Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Walter Harper and the Summiting of Denali, Part 1 About this episode 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.
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1:04 Speaker 03 A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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2:17 Speaker 03 Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:28 Speaker 03 Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. 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 Athabaskan and Irish ancestry, and so Jake's costume is this homemade outfit that he has made to look like regalia. But Jake is not native, 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,
3:13 Speaker 03 so Molly and her friends put together a more suitable Halloween costume for him using mountaineering gear. This is a really sweet clip. 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.
3:36 Speaker 03 Walter Harper's parents were Arthur Harper, who was born in Ireland, and Sintana, who was Koyakon Athabaskan. In some accounts, Sintana 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 Sintana had met in 1874. 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 to talk about Hudson Stuck a lot more in just a bit. Arthur and Sintana had eight children together, and Walter was their youngest.
4:17 Speaker 03 His exact birth date is not known, but it was probably sometime in the winter of 1892 to 1893. And his upbringing was a lot different from that of his older siblings. Arthur 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 Sintana separated when Walter was just a toddler. Sintana moved to the village of Tanana and she raised Walter according to Athabaskan traditions. That included him speaking Koyakon Athabaskan as his first language. He was the only one of his siblings to be raised in this way, rather than being sent
5:02 Speaker 03 away to an English language school. Arthur Harper died in 1897 when Walter was about five. So Walter never really knew his father. And that happened just as the Klondike gold rush was sweeping through Alaska and neighboring parts of Canada. About 100,000 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 built on things that had been happening over the previous decades.
5:43 Speaker 03 The United States had purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire in 1867, 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 government was in part motivated by federal efforts to establish mining laws in the territory. More than 50 gold mining camps were established in Alaska between 1897 and 1907. 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
6:26 Speaker 03 spike in crime, lawlessness, and alcohol misuse. 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 1880s, multiple Christian denominations in 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.
7:08 Speaker 03 In theory, this was supposed to reduce conflicts and prevent misunderstandings among the various denominations and missionary societies, but it also meant that 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 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
7:53 Speaker 03 Stuck, who had become a huge part of Walter Harper's life. Stuck had been born in London and immigrated to the US state of Texas in 1885. 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 principal before getting a scholarship to study at the University of the South in Suwannee, Tennessee. He studied theology and was ordained in 1892. Stuck initially went back to Texas, where he became the dean of St. Matthew's Cathedral in Dallas. He was also a social reformer.
8:36 Speaker 03 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. In a letter, he wrote that, quote, "I designed, 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 1904, he was named Archdeacon of the Yukon and of the Arctic regions to the north, and he moved to Alaska. At this point, the US government's policy toward the indigenous peoples of Alaska was that they should be brought under the influence of Christian missionaries.
9:21 Speaker 03 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 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 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.
10:03 Speaker 03 This dividing up of Alaska among the various religious denominations was rooted in colonialism and imperialism. The Federal Boarding School Program was an attempt to separate indigenous children from their families and their cultures and to force them to assimilate with white society, making it an act of cultural genocide. 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 did not see any value in the idea of forcing Alaska's native peoples to assimilate.
10:45 Speaker 03 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 racial distinctions any more 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 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,
11:30 Speaker 03 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 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 same book, he denounced the idea of forcing indigenous students to speak
12:12 Speaker 03 only English, saying that such efforts involved, quote, "a great deal of 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 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 tongue by speaking contemptuously of it, and as far as may be, proscribing its use."
12:52 Speaker 03 Stuck 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, 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 peoples' cultures and sovereignty.
13:38 Speaker 03 than a lot of other religious and missionary figures in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We'll of course be talking more about Hudson's stuck, but for now, about five years after he arrived in Alaska, he met Walter Harper at a fish camp. Harper was about 16. We'll talk more about that after a sponsor break.
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14:31 Speaker 05 This mood check is brought to you by State Farm. Porque tu bienestar también merece protección. Que tal mi gente? Honey, German checking in contigo. Take a second. Literalmente, un momentico para ti. How's your corazón feeling today? If it's a little tired, a little oof, you're not alone. Have you eaten algo rico? Taken a deep breath? Maybe even turned off your phone for cinco minutitos? I promise the memes will still be there. Sometimes self-care isn't candles and meditation. It's just saying no. It's drinking a little bit of agua. It's letting yourself rest sin pena. You don't have to prove anything today. Just be. Breathe. Estás haciendo lo mejor que puedes. And yes, that's enough.
