware, the Episcopal Church is the name
for the Anglican Church in the United States. One of
the Episcopal missionaries who came to Alaska during all of
this was Hudson Stuck, who had become a huge part
of Walter Harper's life. Stuck had been born in London
(05:44):
and immigrated to the US state of Texas in eighteen
eighty five. He seems to have been at least partially
seeking adventure. He and some friends flipped a coin when
they decided whether to go to Texas or Australia. Stuck
worked as a cowboy and as a teacher and school
principle before getting a scholarship to study at the University
(06:04):
of the South in Swanee, Tennessee. He studied theology and
was ordained in eighteen ninety two.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
Stuck initially went back to Texas, where he became the
dean of Saint Matthew's Cathedral in Dallas. He was also
a social reformer. He campaigned for one of Texas's first
child labor laws and established a night school for mill
workers and a home for impoverished women, but eventually he
did not think his work in Texas was challenging enough.
(06:35):
In a letter, he wrote that quote, I design, quite
frankly and honestly, to give some years of my life
to the work of the missionary field, and I want
it to be hard and remote work. In nineteen oh four,
he was named arch deacon of the Yukon and of
the Arctic regions to the north, and he moved to Alaska.
(06:55):
At this point, the US government's policy toward the indigenous
peoples of the Last Asca was that they should be
brought under the influence of Christian missionaries. Most of the
schools in Alaska were being run by missionaries, and even
as the government started establishing other schools, the teachers there
were often missionaries, or they were people the nearest mission
(07:16):
had vetted. This included the creation of schools for Indigenous
children under the Federal Boarding School Program, which we've talked
about in a number of previous episodes. Many of Alaska's
hospitals and medical clinics were also established and run by missionaries.
We have multiple previous episodes in which we've talked about
(07:36):
ways in which these kinds of missionary efforts could harm
Indigenous peoples, even when the missionaries involved had the best
intentions and were trying to help. This dividing up of
Alaska among the various religious denominations was rooted in colonialism
and imperialism. The Federal boarding school program was an attempt
(07:57):
to separate Indigenous children from their faith families and their
cultures and to force them to assimilate with white society,
making it an act of cultural genocide.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
At the same time. Exactly how much the different missions
in Alaska were focused on assimilation and proselytizing really varied
from one denomination to another, and even from mission to
mission within a denomination. Hudson Stuck in particular.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Did not see any value in the idea of forcing
Alaska's Native peoples to assimilate. In his book Voyages on
the Yukon, he wrote quote, I find myself perhaps too
easily vexed by the calm assumption of the infinite distance
that separates the Indian from the white man merely because
he is a white man. I am no foe to
(08:44):
racial distinctions anymore than I am to social distinctions, and
certainly no friend to the admixture of bloods. I do
not view with complacency the solution of racial problems by
the absorption of the lesser breeds into the overwhelming white race.
I hate the thing, even though I cannot shut my
eyes to it. I do not see why different races
(09:05):
should not perpetuate themselves with their special cultures and their
special tongues. And I think the world will be a
much less interesting world, and not on that score, one
with the better world, when all the little people shall
have been absorbed, all picturesque distinction of custom and costume
broken down, and a thousand vigorous, elastic indigenous languages superseded
(09:27):
by pigeon English. From some points of view, the vaunted
march of civilization is to me a mere apes march
to nowhere, just for the sake of clarity. He had
the terms lesser breeds, pigeon English, and March of Civilization,
all in scare quotes, as though he was saying so
called before each of those terms. Later on in the
(09:50):
same book, he denounced the idea of forcing Indigenous students
to speak only English, saying that such efforts involved quote
a great deal of s stamping without much stamping out.
He went on to say, quote, it is probable that
the English speech will prevail over the native speech of
these peoples by natural process, though in many places it
(10:12):
will be a long time yet, And I cannot see,
to save my life, why it is so devoutly to
be wished. But there is no sort of advantage in
seeking to expedite the process beyond its natural rate, nor
in repressing the Indian's tongue by speaking contemptuously of it,
and as far as may be, proscribing its use. Stuck
(10:36):
also saw the influx of miners and mining camps to
Alaska as sources of harm to the indigenous population, bringing
alcohol and its associated problems, and debasing Indigenous women. At
various points during his time in Alaska, he went on
speaking tours in the lower forty eight both to raise
money and to try to advocate for Alaska's Native peoples,
(11:00):
including raising awareness about how new industries in Alaska, like
commercial salmon canning, could harm indigenous communities. So he was
not a flawless man by any means, and the language
he used could definitely be underpinned by the prejudices of
the time he was living in. But he does seem
to have been more supportive of Alaska Native people's cultures
(11:21):
and sovereignty than a lot of other religious and missionary
figures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We'll of
course be talking more about Hudson Stuck, but for now.
