On January 3rd, 1959, Alaska officially became the 49th state in the Union. Like the continuing quest for Yukon autonomy, the road to Alaskan statehood had been long and winding. The United States bought Alaska from the Russians in 1867…
Read more
At the beginning of World War Two, the importance of Whitehorse as a transportation hub grew when a fully operational airport was built as part of the Northwest Staging Route. The Canadian and American military made their headquarters in Whitehorse,…
Read more
I didn't really know the elderly gentleman who spent his days in the back room of the little Yukon Electrical clapboard office on Main Street, except that my school chum, Willard, enjoyed stopping there to say hello. To me, he…
Read more
Today, the SS Keno sits high and dry near Front Street overlooking the Yukon river in Dawson.
She was built in Whitehorse in 1922, this little jewel in the crown of Yukon riverboats. The SS Keno was built to…
Read more
If there ever was a cowboy town in the Yukon, Champagne was it. After all, the community had horses, fences, log buildings like the American west had in the movies - and most importantly - a rodeo.
In the 1950s,…
Read more
It wasn't the Yukon's first pipeline. The Canol line had been built in 1942, and included a line from Whitehorse to Skagway.
The eight-inch pipe-line, built in 1954 from Haines to Fairbanks, was a symbol, not of WWII, but of…
Read more
To understand the Distant Early Warning line, you first have to understand the dawn of the nuclear age and the phrase "mutually assured destruction." In the early fifties, both the U.S. and Russia could deliver nuclear warheads to each other’s…
Read more
"Containerization." Today it is as commonplace as crocuses on the clay cliffs in the spring. Ports around the world are bustling with huge machinery loading and unloading goods. It wasn't always so.
Everything you buy today probably arrived from some…
Read more
Ian Tyson is one of my favourite singing story tellers. Always has been. He wrote a wonderful song called "50 Years Ago".
If I could roll back the years,
Back when I was young and limber,
Loose as…
Read more
By the mid-1950s, a growing Whitehorse apparently needed more electrical power than could be provided by the Fish Lake power plant operated by Yukon Electric. But what to do? At the time, two parallel systems were operating. The Read more
00:0000:00
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…
Read more