15:15 Speaker 05 Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
15:18 Speaker 03 A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, S SMA and other rare autoimmune conditions. Each episode explores hope, progress and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up
16:02 Speaker 03 for each other? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
16:14 Speaker 06 Hey, I'm Niall Rogers, producer, songwriter, guitarist, and co-founder of the group Sheik. A great song has a way of defining a moment, a moment of joy, heartbreak, or anything in between. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, dropping in on some of the coolest, most fascinating artists working today. We'll go deep into their lives and careers and hear what it was like before the moment that made them. From hitmakers like Miguel.
16:48 Speaker 03 That last year, finishing that record was the hardest experience of my life, regardless of how everyone else buys into this. I believe in this, and I'm gonna push.
17:00 Speaker 06 To rising stars like Alex Warren. You know, a song is a story, and the verse is setting the scene. And for me, at least, it's allowing me to be personal and vulnerable with the audience, whether it's about my wife and I'm being vulnerable about her, or it's about, you know, my parents, I'm being vulnerable to them. And it's almost like a cinematic piece in a way where each song tells that beautiful story. It's gonna be one hell of a trip. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
17:39 Speaker 03 When Hudson Stuck met Walter Harper at a fish camp in 1909, Stuck was immediately impressed. Harper was deeply knowledgeable in Athabaskan 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. Stuck convinced Walter's mother, Santana, to send him to St. 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.
18:22 Speaker 03 For example, Athabaskan chief Peter John, who died in 2003, 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 St. Mark's Mission 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. When Harper was 17, Stuck hired him for help with his missionary work.
19:06 Speaker 03 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 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. Stuck was also Harper's tutor and became a father figure to him. This paternalism is totally understandable, since Harper was 16 when they met and only 17 when they started working and traveling together. But Stuck would also repeatedly acknowledge that he had trouble thinking of Harper as
19:51 Speaker 03 a grown man, once Harper reached adulthood. This was probably complicated by 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 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 hardwood, he could fashion a new bracket and mount it onto the boat with wire.
20:36 Speaker 03 Stuck was so confident in Harper's abilities that 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 to replace that stock somehow. In 1913, when Harper was 20 or 21, 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.
21:19 Speaker 03 In 1896, a gold 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 1901. 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.
21:58 Speaker 03 Hudson Stuck objected to the name Mount McKinley, as well as to the naming of a neighboring peak as Mount Foraker, after Ohio Senator Joseph B. Foraker. Stuck wrote that Mount Foraker's name in Athabaskan translated to "the woman," or Denali's wife. He said of the names McKinley and Foraker, "They should stand no longer, since if there be right and reason in these matters, they should not have been placed there at all." He went on to say, "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
22:42 Speaker 03 preponderates so greatly as to leave no question which native name it should bear." Later, he wrote, "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 the other. The learned societies of the world, the geographical societies, the ethnological societies, have set their faces against this practice these many years past. And to them, the writer confidently appeals."
23:26 Speaker 03 Denali is the highest mountain peak in North America, with an elevation of 20,310 feet above 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 Denali interacts with prevailing winds and air currents, it is sometimes described as creating its own weather. There have been several known attempts to summit Denali in the early 20th century. Dr. Frederick Cook had launched an expedition in 1906, and he claimed to have reached the summit alone while the rest of his team had stayed at a lower elevation.
24:10 Speaker 03 His claims were quickly discredited and he later made other claims that ranged from dubious to straightforwardly fraudulent. He wound up being convicted of an unrelated mail fraud in 1923. A team known as the sourdough party, made up of Tom Lloyd, Peter Anderson, Billy Taylor, and Charles McGonigal, tried to summit Denali in 1910. They probably did reach a summit, but it was the north peak, which is about 850 feet lower in elevation than the south peak. That is something they did not know at the time. Hudson's Stuck's expedition spotted a pole that the sourdough party left on the lower summit through binoculars.
24:53 Speaker 03 Then, in 1912, a team led by Bellmore Brown and Herschel Parker tried to reach the south summit of Denali. They had previously made other expeditions on the mountain, including one to conclusively disprove Cook's claims of having summited. And on their final attempt, they almost made it. They were probably within about 125 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 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.