About five years after he arrived in Alaska, he met
Walter Harper at a fish camp. Harper was about sixteen.
We'll talk more about that after a sponsor break. When
(11:51):
Hudson Stuck met Walter Harper at a fish camp in
nineteen oh nine, Stuck was immediately impressed. Was deeply knowledgeable
in Athabascan traditions and ways of living, including how to
survive and live off the land. He was also relentlessly optimistic, charismatic,
and personable. People also thought of him as very handsome.
(12:16):
Stuck convinced Walter's mother, Sentana, to send him to Saint
Mark's Mission School in Nanana. While Stuck doesn't seem to
have been focused on the idea of forcing Alaska Native
children to assimilate with white culture, that wasn't necessarily the
case for the teachers at this mission school. For example,
Athabaskan chief Peter John, who died in two thousand and three,
(12:37):
spent about five years at this school, and in his
adult life he talked about being hit with a switch
if he spoke Athabaskan and of not being allowed to
do things the Athabaskan way. He said the school taught
him the basics of subjects like reading and writing, but
that he mostly did manual labor there and he taught
himself English later on. Walter didn't attend Saint Mark's Mission
(13:01):
School for very long, but while he was there he
was well liked by the other students. A lot of
them were also impressed by his knowledge of the outdoors
and of Athabaskan traditions.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
When Harper was seventeen, Stuck hired him for help with
his missionary work. For about the next three years, Harper
acted as a guide a riverboat pilot in the summer
and a sled dog handler in the winter. He was
also an interpreter and a liaison with Alaska's indigenous communities,
acting as a bridge between Stuck and his missionary work
(13:33):
and the indigenous communities that he was trying to help.
Harper also came to trust Stuck, and he let other
indigenous people know that he thought Stuck was worthy of trust.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Stuck was also Harper's tutor and became a father figure
to him. This paternalism is totally understandable, since Harper was
sixteen when they met and only seventeen when they started
working and traveling together. But Stuck would also repeatedly acknowledged
that he had trouble thinking of Harper as a grown
man once Harper reached adulthood. This was probably complicated by
(14:08):
the fact that Stuck was still teaching and tutoring Harper
in multiple subjects when Harper was in his twenties and
was preparing to go to college. Stuck's writings describe Harper
as smart and resourceful like once they were traveling on
the mission's riverboat called the Pelican, and the Pelican had
a four cylinder engine and a cast iron bracket that
(14:29):
was holding one of the cylinders in place broke. Stuck
and the crew talked about hobbling back to the last
town that they had been to on three cylinders to
try to find a repair. But Harper thought that if
he had a piece of very hard wood, he could
fashion a new bracket and mount it onto the boat
with wire. Stuck was so confident in Harper's abilities that
(14:50):
he allowed him to use the one piece of hardwood
that they had that was the stock of their shotgun,
and this solution worked. In Stuck's words, quote, there are
no limits to Walter's ingenuity. I don't remember if he
specifically said, but I am assuming that later, when they
got to the next town or village, they were able
(15:13):
to replace that stock somehow. In nineteen thirteen, when Harper
was twenty or twenty one, he became part of an
expedition Stuck was funding to try to summit Denali. That
name comes from Athamascan for great. One probably also heard
it called Mount McKinley. In eighteen ninety six, a gold
(15:33):
prospector named William Dickey had proposed to call Denali Mount McKinley,
after then US presidential candidate William McKinley. William McKinley had
no connection to the mountain or to Alaska, but the
name Mount McKinley started to gain popularity after he had
been elected president and then assassinated, which was in nineteen
(15:54):
oh one. Although that name was not yet formally recognized
by the federal government, it was one that a lot
of people, especially outside of Alaska, were using. By the
time this expedition was being planned. Hudson Stuck objected to
the name Mount McKinley, as well as to the naming
of a neighboring peak as Mount Foricker, after Ohio Senator
(16:17):
Joseph B.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
Forcker.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Stuck wrote that Mount Forker's name in Athabaskan translated to
the woman or Denali's wife. He said, of the names
McKinley and Foricker, quote, they should stand no longer, since
if there be right and reason in these matters, they
should not have been placed there at all.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
He went on to say, quote, it is probably true
of every great mountain that it bears diverse native names,
as one tribe or another on this side or on
that of its mighty bulk speaks of it. But the
area in which and the people by whom this mountain
is now known as Denali, preponderate so greatly as to
leave no question which native name it should bear. Later,
(17:00):
he wrote quote, there is to the author's mind a
certain ruthless arrogance that grows more offensive to him as
the years pass by. In the temper, that comes to
a new land and contemptuously ignores the native names of
conspicuous natural objects, almost always appropriate and significant, and overlays
them with names that are commonly neither the one nor
(17:23):
the other. The learned societies of the world, the geographical societies,
the ethnological societies, have set their faces against this practice
these many years passed, and to them the writer confidently appeals.
