Yukon who is who

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Arthur Francis Sean Harper (1835 - 1897)
	
Arthur Harper was an Ulsterman, born in the County of Antrim, Ireland.((Alfred Hulse Brooks, //Blazing Alaska’s Trails.// University of Alaska Press, 1953: 313.)) He left Ireland at age twelve due to the potato famine and lived with his uncle’s family in Brooklyn, New York. He moved to California at age twenty.((Mary F. Ehrlander, //Walter Harper Alaska Native Son.// University of Nebraska Press, 2017: 1.)) Harper moved to British Columbia in the 1860s and left in 1871 when it started to be more developed.((“Arthur Harper (trader).” //Wikipedia,// 2020 website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Harper_(trader).)) 

In September 1872, Arthur Harper and three companions left a creek near the head of the Peace River to prospect on the way to Fort Yukon. When Harper reached the Yukon River in mid-July 1873, his party included Frederick Harte from Antrim Couty, Ireland; George Finch from Kingston, Ontario; and Andrew Kansellar [Gensler] [from Germany?].((Alfred Hulse Brooks, //Blazing Alaska’s Trails,// Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1973: 313.)) 
Harper reported to William Ogilvie that they found nothing on the Liard, colours on the Mackenzie, nothing on the Peel, fair prospects on the Bell, nothing on the Porcupine, and colours and prospects everywhere on the Yukon River.((William Ogilvie, “Extract from Lecture on the Klondike Mining District” in //Klondike Gold Miners of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Syndicate.// Reprint Franklin Classics, October 2018: 20, 22.))

Harper met an Indigenous man at Fort Yukon who had some native copper from the White River and they left to prospect there. They wintered around the current site of Snag at the mouth of the White River and had about $500 worth of gold from their prospecting.((Leroy McQuesten letter to Albert McKay dated 1 July 1905. 11pp, Alaska State Library, MS 13, Box 5, #5 AHC)) Geologist A. H. Brooks reported that Harper travelled fifty miles up the White on the ice in 1872.((A.H. Brooks, “A reconnaissance in the White and Tanana River basins, Alaska, in 1898”: U. S. Geological Survey, 20th Annual Report, Part VII, 1898-99: 435-436.)) They met Jack McQuesten, Al Mayo, and George Nicholson at Fort Yukon and all made their way down the Yukon River to St. Michael.((Leroy McQuesten letter to Albert McKay dated 1 July 1905. 11pp, Alaska State Library, MS 13, Box 5, #5 AHC)) 

The next summer, 1873, Jack McQuesten made his way up the Yukon to establish Fort Reliance.((William Ogilvie, “Extract from Lecture on the Klondike Mining District” in //Klondike Gold Miners of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Syndicate.// Reprint Franklin Classics, October 2018: 20, 22.)) Harper, George Finch, and John McKniff went up the Tanana River and prospected there for the summer.((Alfred Hulse Brooks, //Blazing Alaska’s Trails.// University of Alaska Press, 1953: 316.)) They met an Indigenous man who had some gold he found on the Koyukuk River and Harper went and prospected there for the winter.((William Ogilvie, “Extract from Lecture on the Klondike Mining District” in //Klondike Gold Miners of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Syndicate.// Reprint Franklin Classics, October 2018: 20, 22.))
Harper and McQuesten traded together at Fort Reliance for many years. They often hunted up the Klondike River, but they never prospected there. They would not have found anything anyway, because in those days all the prospecting was done on the river and creek bars, and the Klondike gold was sunk out of sight.((William Ogilvie, “Extract from Lecture on the Klondike Mining District” in //Klondike Gold Miners of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Syndicate.// Reprint Franklin Classics, October 2018: 20, 22.)) Harper used Fort Reliance as a base for prospecting and on one long trip travelled up the Fortymile River, where he found some gold, crossed the divide and travelled down the Sixtymile River. These rivers would later become famous for the wealth of their placer gold mines, and it was Harper’s letters about his travels and findings that drew more prospectors into the country.((Alfred Hulse Brooks, //Blazing Alaska’s Trails.// University of Alaska Press, 1953: 316.))
	