25:37 Speaker 03 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. Pemmican is a frequent flyer on the podcast lately. Yeah, it became a staple food for a lot of 19th century expeditions. Oh, I meant, we just mentioned it on the cranberry episode. We did do that. Yeah. 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 this food anymore because it makes us... It's doing more harm than good. Yeah.
26:21 Speaker 03 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. Carstens, known as Harry. Carstens had been born in Chicago in 1878 and had come to Alaska at the age of 19 during the Klondike Gold Rush. His prospecting along the 70 Mile River had earned him the nickname "The 70 Mile Kid." In addition to being a prospector and a trader, Carstens had become an expert dogsled handler. He had helped establish a trail between Fairbanks and Valdez and then had operated
27:02 Speaker 03 a private mail service along that route while the government was still getting an official mail service established. Carstens had done a lot of work with naturalist and big game hunter Charles Sheldon and initially had hoped to plan a Denali expedition with Sheldon. That didn't work out, though, and he started working with Hudson Stuck. Carstens 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 day to day. Stuck provided most of the money for food, equipment, and miscellaneous expenses, which was an amount he characterized as, quote, "not far short of $1,000. A mere
27:46 Speaker 03 fraction of the cost of previous expeditions, it is true, but a matter of long scraping together for a missionary." Other people who were part of the Carstens-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 1911. There were also two Alaska native teenagers named John Fredson and Isaias George, who were selected from the oldest boys 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,
28:30 Speaker 03 he had lived through two winters in Denali and had various experience surveying and doing other work in the back country. He also did a lot of winter time hiking in preparation for the expedition. Everyone involved had experienced traveling by boat, by dog sled, and on foot, and surviving 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 experienced and prepared than some of the other expeditions we've talked about on the show. We will get some more detail about their preparations for this expedition after a sponsor break.
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29:44 Speaker 05 This mood check is brought to you by State Farm. Porque tu bienestar también merece protección. ¿Qué tal, mi gente? Honey German checking in contigo. Take a second. Literalmente, un momentico para ti. How's your corazón feeling today? If it's a little tired, a little oof, you're not alone. Have you eaten algo rico? Taken a deep breath? Maybe even turned off your phone for cinco minutitos? I promise, the memes will still be there. Sometimes self-care isn't candles and meditation. It's just saying no. It's drinking a little bit of agua. It's letting yourself rest sin pena. You don't have to prove anything today. Just be, breathe. Estás haciendo lo mejor que puedes. And yes, that's enough. Like a good neighbor,
30:29 Speaker 05 State Farm is there.
30:31 Speaker 03 A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?
31:16 Speaker 03 Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
31:27 Speaker 06 Hey, I'm Niall Rogers, producer, songwriter, guitarist, and co-founder of the group Sheik. A great song has a way of defining a moment, a moment of joy, heartbreak, or anything in between. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, dropping in on some of the coolest, most fascinating artists working today. We'll go deep into their lives and careers and hear what it was like before the moment that made them. From hitmakers like Miguel... That last year, finishing that record was the hardest experience of my life, regardless of how everyone else buys into this. I believe in this, and I'm gonna push.
32:12 Speaker 06 To rising stars like Alex Warren. You know, a song is a story, and the verse is setting the scene. And for me, at least, it's allowing me to be personal and vulnerable with the audience, whether it's about my wife... And I'm being vulnerable about her, or it's about, you know, my parents, I'm being vulnerable to them. And it's almost like a cinematic piece in a way where each song tells that beautiful story. It's gonna be one hell of a trip. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
32:52 Speaker 03 Getting shipments from other parts of the world can be challenging in Alaska today. And that was an even bigger issue when Hudson Stuck and Harry Carston started trying to provision an expedition to Denali in the early 19 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 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,
33:36 Speaker 03 quote, "terribly heavy, clumsy, rat trap affairs." And they 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 going to accommodate many extra layers. 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.
34:20 Speaker 03 Yeah, when we say cold, like, many tens of degrees below zero, and also very windy. No, thank you.
34:30 Speaker 03 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 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 snow blindness. That hadn't been entirely effective.
35:15 Speaker 03 Some of the treatments for snow blindness at the time included eye washes made with boric acid or 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 snow glass is an even greater blessing to the traveler in the north than the invention of the thermos bottle." Other supplies included a huge amount of food. They had 72 four ounce packages of herbs worst, which is a ready to eat sausage like preparation of pea flour, pork belly, fat onions and spices from Germany.
