Howdy folks, it’s the second week of December 2025, and welcome to This Week in The West.
I’m Seth Spillman, broadcasting from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.
On this podcast, we share stories of the people and events that shaped the history, art and culture of the American West—and those still shaping it today.
It was a cold March day in 1931 when the wings of a Transcontinental & Western Air airliner broke apart, sending it crashing into the ground in the Flint Hills of Kansas.
About 100 miles away, a rancher named Jesse Harper heard the news and drove straight to the crash site. He was asked to identify the body of one of the crash’s victims: His Friend, famed Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne.
Today, we remember Harper, on the week of his birth, December 10, 1883. He was more than a rancher; he is a member of our Hall of Great Westerners. And he was more than just a friend of Rockne; he was the coach who launched the Fighting Irish into a college football power.
Harper accompanied Rockne’s body by train back to Notre Dame’s campus in South Bend, Indiana, standing watch as the nation mourned.
Within days, Notre Dame called Harper back into service, asking him to return as athletic director and steady a shaken program.
It has been argued that Harper was the coach who set Notre Dame on the path to greatness. He was the Irish coach from 1913-17, but gave it all up to return to the range in Clark County, Kansas. He faded into sports history.
As journalist Lou Somogyi once wrote, “Regretfully, the man who set the table or made a straight path for Rockne, and helped forge the program’s identity for at least 100 years, often is in the shadows.”
Harper was born in Illinois and left his family’s cattle farm to become a football star at the University of Chicago, playing for Amos Alonzo Stagg, another of college football’s early immortals.
He played behind Rockne’s idol, All-American Walter Eckersall, and helped Chicago claim the “Western Championship” in 1905 when it snapped Michigan’s 56-game unbeaten streak.
From Stagg, Harper learned offensive innovations and the power of organization, discipline, and foresight: traits that would serve him in both football and ranching.
Notre Dame had been struggling on the football field during the early days of the 20th Century. It had ten different head football coaches between 1899 and 1912 and an athletic department run by student managers.
Harper was at Wasbash College. He was successful on the field, but the Notre Dame administration was said to be even more taken with his business acumen. They hired him as Notre Dame’s first full-time athletics director, as well as head coach in football, basketball, and baseball.
A newspaper would later dub him “a man for all seasons,” and the title fits: from 1913 to 1917, Harper went 34-5-1 in football, 61-28 in baseball, and 44-20 in basketball.
He put Irish football on the map using the newly legal forward pass and the skill of Rockne, the star of his roster.
Off the field, Harper was just as innovative. He believed that “football should pay for itself” and insisted that the program never be a drain on university resources. When he wrote to Army to request a game, he bargained travel expenses up from $600 to $1,000 and then pinched pennies so tightly that the trip cost only $917, turning a small profit on what became a monumental win.
He upgraded Notre Dame’s schedule with road games against Army, Penn State, Texas and Nebraska.
Harper ended freshman eligibility, cracked down on “tramp athletes” who moved from school to school as hired guns, and required that players be students first.
Later in life, his son James would say, “His whole religion was geared around the Golden Rule,” and Harper applied that same principle to how he ran teams, departments, and eventually his ranch.
In 1918, at just 35, Harper shocked many by stepping away from coaching. World War I was shrinking college rosters, but there was another reason—one he shared in a “man-to-man talk” with his son. Harper “could see the handwriting on the wall” and the growing pressure “to do nothing but win, win, win, regardless of what you did to the boy, the school or anything else.”
As he told his son, “Football is to build men and to build good sportsmanship. That’s why I left.”
Before he did, he named his assistant, Knute Rockne, as his successor.
In his next chapter, Harper married his wife, who was from Sitka, Kansas and whose family operated a 20,000-acre ranch in Clark County. There, Harper became a respected cattleman and later president of the Kansas Livestock Association.
Oil was discovered on his land, and he weathered the financial storms of the Great Depression, famously using a $12,000 paycheck from Notre Dame to buy back his foreclosed ranch at 50 cents on the dollar.
But Notre Dame never left his heart, and the feeling was mutual. Rockne regularly sought his counsel and even arranged for team trains to make unscheduled stops in Kansas so they could visit.
After Rockne’s death, Harper’s return to Notre Dame stabilized the program through the Depression and reset its standards. By the time he stepped aside in 1934, the football house was back in order.”
When Jesse Harper died in 1961 at age 77, Notre Dame sent athletic director Ed “Moose” Krause and business manager Herb Jones to a small rural cemetery in Kansas to pay their respects.
Harper had requested no formal religious service, but his widow asked Krause to say a few words anyway about the school her husband had dearly loved. Krause honored him with “A Sportsman’s Prayer,” a tribute to a man who “played the game ’til it was finished, lived a Sportsman to the End.”
He was inducted into our Hall of Great Westerners in 1962. Ten years after his death, in 1971, Jesse Harper was finally enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame.
And with that, we’ve cemented the legacy of another episode of “This Week in the West.”
Our show is produced by Chase Spivey and written by Mike Koehler.
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We leave you today with the words of Jesse Harper himself, when asked by a newspaper reporter if he ever had second thoughts about leaving football.”I’ve never once regretted that I quit coaching. Even back in the depression years, when the cattle business was so bad and I was in so deep I thought I’d never get out, I never regretted it.”
Much obliged for listening, and remember, come Find Your West at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