Harper and Al Mayo traded at a post at Noukelakayet, near the mouth of the Tanana River. Harper was thirty-nine when he married fourteen-year-old Seentahna (Jennie Bosco) from the Koyukuk River area. Mayo married Jennie’s first cousin and McQuesten married Satejdenalno (Katherine or Kate). All of the girls had been educated at the Russian mission school.((“Arthur Harper (trader).” //Wikipedia,// 2020 website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Harper_(trader).))
	
In 1887, Rev. Robert McDonald was on a missionary trip where he travelled up the Yukon River from the mouth of the Porcupine River. He stopped at Harper’s post at the mouth of the Stewart River and carried on to a First Nation camp he called Trurtsyik. This may be a fish camp near Victoria Rock. McDonald’s August 1st journal entry notes that Harper was building a store to establish a trading post and was employing a few Hän Gwich’in to help him.((T.G.A. Wright, Transcript of an interview with Archdeacon Robert McDonald, 24 March 1921. Yukon Archives, Robert McDonald fonds Acc 79/3 mss 064.)) 
	
In the summer of 1889, Arthur Harper with his wife and children unloaded a large outfit of trading good at the site of Fort Selkirk in order to establish a frontier store. Harper and family had travelled up the Yukon River with an expedition sent by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey to establish the Alaska-Canadian border. A fellow passenger, Israel Russell, wrote about the journey and noted that the captain of their steamer //Yukon// stopped the boat at the abandoned post at Fort Reliance and ordered his men to tear down the only remaining house that marked the spot. Russell noted that this was done to the great dismay of the hunters and traders present as it was the only refuge for scores of miles. Harper’s store of supplies unloaded at Fort Selkirk included flour, cotton cloth, tea, and other domestic articles that he intended to trade for furs.((Israel C. Russell, “A Journey up the Yukon River.” //Bulletin of the American Geographical Society.// Vol. XXVII, No. 2. 1895: 153-154.))

By 1891, Harper had a well-established trading post at the site of the second Hudson’s Bay Company trading post built near the mouth of the Pelly River fifty years before. He had a store house of logs, (25 x 20 feet), a warehouse (26 x 30 feet), a dwelling (24 x 18 feet) and three cabins for travellers. He started in 1892 to cultivate a small bit of ground as a garden and grew potatoes of a fair quality, turnips, carrots, parsnips, cabbage, and a little barley and oats.((Yukon Archives, YRG 1, Series 1, vol. 7, f 956. A. Harper, townsite of Selkirk, 1896-1942.))
	
Harper’s post at Fort Selkirk was busy in the spring of 1893 and he was able to trade for 9,000 marten skins plus ten bales of lynx and fox skins. Harper staked George Carmack in a half interest in a post that Carmack established on the Yukon River above the Big Salmon River [present-day Carmacks]. Carmack looked after the Selkirk store when Harper and his family went down to St. Michael in the summers of 1894 and 1895.((James Albert Johnson, //Carmack of the Klondike.// Epicenter Press and Horsdal & Schubart, 1990: 103.)) Harper returned alone in the fall of 1895 as his wife Jennie was angry when Harper sent all of their children except one to a school in California. Jennie left Arthur and stayed at her home village at Tanana with her youngest child, Walter.((Deb Vanasse, //Wealth Woman: Kate Carmack and the Klondike Race for Gold.// Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2016: 103-104.))
	
Harper moved to Dawson during the gold rush. Within a year of his separation from Jennie, he had married an Indigenous woman from St Michael where he went to sell his furs and pick up supplies. Harper had tuberculosis and died in Dawson.((Deb Vanasse, //Wealth Woman: Kate Carmack and the Klondike Race for Gold.// Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2016: 139-40.))
	
Harper was elected to the Alaska Mining Hall of Fame as the first man to come to the Yukon country seeking gold. He was an important person in the development of the region. Mount Harper in the Ogilvie Mountains, Mount Harper in the Yukon-Tanana Uplands, and Harper Bend in the Tanana River are named in his honour.((“Arthur Harper (trader).” //Wikipedia,// 2020 website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Harper_(trader).))