Moe Grant wasn’t born in the Yukon, but he arrived with his parents from Saskatchewan in 1929, when he was six months old. The family lived in Carcross and it was here that Moe developed his lifelong love of…
Riverboats were the life-blood of the Yukon at the turn of the century. One day - Tuesday, September 25th, in 1906 - one of them was the scene of a disaster which led to the death of six young men.
When she was built in 1912 on Bonanza Creek, she entered the record books as the largest dredge in the world. For almost 50 years, this magnificent structure helped turn the Klondike valley upside down and produced millions in gold…
From June of 1957 until April of 1958, he ran in three federal elections. In less than a year, this Yukoner lost and won more elections than most politicians do in a lifetime.
It was a magical time - a time during the endless Vancouver summer to showcase the sights, sounds and pleasures of the Yukon. They called it Expo '86, a six-month world fair about transportation and communications. It featured exhibits from…
On the morning of October 25, 1927, residents of Whitehorse heard a sound which would set the stage for a revolution in northern travel. High over-head, a single-engine monoplane, carrying five aviation pioneers, headed for a clearing in Cyr's wood…
My first airplane flight came in 1954 when I flew from Whitehorse to Dawson City where I would spend the summer holidays with my brother who was the Canadian Pacific airlines agent in the gold rush city.
It was the summer of 1966. It was the year they shutdown the Yukon Consolidated Gold Corporation – YCGC. This conglomerate had dredged the Klondike creeks near Dawson City since the turn of the century. Now those great squealing hotel-like…
The most northerly highway in North America, the Dempster, roughly follows a route taken by early North West Mounted Police patrols between Dawson City and Fort McPherson. It is named for Corporal Jack Dempster, because he led the expedition to…
When he was transferred to Whitehorse in 1955, the 37-year-old Canadian Army Captain was sure he had arrived in the right place at the right time. Thus, Roy Minter began his lifelong career as a publicist and a public relations…
One day in the mid-seventies, my buddy Cal Waddington and I travelled to a construction site and spent a glorious afternoon in the company of friends who were building the Skagway Road. The work included blasting solid rock faces and…
The Yukon lost a little bit of its soul. That's the way a noted Yukon historian described the reaction on that Friday back in 1974, when the Whitehorse and the Casca were reduced to ashes.
There are strange things done in the midnight sun, perhaps none stranger or more spectacular than, back in the June of 1966, when the old sternwheeler SS Klondike made her final voyage.
When you visit the SS Klondike at her final resting place on the banks of the Yukon near Second Avenue, consider that this marvel of a riverboat was not the first to bear the name. But it was the last…
Have you ever driven behind a caravan of trailers on the Alaska Highway and wondered how you were ever going to pass them all? It’s a reality. Trailers bunch up on the highway. So imagine a week back in the…
The Canadian army invaded the Yukon in 1946. Well, invasion may be a strong word, and their presence was more than welcome. They came to fix up a mess known as the Alaska Highway. The road had been built in…
Emil Forrest, like all Yukoners of his day, was a jack-of-all-trades, and a master of some. He came to the Yukon from Alberta with his family in 1901, at the age of twelve, and went to school at Dawson City…
On August 23rd, 1960, hundreds of Whitehorse residents stood on the banks of the Yukon River at the shipyards and watched history in the making. The SS Keno was heading on her last voyage to Dawson City after sitting…
Mining has been a crucial element in Yukon development since the gold rush. In the mid-1940s, mining men were reviewing the old Treadwell Yukon’s silver workings on Galena Hill near Mayo. What geologists found led to the opening of…
Today, a story that could come from the pages of Ripley's "Believe It or Not", a story about how the Yukon almost lost one of its most important historical artifacts. A tale of what-ifs and might-have-beens.