Alaskans representing the Walter Harper Project have launched a drive that will culminate in a life-size bronze statue of Walter Harper, the first person to summit Denali. The statue will be placed in Fairbanks, where the 1913 expedition began. Episcopal Archdeacon Hudson Stuck and the rugged outdoorsman Harry Karstens co-led the expedition. The Koyukon-Athabascan Harper, along with Tennessean Robert Tatum, completed the four-member ascent team. Athabascan youths John Fredson and Esaias George provided vital support, including transporting supplies and equipment to the base camp. Fredson manned the basecamp while the ascent team members scaled the mountain.

The Walter Harper Project will recognize Harper’s critical role in the pioneer ascent team’s success, which was long unrecognized. Harper’s expert subsistence skills, superb athlete condition, courage, and cheerfulness moved the team forward under the most trying conditions. On summit day, Harper, the team member in the best condition, took the lead position and thus reached the peak first.

For several years, Harper served as Archdeacon Stuck’s trail guide, riverboat pilot, interpreter, and right hand man, as they traveled among the Episcopal missions, Native communities, and mining camps of Alaska’s northern Interior. Wherever they stopped, Harper’s subsistence skillset, integrity, magnetic personality, and ability to navigate in both his Athabascan culture and in mainstream American society won him admirers. He planned to become a medical missionary to Interior Alaska Natives. Tragically, when he was just 25 years old, he and his wife of seven weeks, Frances Wells Harper, drowned in the 1918 sinking of the Princess Sophia.