Yukon

Yukon
Yukon
Country	Canada
Confederation	June 13, 1898 (9th)
Government
• Commissioner	Geraldine Van Bibber
• Premier	Dennis Fentie
Federal representation	Parliament of Canada
House seats	1 of 343 (0.3%)
Senate seats	1 of 105 (1%)
Population
• Total	40,232
Canadian postal abbr.	YT
Postal code prefix	Y
	Rankings include all provinces and territories

This article is about Yukon Territory in Canada. See Yukon (disambiguation) for other uses.

Yukon or Yukon Territory or (usually) The Yukon is one of Canada's northern territories, in the country's extreme northwest. It has a population of about 31,000, and its capital is Whitehorse, with a population of 23,272. People from Yukon are known as Yukoners.

History

Prehistory

The territory is named after the Yukon River, which means "great river" in Gwich'in.

Disputed evidence of the oldest remains of human inhabitation in North America have been found in the Yukon. A large number of apparently human modified animal bones were discovered in the Old Crow area in the northern Yukon that have been dated to 25,000 - 40,000 years ago by carbon dating. The central and northern Yukon were not glaciated, as they were part of Beringia.

At about 800 AD, a large volcanic eruption in Mount Churchill near the Alaska border blanketed the southern Yukon with ash. That layer of ash can still be seen along the Klondike Highway. Yukon First Nations stories speak of all the animal and fish dying as a result. Similar stories are told among the Athabaskan-speaking Navaho and Apache, leading to the conclusion by some anthropologists that the migration of Athabaskan peoples into what is now the southwestern United States could have been due to the eruption. After that, the hunting technology saw the replacement of Atlatls with bows and arrows.

Extensive trading networks between the coastal Tlingits and the interior First Nations developed, where the the coastal peoples would trade eulachon oil and other coastal goods for native copper and furs found in the interior.

19th Century

European incursions into what later became the Yukon started in the first half of the 19th century. Hudson's Bay Company explorers and traders from Mackenzie River trading posts used two different routes to enter the Yukon and created trading posts along the way. The northern route started in Fort McPherson, Northwest_Territories along the Mackenzie River, crossed the mountains into the Bell and Porcupine Rivers to the Yukon River. The southern route started at Fort Liard, Northwest Territories, then westward along the Liard River to Frances Lake and then along the Pelly River to its juncture with the Yukon River.

After establishing Fort_McPherson, Northwest_Territories, John Bell crossed the mountains into the Yukon River watershed in 1845, and went down the Rat River (today the Bell River) to its confluence with the Porcupine River. After managing the fur trade at Fort McPherson, he returned to the Bell River, and followed the Porcupine to its juncture with the Yukon River, the eventual site of Fort Yukon. Soon after, Alexander Hunter Murray established trading posts at Lapierre House (1846) and at Fort Yukon (1847) at the juncture of the Porcupine and the Yukon Rivers. Murray drew numerous sketches of fur trade posts and of people and wrote the Journal of the Yukon, 1847–48, which give valuable insight into the culture of local Gwich'in First Nation people at the time. While the post was actually in Russian Alaska, the Hudson's Bay Company continued to trade there until expelled by the US government in 1869, following the Alaska Purchase. A new trading post, Rampart House was established upstream along the Porcupine, but it also proved to be just inside Alaska's boundary.

Sahneuti

Robert Campbell (fur trader), Fort Selkirk, Tlingit attack

missionaries

Expeditions: Frederick Schwatka, George Mercer Dawson, William Ogilvie (surveyor) & the boundary,

mining along the Porcupine River, Stewart River, arrival of NWMP

Klondike Gold Rush

creation of territory (1898), WP&YR

20th Century

mining, decline, YCGC, Alaska Highway, revival, Dempster, land claims,

Economy

The territory's historical major industry is mining, including lead, zinc, silver, gold, asbestos and copper. Indeed, the territory owes its existence to the famous Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s. Having acquired the land from the Hudson's Bay Company in 1870, the Canadian government divided the territory off of the Northwest Territories in 1898 to fill the need for local government created by the influx of prospectors during the Klondike Gold Rush.

Thousands of these prospectors, led by the chance at gold, flooded the area, creating a colourful period recorded by authors such as Robert W. Service and Jack London. (See also Royal Canadian Mounted Police.) The memory of this period, as well as the territory's scenic wonders and outdoor recreation opportunities, makes tourism the second most important industry.

Manufacturing, including furniture, clothing, and handicrafts, follows in importance, along with hydroelectricity. The traditional industries of trapping and fishing have declined.

