Interactive timeline · 23,000 BCE to 2026
From Beringia's caves to the Klondike and self-government: Yukon in 26 moments.
26 moments6 eras47 sourcesAbout ↓
25,000 BCE – 1824
People hunt in ice-age Beringia, and 14 nations speaking eight languages build trade networks reaching the coast.
Bones of mammoths, horses, bison, caribou and other animals in the Bluefish Caves near Old Crow show cut marks made by stone tools. Researchers have argued that small hunting groups used the caves sporadically between about 25,000 and 12,000 years ago, when the region was part of unglaciated Beringia. The early dates remain debated among archaeologists.
Yukon, with Alaska, is considered the oldest continuously inhabited part of North America; sites in the Old Crow basin place people there at least as early as 10,000 BCE and possibly much earlier. Ancestors of today's First Nations hunted caribou and other game and fished for salmon, adding smaller game, roots and berries in lean times.
Yukon's 14 First Nations speak eight languages: Gwich'in, Hän, Upper Tanana, Northern Tutchone, Southern Tutchone, Tagish and Kaska, which are Athapaskan, and Tlingit. Many people spoke more than one; Southern Tutchone traded with coastal Tlingit through formal partnerships and marriage. On the treeless Arctic slope, Inuit lived from fish and sea mammals.
💡 Fun fact
Did you know? Southern Tutchone speakers use Kwäday Dän, "Long Ago People," for their ancestors.
Word of Russian explorers on the Pacific coast in the 1740s and of British explorers in the 1770s travelled inland along existing trade routes. Groups repositioned to control the new trade in European goods, and at the height of the fur trade one gun could cost its own height in stacked pelts. Smallpox and other diseases spread inland ahead of Europeans, with devastating effects.
1825 – 1895
Explorers, HBC posts and Arctic whalers arrive.
Sir John Franklin's overland expedition reached Yukon's Arctic shore in 1825 and in 1826 named Herschel Island, Qikiqtaruk, after the astronomer William Herschel. The island and coast were Inuvialuit homeland.
The first lasting contact came in the 1840s, when HBC traders Robert Campbell, coming over the upper Liard to the Pelly, and John Bell, by the Porcupine, pushed into the Yukon interior. Campbell built Fort Selkirk at the mouth of the Pelly in 1848, but the post was attacked and plundered by Chilkat Tlingit and was soon abandoned. Today Fort Selkirk is co-owned and managed by Selkirk First Nation and the Yukon government.
Beginning in 1889 American whaling ships used Herschel Island as a wintering station. After complaints that local Inuit were being abused, an Anglican missionary arrived in 1893 and a North-West Mounted Police detachment was set up in 1903. Whaling had collapsed by 1914, but the police stayed to assert Canadian sovereignty in the western Arctic.
1896 – 1941
Gold creates a territory, a railway and a city, then the boom fades.
In mid-August 1896, Keish (Skookum Jim Mason), Káa Goox (Dawson Charlie), Shaaw Tláa (Kate Carmack) and George Carmack found gold on Rabbit Creek, soon renamed Bonanza Creek, a tributary of the Klondike River. Keish and Káa Goox were Tagish First Nation members, and Shaaw Tláa was a Tagish woman of the dakl'aweidí clan. Sources give the date as August 16 or 17.
Stampeders sailed from Victoria, Seattle, Portland and San Francisco to Skagway and Dyea, then hauled a tonne of supplies, required by the North-West Mounted Police, over the Chilkoot or White Pass trails, many making 30 or 40 climbs. About $29 million in gold was recovered from 1897 to 1899. The police force grew from 19 officers in 1896 to 285 by the end of 1898.
The gold rush overran the homeland of the Hän-speaking Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in, who had long fished at Tr'ochëk, the mouth of the Klondike. Displaced by newcomers, they moved downriver to Jëjik Dhä Dënezhu Kek'it (Moosehide village). Only a century later, through land claim agreements, did they gain redress and self-government.
⚖️ Established fact
Established factThe historical record shows the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in were displaced and marginalized during the rush, with no treaty; their land claim and self-government agreement came in the 1990s.
The Yukon Territory Act of June 13, 1898, separated Yukon from the North-West Territories, with Dawson City as its capital, a federally appointed commissioner and an appointed council. Within a month of being surveyed, Dawson had become the largest Canadian city west of Winnipeg, and the census of 1901 counted 27,219 people in the territory.
Construction began in 1898, and the 177 km narrow-gauge railway from Skagway, Alaska, to Whitehorse was completed in 1900, one of the steepest lines in North America.
In 1902 Jim Boss, chief of the Ta'an Kwäch'än, wrote to Ottawa asking the federal government to protect Indigenous peoples' land and resources from the effects of the gold rush. No treaty was ever made with Yukon First Nations.
By 1906 the easiest placer ground was worked out, and dredging companies took over. The population fell to 8,512 in 1911 and 4,157 in 1921, and in 1918 Ottawa abolished the elected council, restoring only a three-member council the next year after local protests. Yukon's first hard-rock mine began producing silver and lead at Keno Hill in 1913.
