Canadian Historic Sites: Occasional Papers in Archaeology and History No. 19
Yukon Transportation: A History
by Gordon Bennett
Introduction
From the inception of the fur trade in the early 1840s to the present
predominance of base-metal mining, the Yukon economy has depended on the
exploitation of a staple resource. The extent of this dependence has
been exaggerated because, unlike other more familiar staple-producing
regions, the absence of arable land precluded a comprehensive
subsistence economy. Given the relationship between staple economies and
transportation as well as the Yukon's traditional isolation from
metropolitan centres, it is hardly surprising that the demand for
transportation in the Yukon has always been intense.1
The primary importance of transportation has long been appreciated by
observers of the northern scene.2 One writer has even gone so
far as to assert that "the whole history of the North has been bound up
with the solution of the transportation problem."3 Even
during the precontact period, when hunting and fishing comprised the
sole forms of economic activity, the quality of native life was in large
part determined by transportation.
This study will primarily be concerned with the history of
transportation routes and forms as they evolved in the Yukon Territory.
As Harold Adams Innis suggested in 1938, however, the study of
transportation can have a much broader application, impinging on the
great questions of social and political life as surely as on the
problems of national economy.4 It is hoped that this paper
will demonstrate that transportation routes and forms not only
functioned as carriers of men and materials, but also played a critical
role in defining the nature and course of development of the
territory.
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