Denali is the highest mountain peak in North America, with
an elevation of twenty thousand, three hundred ten feet above
(17:46):
sea level. It's also thousands of feet taller than most
of the other mountains in the Alaska Range. Because of
its massive size and the relative isolation of the Alaska
Range from other mountain ranges, and the way that Danali
interacts with prevailing winds and air currents, it is sometimes
described as creating its own weather.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
There have been several known attempts to summit Denali in
the early twentieth century. Doctor Frederick Cook had launched an
expedition in nineteen oh six, and he claimed to have
reached the summit alone while the rest of his team
had stayed at a lower elevation. His claims were quickly discredited,
and he later made other claims that ranged from dubious
(18:27):
to straightforwardly fraudulent. He wound up being convicted of an
unrelated mail fraud in nineteen twenty three.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
A team known as the Sourdough Party, made up of
Tom Lloyd, Peter Anderson, Billy Taylor, and Charles McGonagall tried
to summit Denali in nineteen ten. They probably did reach
a summit, but it was the North Peak, which is
about eight hundred and fifty feet lower in elevation than
the South peak. That is something they did not know
(18:55):
at the time. Hudson's Stuck's Expedition spotted a pull that
the Sourdough Party left on the lower summit through binoculars. Then,
in nineteen twelve, a team led by Belmore Brown and
Herschel Parker tried to reach the South summit of Denali.
They had previously made other expeditions on the mountain, including
(19:16):
one to conclusively disprove Cook's claims of having summited, and
on their final attempt they almost made it. They were
probably within about one hundred and twenty five feet of
the summit when they were forced to turn back due
to a storm with total whiteout conditions and extreme cold.
The snow was falling so fast that it filled their footprints,
(19:37):
so they could barely make out a return route to
their camp. They tried again, but they were again forced
to turn around because of a blizzard, and by that
point they were running out of food that they could eat.
Their most calorie dense food was pemmican, which is a
food developed by the indigenous peoples of the Far North
that's typically made from dried meat, animal fat, and sometimes berries.
(19:59):
Pemmic as a frequent flyer on the podcast Lately. Yeah,
it became a staple food for a lot of nineteenth
century expeditions.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Oh, I meant we just mentioned it on the Cranberry episode.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
We did do that.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
We've mentioned it in other episodes also, which is what
I was thinking of. Yeah, their canned pemmican had started
to disagree with their digestive systems at very high altitudes,
and they had given up on trying to eat it
near the summit. They pretty much were like, we're not
getting any value from the food anymore because it makes us.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
It's doing more harm than good.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Accounts from the Parker Brown expedition made it sound like
reaching the summit of Denali could be possible if the
weather cooperated, and Hudson Stuck was one of the people
who wanted to try. Another was Henry P. Carstons, known
as Harry. Carstons, had been born in Chicago in eighteen
seventy eight and had come to Alaska at the age
(20:53):
of nineteen during the Klondike Gold Rush. His prospecting along
the seventy Mile River had earned him the nickname the
seventy Mile Kid. In addition to being a prospector and
a trader, Carston's had become an expert dog sled handler.
