Ken S. Coates - Land of the Midnight Sun: A History of the Yukon

CARLETON LIBRARY SERIES

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LAND OF

THE

MIDNIGHT

SUN

A HISTORY OF THE YUKON THIRD EDITION

KEN S. COATES & WILLIAM R. MORRISON

CARLETON LIBRARY SERIES 202

MCGILL-QUEENS UNIVERSITY PRESSMontreal & Kingston London Chicago

McGill-Queens University Press 2017

ISBN 978-0-7735-5212-8 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-7735-5213-5 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-0-7735-5214-2 (ePUB)

Legal deposit third quarter 2017

Bibliothque nationale du Qubec

First edition published in 1988 by Hurtig Publishers

Second edition published in 2005 by McGill-Queens University Press

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free
(100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

McGill-Queens University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Coates, Kenneth, 1956, author

Land of the midnight sun : a history of the Yukon / Ken S. Coates, William R. Morrison. Third edition.

(Carleton library series ; 202)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-0-7735-5212-8 (paper).

ISBN 978-0-7735-5213-5 (ePDF).

ISBN 978-0-7735-5214-2 (ePUB)

1. Yukon History. I. Morrison, William R. (William Robert), 1942, author II. Title. III. Series: Carleton library series ; 202

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

When this book was first published in 1988, it was the collaboration of two historians of quite different ages, personalities, interests, and backgrounds. We were and are a disparate team. One of us was raised in the Yukon, the other in Ontario. One was drawn to the study of Yukon history by the absence of historical analysis about a region he viewed as his homeland; to the other, the Yukon provided an opportunity to study the evolution of Canadian attitudes and policies towards the North, stemming from an early interest in the RCMP. The book represented a union of these approaches an attempt to see the North from both the inside and the outside.

In the first edition, we tried to incorporate the entire Yukon into our investigation. We believed then, and we still do, that in the past the activities of newcomers to the Yukon explorers, traders, miners, and government officials had attracted most of the attention from researchers and writers. The First Nations people, until thirty years ago, were wrongly relegated to the background. The irony of this is obvious, for the aboriginal people of the Yukon have persisted in occupying their corner of the world, while non-aboriginals, as a group, demonstrated in the past surprisingly little commitment to the territory, moving in and out as the seasons and business cycles dictated. The history of the Yukon should be the history of both groups and of the relationship between them. We have tried to bring these often separate strands of Yukon history together in the hope that aboriginals and whites will recognize how their histories and their futures are very much intertwined.

This book also reflects our belief that the history of the Yukon Territory is far more than the experience of the Klondike gold rush and the building of the Alaska Highway. In the past, these dramatic events drew most of the attention given to the Yukon, to the detriment of our understanding of the complexities of its history. While giving them their rightful due, we have covered the full range of the Yukon experience. It is in this larger picture that the major themes of Yukon history become particularly evident: aboriginal persistence, the transiency of the white population, formal and informal processes of racial segregation, the boom-and-bust cycles of the economy, the debilitating effects of colonial status, and the Yukons inability to control its own destiny.

This study is dominated by our understanding of the Yukon Territory as one of Canadas colonies. The political, cultural, and economic realities of being a colony within Canada had a major impact on the territorys evolution during the last century. Rooted deep in the past, the struggle to shed the bonds of colonialism and to gain a full measure of local autonomy dominates contemporary politics and government in the Yukon.

Much has changed since we completed the first edition of this book. The writing project began when we were colleagues at Brandon University a fortuitous circumstance that started a long friendship and professional collaboration. Land of the Midnight Sun was the first book we wrote together. Strange Things Done: Murder in Yukon History, recently published by McGill-Queens University Press, will be our tenth.

A great deal of professional and personal water has flowed under our respective bridges since that first collaboration. Ken was recruited to the University of Victoria, where he lived and worked in southern comfort, all the while maintaining extensive contact with the Yukon Territory. Bill moved to the Centre for Northern Studies at Lakehead University, where he became the director of the centre and worked on the promotion of northern Canadian history. We were both fanatics about a new invention called the Internet, which allowed us to send entire files of draft chapters back and forth across the country. We wrote