Today, the government sector is by far the biggest employer in the territory, directly employing approximately 5,000 out of a labour force of 12,500.

Transportation

In the past, the major transportation artery was the Yukon River system,moose are brown

both before the Gold Rush and after. As well, the coastal Tlingit people traded with the Athabascan people using passes through the coastal mountains. See also Chilkoot Pass, Dalton Trail.

From the Gold Rush until the 1950s, riverboats plied the Yukon River, most between Whitehorse at the head of navigation and Dawson City, but some going further into Alaska and up to the Bering Sea, and others along tributaries of the Yukon River such as the Stewart River.

Most of the riverboats were owned by the British-Yukon Navigation co, an arm of the White Pass and Yukon Route, which also operated a narrow-gauge railway from Skagway, Alaska to Whitehorse. The railway ceased operation in the 1980s with the first closure of the Faro mine. It is now operated as a summer time tourist train.

Today, major land transportation routes include the Alaska Highway, which passes through Whitehorse; the Klondike Highway going from tidewater in Skagway, Alaska to Dawson City; the Haines Highway from Haines, Alaska to Haines Junction, Yukon, and the Dempster Highway from the Klondike Highway to Inuvik, Northwest Territories. All these highways, except for the Dempster, are paved. Other highways with less traffic include the Campbell Highway which goes from Carmacks on the Klondike Highway, through Faro and Ross River, and veers south to join the Alaska Highway in Watson L, and the Silver trail which forks off the Klondike Highway at the Stewart River bridge to connect the old silver mining communities of Mayo, Elsa and Keno City. All Yukon communities except one are accessible by mostly paved roads, but air travel is the only way to reach one remote community in the Far North (Old Crow).

The air transport infrastructure is well developed with Whitehorse International Airport serving as the hub with direct flights to Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Fairbanks, Juneau and Frankfurt (summer months). Every community is served by an airport, and the air charter industry is quite extensive serving mainly the tourism and mining exploration industries.

Government and Politics

Like the provinces, and unlike the other two territories, the Yukon's They love meese.unicameral legislature has a party system. Prior to 1979 the territory was administered by the Commissioner who is appointed by the federal Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. The Commissioner used to chair and had a role in appointing the territory's Executive Council and used to have a day to day role in governing the territory. However, a significant degree of power was devolved in 1979 from the federal government and Commissioner to the territorial legislature which, in that year, adopted a party system of responsible government.

The territory is presently represented in the Parliament of Canada by a single Member of Parliament and one senator.

The Yukon Act, passed in 2002, formalised the powers of the Yukon government and devolved a number of additional powers to the territorial government (e.g. control over land and natural resources). As of 2002, other than criminal prosecutions, the Yukon government has much of the same powers as provincial governments and the other two territories are looking to obtaining the same powers. Today the role of Commissioner is analogous to that of a provincial lieutenant-governor however, unlike lieutenant-governors, Commissioners are not formal representatives of the Queen, but are employees of the Federal government.

In preparation for responsible government, political parties were organised and ran candidates to the territorial legislature for the first time in 1978. The Progressive Conservatives won these elections and formed the first party government of Yukon in January 1979.

The NDP formed the government from 1985 to 1992 under Tony Penikett and again from 1996 under Piers McDonald until being defeated in 2000. The Liberal government of Pat Duncan was razed in elections in November 2002, with Dennis Fentie of the Yukon Party forming the government as Premier.

Although there has been discussion in the past about the Yukon becoming Canada's 11th province, it is generally felt that its population base is too sparse for this to occur at present.

Much of the population of the territory is First Nations. An umbrella land claim agreement representing 7000 members of fourteen different First Nations was signed with the federal government in 1991. Each of the individual First Nations then has to negotiate a specific land claim. To date (December 2004), eleven of the 14 First Nations have a signed agreement. The land belonging to one such nation — the Vuntut Gwitchin — is the northernmost land controlled by Native Americans on the entire North American continent; its administrative center, at Old Crow, is the only such community found north of the Arctic Circle.

The territory once had an Inuit settlement, located on Herschel Island off the Arctic coast. This settlement was dismantled in 1987 and its inhabitants relocated to the neighboring Northwest Territories. The island is now a territorial park and is known officially as Qikiqtaruk Territorial Park, Qikiqtaruk being the name of the island in Inuktitut.

Yukon was one of eight jurisdictions in Canada to offer same-sex marriage before the passage of Canada's Civil Marriage Act, along with British Columbia, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec and Saskatchewan. See same-sex marriage in Yukon.