He had helped establish a trail between Fairbanks and Valdez,
and then had operated a private mail service along that
(21:17):
route while the government was still getting an official mail
service established. Carston's had done a lot of work with
naturalist and big game hunter Charles Sheldon, and initially had
hoped to plan a Dinali expedition with Sheldon. That didn't
work out, though, and he started working with Hudson Stuck.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Carston's was the one who did most of the tactical
planning and scouting of their route. He really led the expedition,
with Walter Harper being a big help in those efforts.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Day to day.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Stuck provided most of the money for food, equipment, and
miscellaneous expenses, which was an amount he characterized as quote
not far short of one thousand dollars, a mere fraction
of the cost of previous expeditions. It is true, but
a matter of long scraping together for a missionary.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Other people who were part of the Carston Stuck expedition
included Robert G. Tatum, a postulant to the Episcopal Priesthood
who was originally from Tennessee and was working at the
mission in Nanana. He had arrived in Alaska in nineteen eleven.
There were also two Alaska native teenagers named John Fredson
and Issias George, who were selected from the oldest boys
(22:29):
at the Nanana School. With the exception of Robert Tatum,
these men were all either native to Alaska or had
spent a significant number of years there. While Tatum was
a relative newcomer, he had lived through two winters in
Nanana and had various experience surveying and doing other work
in the back country. He also did a lot of
(22:50):
wintertime hiking. In preparation for the expedition, everyone involved had
experienced traveling by boat, by dog sled, and on foot
and survey in remote parts of the Alaskan interior. The
one thing they hadn't experienced was the high altitudes of Denali. Yeah,
I would say that as a group they were more
(23:11):
experienced and prepared than some of the other expeditions we've.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
Talked about on the show.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
We will get some more detail about their preparations for
this expedition after a sponsor break. Getting shipments from other
parts of the world can be challenging in Alaska today,
(23:38):
and that was an even bigger issue when Hudson Stuck
and Harry Carston started trying to provision an expedition to
Denali in the early nineteen teens. Stuck described the ice
axes that they ordered as quote, gold painted toys with
detachable heads and broomstick handles. When they arrived, they wound
(23:59):
up having ice axes custom made in Fairbanks, Alaska, from
steel and hickory. They also needed crampons and wound up
having to have those made for them as well. The
resulting contraptions were again, in Stuck's words, quote, terribly heavy, clumsy,
rat trap affairs, and they.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Had real trouble getting suitable boots. They ordered alpine boots
that turned out to be much too small for their purposes.
They were going to be climbing through deep snow and
expected temperatures near the summit of Denali to be so
cold that they would need multiple layers of socks. Their
alpine boots just were not gonna accommodate many extra layers.
(24:42):
They bought rubber boots that were big enough for extra socks,
and they had leather soles nailed to them, but that
didn't work either. They were passing through the Cantishna region
on the way to Denali when they found their most
workable option. That was moccasins with five layers of socks underneath.
YEA say, cold like many tens of degrees below zero
(25:05):
and also very.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Windy, no thank you.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
In addition to those challenges, some of the equipment that
they ordered from outside of Alaska did not arrive in
time for their largest advanced shipment to their staging point
in Nanana. That advanced shipment was sent to Nanana the
autumn before the expedition, before the rivers froze over. Some
of what they ordered also just never showed up in
(25:30):
Alaska at all. Stuck said of all this, quote, such
are the difficulties of any undertaking in Alaska, despite all
the precautions that foresight may dictate. But some of their
gear actually worked better than expected. Members of the expedition
had previously used glasses with blue or smoked glass lenses
to try to prevent snowblindness that hadn't been entirely effective.
(25:54):
Some of the treatments for snowblindness at the time included
eye washes made with boric acid zinc sulfate. They were
prepared with these eye washes, but they also acquired new
glasses with amber lenses, which seemed to work much better
than anything they had worn before. In Stuck's words, quote,
the invention of the amber snowglass is an even greater
(26:15):
blessing to the traveler in the North than the invention
of the thermos bottle. Other supplies included a huge amount
of food. They had seventy to four ounce packages of herbsworst,
which is a ready to eat sausage like preparation of
pea flour, pork belly fat, onions, and spices from Germany
(26:38):
that can also be dissolved in water to make a soup.
