People and economy

The Yukon River basin has remained sparsely populated in the nearly two centuries since it was first settled by Europeans. The lure of mineral wealth has been the main attraction of the region, and mining has maintained several of the settlements. Gold brought people to Fairbanks and Dawson; when the gold was depleted, Fairbanks continued to grow as it took on administrative and transportation functions for east-central Alaska, but the population of Dawson declined to only a tiny fraction of its size in the heyday of the gold rush. In the 1950s the Yukon territorial capital was moved from Dawson to the more accessible city of Whitehorse, on the Alaska Highway. Whitehorse then developed transportation and service functions for the other small settlements in the southern Yukon region and became the largest city in the territory.

Mines were always marginal economic operations in the Yukon River basin because the area is far from world markets and had only a few land-transport routes. Lead, zinc, and silver were produced at Keno City, near Mayo, from the 1920s to the late 1980s, but the high-grade ore had to be transported southward to Trail, B.C., near the U.S.-Canadian border, for smelting. From the early 1970s to the late 1990s, copper and base metals were mined at Faro, on the Pelly River west of the Mackenzie Mountains, and ore concentrates were transported by truck to Whitehorse. Some gold is still extracted intermittently from alluvial deposits in several Yukon tributaries, and deposits of tungsten, iron, and coal are known.

Other economic activities are of minor importance in the Yukon basin. Fur trapping has been the traditional livelihood for the region’s Indians, but low monetary returns plus the attraction of better pay from wage labour in the towns have taken many Indians away from their former migratory lives. Agriculture is a minor activity. Although vegetables, pasturage, and coarse grains can be grown during the long days of the short summer, only a small number of operating farms exist; most of the food consumed in Whitehorse, for example, is shipped in from southern Canadian farms.

Perhaps the main resource of the Yukon basin is its scenery, isolation, and sparse population, all of which are attractive to tourists seeking to escape the more crowded and less scenically endowed areas of the continent. The many vistas of the winding river, its forested slopes supporting game and wildlife, and the game fish in the tributary lakes are all part of an attractive natural environment that has become more difficult to find in southern regions. A major recreational area is Yukon–Charley Rivers National Preserve in Alaska, which stretches westward for some 130 miles (210 km) of the Yukon’s course from the Canadian border and encompasses the small Charley River basin south of the Yukon.

History

The delta mouth of the Yukon River was known to the Russians when they occupied nearby St. Michael Island in 1831, but the headwaters in British North America remained unknown for another decade. By 1838 Russian fur traders had explored the river as far inland as Nulato (Alaska), where they established a post near the junction of Koyukuk River. By 1846 the Russians had mapped almost 600 miles (970 km) of the lower river. The trader Robert Campbell, of the Hudson’s Bay Company, explored Pelly River, one of the Yukon headwaters, in 1840. In 1848 he established a trading post at Fort Selkirk, at the junction of the Pelly and Yukon rivers, in order to trade with the local Indians. In 1851 Campbell explored the Yukon downstream to the junction of the Porcupine River, where Fort Yukon had been built in 1847. When the trading post at Fort Selkirk was burned by hostile Indians in 1852, however, Europeans withdrew from the upper Yukon basin for two decades.

Water transportation gradually extended upstream from the mouth of the Bering Sea. Shallow-draft steamers had been operating on the river in Alaska after 1866, and the first riverboat reached the Yukon territory a few years later. The Yukon River became known to the world following the rich gold strikes in 1896 on the Klondike River in Canada and the subsequent Klondike gold rush. In the summer of 1898 at least 20 vessels rounded the extremity of southwestern Alaska and navigated the lower Yukon River to reach the booming community of Dawson City (the name later was shortened to Dawson). Other gold seekers took a shorter route by penetrating north through the Coast Mountains from Skagway, Alaska; they made crude boats or rafts on Bennett Lake and floated downstream to the rapids near Whitehorse. From there riverboats took passengers and freight downstream to Dawson. When gold-mining activity declined during the years following World War I, the use of water transport on the Yukon River also decreased. The riverboats ceased to operate on the Canadian part of the river in the 1950s, being replaced by road and air transport to Dawson and other small towns.