35:59 Speaker 03 That can also be dissolved in water to make a soup. They also had 20 pounds of milk chocolate, five pounds of Chinese tea in tablets, 10 pounds of figs and 10 pounds of sugared almonds. All of this was meant to be saved for the highest altitude parts of the expedition. 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. Carstens contributed a wolf robe that weighed about 25 pounds. They also had various weather instruments to take readings on the mountain and cameras to record their journey.
36:45 Speaker 03 In March of 1913, Hudson, Stuck, Harry Carstens, and Walter Harper made their way to Nanana, Alaska, where they met up with Robert Tatum, John Fredson, and Asaius George. The six of them needed to 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 St. Patrick's Day, which was actually a couple of weeks later than they planned. They arrived at Eureka in the Cantishna region on March 21, which was Good Friday, and a few days later, arrived at Diamond City on the Bear Paw River.
37:30 Speaker 03 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 cache 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 stopping for the night, then go back and get what they had cached. 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. The Carstens-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
38:15 Speaker 03 after they came down from the summit. One of their earlier camps was at about 4,000 feet in elevation, and it had an additional purpose. In Stuck's words, "Our prime concern at this camp was the gathering and preserving of a sufficient meat supply for our subsistence on the mountain. It was an easy task. First, Carstens killed a caribou, and then Walter, a mountain sheep. Then Asaius happened into the midst of a herd of caribou as he climbed over a ridge and killed three. That was all we needed. Then we went to work preparing the meat. Why should anyone haul canned pemmican hundreds Of miles into the greatest game country in the world.
38:58 Speaker 03 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 the earlier expedition. Yeah, like, oh, you wusses, you know, it's the homemade versus canned cranberry debate of mountaineers. Yeah, well, and to be fair, like, there have been other expeditions where their plan was like, oh, we will just hunt for food when we get there that really did not work out for them. Yeah. 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.
39:41 Speaker 03 Right. I mean, it fails to acknowledge that there is a degree of luck to how well they did. Right. So here is how they made their pemmican. Quote, "A 50-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 about as large as a baseball. We made a couple of hundred of such balls and froze them, and they kept perfectly. When all the boiling was done, we put in the hawks of the animals and boiled down the liquor into five pounds
40:25 Speaker 03 of the thickest, richest meat extract jelly, adding the marrow from the bones. With this pemmican and this extract of caribou, a package of herbs worst and a cupful of rice, we concocted every night the stew which was our main food in the higher regions." Yeah, 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 15th, the expedition finished their supply relay. Asias George returned to Nanana with one of the dog sled teams since they no longer needed that many dogs. The weather at lower elevations had gotten a lot warmer than it had been when they had set out from Nanana in March.
41:09 Speaker 03 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 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 cache at the pass that they would use to access the Moldro Glacier. That glacier was one that earlier expedition had used to work their way toward the summit.
41:55 Speaker 03 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. 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 its 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 their crossing of the glacier and their continuing to the summit next time. In the meantime, do you have listener mail? I do.
42:39 Speaker 03 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 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 Lyme vaccine trial currently in progress because I am a participant in this study." Kristin gets into like where the study was taking place and how long it took to get there. Actually, the place that Kristin went would have been perfectly convenient for me. It would have been fine.
43:23 Speaker 03 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 geocacher. 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 Lyme, 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 tick-borne illness. I wanted to share a tip that I use to help prevent tick bites. I keep a lint roller in my car, and when I'm done with a hike, I roll it over my clothes
44:07 Speaker 03 to pick up any unwanted travelers. It works on dogs, too. 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 pants 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 13 years and was such a princess. I'm also attaching a photo of a stunning 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. Kristin, we have an adorable orange cat perched on a chessboard. Baby.
44:50 Speaker 03 And man, that is a very beautiful view of that hawk. This is a great tip with the lint 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. I also think I have mentioned on the show before that my doctor's office has a thing on their, on their portal in my chart where as soon as you log in, it's like, have you been bitten by a tick? Get medical advice. So I continue to encourage that if you live in a place where there are tick-borne 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.
45:35 Speaker 03 Thank you so much, Kristin, for this email. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, we're [email protected] . And you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to get your podcasts.
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