They also had twenty pounds of milk chocolate, five pounds
of Chinese tea and tablets, ten pounds of figs, and
ten pounds of sugared almonds.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
All of this was meant.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
To be saved for the highest altitude parts of the expedition.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
They had a large silk tent for use at low
elevations and smaller ones for later in the journey. There
were also stoves, dishes, down quilts, camel's hair blankets, and
a sleeping bag lined with down and camel's hair. Carstons
contributed a wolf robe that weighed about twenty five pounds.
They also had various weather instruments to take readings on
(27:20):
the mountain, and cameras to record their journey. In March
of nineteen thirteen, Hudson Stuck, Harry Carston's, and Walter Harper
made their way to Nanana, Alaska, where they met up
with Robert Tatum, John Fredson, and Assias George. The six
of them needed to.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Arrive at Denali late enough in the spring to have
a chance of milder weather at the summit, but they
also needed everything to be frozen enough to travel by
dog sled on the way there and during their initial ascent.
They wound up setting out from Nanana on Saint Patrick's Day,
which was actually a couple of weeks later than they planned.
(28:00):
Arrived at Eureka in the Cantieshna region on March twenty first,
which was Good Friday, and a few days later arrived
at Diamond City on the Bearpaw River.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Along the way, they picked up caches of food and
supplies that had been shipped ahead of them. In total,
they wound up with about one and a half tons
of food and supplies that had to be carried to
the foot of the mountain in a relay. They would
take a load ahead and cash it at the midway
point of the day's journey, then double back and take
a second load all the way to where they were
(28:30):
stopping for the night, then go back and get what
they had cashed. To do this, they used two dog
sleds and two teams of seven dogs, each following a
path that had been laid out by the Sourdough Expedition.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
The Carston Stuck Expedition made a series of camps on
their way to the mountain, either to support them as
they tried to cross various geographic features, or to provide
for their return journey after they came down from the summit.
One of their earlier camps was at about four four
one thousand feet in elevation, and it had an additional
purpose and Stuck's words quote, Our prime concern at this
(29:07):
camp was the gathering and preserving of a sufficient meat
supply for our subsistence on the mountain. It was an
easy task. First Carston's killed a cariboo, and then Walter
a mountain sheep. Then Asiahs happened into the midst of
a herd of cariboo as he climbed over a ridge
and killed three. That was all we needed. Then we
(29:28):
went to work preparing the meat. Why should anyone haul
canned pemmican hundreds of miles into the greatest game country
in the world. We made our own pemmican of the
choice parts of this tender, juicy meat and we never
lost appetite for it or failed to enjoy and assimilate it.
I feel like he is throwing some shade here at
(29:51):
the earlier expedition.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
Like, oh, you wusses. You know it's the homemade versus
canned cranberry debate of mountaineers.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Yeah, well, there have been other expeditions where their plan
was like, oh, we will just hunt for food when
we get there.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
That really did not work out for them. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
So the fact that they did, which you know, was expected.
They knew what they were doing and they knew the landscape.
But still there have been other expeditions where that plan
would not have worked. Right, I mean, it fails to
acknowledge that there is a degree of luck to how
well they did.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
Right.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
So here is how they made their Pemmican.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
A fifty pound lard can three parts filled with water,
was set on the stove and kept supplied with joints
of meat. As a batch was cooked, we took it
out and put more into the same water, removed the
flesh from the bones and minced it. Then we melted
a can of butter, added pepper and salt to it,
and rolled a handful of the minced meat in the
butter and molded it with the hands into a ball
(30:51):
about as large as a baseball. We made a couple
of one hundred of such balls and froze them, and
they kept perfectly. When all the boiling done, we put
in the hawks of the animals and boiled down the
liquor into five pounds of the thickest, richest meat extract jelly,
adding the marrow from the bones. With this pemmican and
this extract of cariboo, a package of herbsworst and a
(31:14):
cupful of rice, we concocted every night the stew, which
was our main food in the higher regions.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Here we've talked about pemmican as using dried meat, and
they were able to use it with fresh meat because
everything was staying frozen all the time, which allowed it
to keep on. April fifteenth, the expedition finished their supply
relay Asia as George returned to Nanana with one of
the dog sled teams since they no longer.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
Needed that many dogs.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
The weather at lower elevations had gotten a lot warmer
than it had been when they had set out from
Nanana in March, and so a lot of the time,
George had to travel at night when everything froze back over.