1942 – 1972
The Alaska Highway, a new capital and large mines reshape the territory.
Fearing a Japanese invasion, US Army engineers built the Alaska Highway from Dawson Creek, BC, to Alaska in 1942–43, with 1,014 km in Yukon via Watson Lake and Whitehorse. About 11,000 soldiers and 16,000 Canadian and American civilians worked on the 2,451 km road, which opened to unrestricted travel in 1948. The highway, and the Canol oil pipeline from Norman Wells to Whitehorse, brought a permanent non-Indigenous population that outnumbered Yukon's Indigenous peoples for the first time.
Two years after the announcement, Yukon's capital moved from Dawson to Whitehorse in 1953. A major hydroelectric plant was built at Whitehorse in 1957.
An open-pit lead-zinc mine and town opened at Faro in 1969, the largest economic development in postwar Yukon and at one time among the largest lead-zinc mines in the world. Low metal prices closed all of Yukon's major mines in the 1980s, and Faro shut for good in 1998.
1973 – 1999
First Nations push for a settlement that becomes the Umbrella Final Agreement.
In February 1973 Chief Elijah Smith led a delegation of the Yukon Native Brotherhood to Ottawa and presented Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau with "Together Today for Our Children Tomorrow," a statement of grievances and a proposal for settlement. "We, the Indians of Yukon, object to being treated like squatters in our own country," Smith said. The document persuaded Ottawa to begin land claim negotiations.
Party politics came to the Yukon assembly in 1978, and in 1979 an elected five-member executive council began acting as a cabinet reporting to the government leader rather than the federally appointed commissioner.
The Dempster Highway between Dawson and Inuvik, NWT, was completed in 1979 after being conceived under the federal "roads to resources" program. The Haines Road to Skagway had given Yukon its first road access to the Pacific in 1978.
On May 29, 1993, Canada, Yukon and the Council for Yukon Indians (now the Council of Yukon First Nations) signed the Umbrella Final Agreement, the framework for each First Nation's final and self-government agreement. Individual agreements were signed between 1993 and 2006, and 11 of the 14 Yukon First Nations are now self-governing, with law-making powers over their lands. White River, Liard and Ross River have not concluded agreements.
2000 – today
Devolution, World Heritage status and new challenges in mining and politics.
After the Yukon Devolution Protocol Accord of 1998 and a 2001 transfer agreement, an amended Yukon Act in 2003 made Yukon the first territory to formally take control of its land, water and resources.
On November 7, 2016, Sandy Silver's Liberals vaulted from third place to a majority, ending 14 years of Yukon Party government. The Liberals governed for nine years under Silver, Ranj Pillai and Mike Pemberton, with NDP support propping up their minority governments in the last four of those years.
In September 2023 UNESCO inscribed Tr'ondëk-Klondike, eight sites along the Yukon River from Tr'ochëk to Ch'ëdähdëk, plus Black City on the Blackstone River. The Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in Government led the nomination. It is Yukon's first cultural World Heritage Site.
On June 24, 2024, the heap leach facility at Victoria Gold's Eagle mine north of Mayo failed, shutting down mining and leaking cyanide into nearby waterways. The company warned it might not have the money to remediate the damage, and the Yukon government applied in August 2024 to have a receiver appointed; the First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun said it had lost confidence in the company.
In the November 3, 2025, election the Yukon Party won 14 of 21 seats, the NDP won six, and the Liberals were reduced to one seat. Yukon Party leader Currie Dixon became premier.
About this timeline
Yukon's First Nations have lived in the land for well over 10,000 years, and the Bluefish Caves may hold some of the oldest traces of people in North America. Fur traders arrived in the 1840s, and the 1896 Klondike discovery created the territory in 1898 and displaced the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in. The Alaska Highway changed Yukon in the 1940s, and the 1973 land claim led to the 1993 Umbrella Final Agreement under which 11 of 14 First Nations now govern themselves.
1 moments on this page carry a government record note.
FAQ
The Yukon Territory Act of June 13, 1898, created Yukon as a separate territory during the Klondike Gold Rush, with Dawson City as its capital. Whitehorse became the capital in 1953.
Keish (Skookum Jim Mason), Káa Goox (Dawson Charlie), Shaaw Tláa (Kate Carmack) and George Carmack found gold on Bonanza Creek in mid-August 1896. The first three were Tagish.
No historic treaties were signed with Yukon First Nations. Instead, the 1993 Umbrella Final Agreement set the framework for modern land claim and self-government agreements; 11 of the 14 First Nations have them.
Eight: Gwich'in, Hän, Upper Tanana, Northern Tutchone, Southern Tutchone, Tagish, Kaska and Tlingit.
During the Second World War the US and Canada feared a Japanese invasion of Alaska, so US Army engineers built the highway in 1942–43. It opened to unrestricted travel in 1948.
Written from the sources linked on each moment: the Canadian Encyclopedia, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Parks Canada, Library and Archives Canada, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, provincial and city archives, and others. Where governments acted wrongly, we say so and note whether it has been officially acknowledged, is established by the record, or is disputed. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will fix it.
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