The base camp they had established at this point was remote,
but not so remote that no one else was around.
One day in April, an indigenous family arrived at one
(32:05):
of their camps, hoping Stuck would baptize their child. The
family had tried to catch up with the party before
they left the Cantishna region, but they hadn't been able to,
and the expedition speculated about how far they would have
continued to travel looking for Stuck if they hadn't been
at the base camp. From there, the party established a
cash at the pass that they would use to access
(32:27):
the Muldro Glacier. That glacier was one that earlier expedition
had used to work their way toward the summit. Stuck
wrote of their first view of this glacier, quote, that
day stands out in recollection as one of the notable
days of the whole ascent. Where the glacier stretched away,
broad and level the road to the heart of the mountain,
(32:49):
and as our eyes traced its course, our spirits leapt
up that at last we were entered upon our real task.
One of us at least knew something of the dangers
and difficulties. It's apparently smooth surface concealed, yet to both
of us it had an infinite attractiveness. For it was
the highway of desire. We are going to get to
(33:11):
their crossing of the glacier, and they're continuing to the
summit next time. In the meantime, do you have listener,
mayil I do. It is about outdoorsy things, but in
a very different climate from Denali. This is from Kristin.
Kristin wrote back in October and said, Hi, Holly and Tracy.
I discovered your podcast during the pandemic and shared them
(33:33):
frequently with my kids as I homeschooled them, and now
listen mostly when I am driving or weaving at home
or work. Thanks for everything you do to provide a
deeper dive into so many interesting topics. My ears perked
up when I heard mention of the lime vaccine trial
currently in progress, because I am a participant in this study.
Kristin gets into like where the study was taking place
(33:56):
and how long it took to get there. Actually, the
place that Kristin went would have been perfectly convenient for me.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
It would have been fine.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
It was not a location that I was offered to
get back to the email. This was my first experience
participating in a clinical trial, and I was glad to
be able to contribute. I spend a lot of time
out in the woods as a geocasher. I'm particularly high
risk because I bushwhack off trail more than the average hiker.
When a family member of mine finally realized he had lime,
(34:24):
he was told that every month that goes undiagnosed equals
about a year of recovery. So as important as it
is to have an effective vaccine, it's also crucial to
get tested promptly if you suspect you have a tickborn illness.
I wanted to share a tip that I used to
help prevent tick bites. I keep a lint roller in
my car, and when I'm done with a hike, I
(34:45):
roll it over my clothes to pick up any unwanted travelers.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
It works on dogs too.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
I also keep the lint roller within easy reach in
the car. Ticks like to crawl upwards, so sometimes when
I'm driving, I'll notice a tick crawling up my pain
ance leg. With the roller, I can get it off
me quickly and safely. Our household is currently pet free.
But I'm sharing a photo of my beautiful cat, Phoenix,
who was with me for thirteen years and with such
a princess. I'm also attaching a photo of a stunning
(35:13):
red tailed hawk who swooped in on a critter in
my garden and let me get a few feet away
for a close up before flying off with a snack.
Best to you both, and keep up the good work.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
Kristin.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
We have an adorable orange cat perched on a chessboard, baby,
and man, that is a very beautiful view of that hawk.
This is a great tip with the lin roller. Yeah,
that's a great idea. I don't think I had ever
thought of that or heard anybody suggest that as a
thing to do, but it makes a lot of sense.
(35:45):
I also think I have mentioned on the show before
that my doctor's office has a thing on their portal
in my chart where as soon as you log in,
it's like, have you been bitten by a tick?
Speaker 3 (35:59):
Get medical advice.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
So I continue to encourage that if you live in
a place where there are tickboard diseases, if you have
a tick bite, even if you think you're fine, it's
a good idea to speak to a doctor real quick.
See what they think. Thank you so much, Kristen for
this email. If you would like to send us a
note or about this or any other podcast for history
(36:23):
podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and if you can subscribe
to our show on iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd
like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
(36:46):
to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.