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.The Royal Canadian Mounted Police estab-lished the Yukon Subdivision Headquarters in Whitehorse in1943.By the early 1950s, Whitehorse was the new capital ofYukon Territory.Later in the decade, a hydroelectric plant wasEpilogue 109constructed along the Upper Yukon at Whitehorse Rapids,providing additional electrical power for the region.By the1960s and 1970s, tourism became one of Whitehorse s mostimportant economic resources.In 1966, one of Whitehorse smost popular tourist attractions the SS Klondike NationalHistoric Site was installed in the town by Parks Canada.Thehighlight of the attraction for tourists is a permanently dockedpaddle-wheel steamer.The SS Klondike served the towns alongthe Yukon from 1937 until the 1950s.Other Yukon region towns that sprang up during thelate-nineteenth-century gold rush days also remain vibrantcommercial and residential centers today.In the midst of the1898 Klondike gold rush, Dawson City had been the largestCanadian town west of Winnipeg, with 40,000 people walkingits muddy streets.By the following year, 8,000 people leftDawson during the summer alone.By 1902, Dawson haddwindled to 5,000 but remained the seat of the territorialgovernment.Large-scale corporate mining in the regionaround Dawson came to an end after the Klondike placerstrikes, but the surface gold rush took several decades tocompletely run its course, peaking through high-volumemachine mining in 1911.During the 1930s, Dawson Cityexperienced a revival of its gold rush heyday as higher goldprices served as a new incentive to mine for gold.Not until1966 was the last gold dredge of a long golden period in Yukonhistory finally shut down, but a new wave of higher gold priceshas managed to reopen some mining districts.With the arrival of the Alaska Highway in Whitehorseduring the 1940s, and the end of steamboat travel into theregion by the 1950s, Dawson declined further.Today, Dawsonis home to approximately 2,000 permanent residents but60,000 tourists visit the town annually, drawn by the historicbuildings and Canada s only legalized gambling house, bar,and cancan show:  Diamond Tooth Gertie s Gambling Hall,110 THE YUKON RIVERFive Finger Rapids, located near Carmacks, Yukon Territory, about halfwaybetween Dawson City and Whitehorse, was once a treacherous stretchof river for steamboat captains to navigate.Today, the area is a populardestination for outdoor enthusiasts.a highlight of each summer s tourist season.(Diamond ToothGertie was a famous dance-hall proprietress during the Klondikegold rush.)Overall, the number of tourists who reach the Yukon everysummer sometimes reaches into the hundreds of thousands;vacationing adventurers lured by the excellent fishing, hunting,canoeing, kayaking, hiking, and climbing offered by the YukonEpilogue 111River, as well as its adjacent streams, forests, rock formations,mountains, and meadowlands.The increase in tourism to theYukon Valley, as well as the development of the Arctic oil fieldsof Alaska s North Slope, have caused an increase in highwayconstruction, all designed to  tap resources north of the YukonRiver. 83 Canada began construction on the Dempster Highwayin 1957 to aid in discovering more northern oil and gas fields.After the 1968 discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay, the road wasfurther developed by 450 miles from Dawson northward to themouth of the Mackenzie River, but it was not completed andopened to the public until 1979.The great Alaska Oil Pipelinenecessitated the building of yet another road from Fairbanksduring those years, and this included the construction of theonly bridge spanning the Yukon River.The bridge was erectedon giant pylons set hundreds of feet into the Yukon s riverbottom to help it withstand the mighty floes of ice that crashdown the river during the annual spring melt.Because the Yukon River has remained one of westernCanada s and Alaska s greatest natural resources, the United Statesand Canadian governments have sought to preserve as muchof the area around the river as possible.Environmental andconservation efforts have become more important; one sucheffort resulted in the creation of the Yukon-Charley RiversNational Preserve during the mid-1970s.It is located alongthe Canadian border in central Alaska and includes 160 milesof the Yukon River basin, as well as the entire length of theCharley River, one of the Yukon s tributaries, which meandersfor 100 miles from its headwaters to the Yukon.For manycanoeists and kayakers, the Charley is one of the grandest,most beautiful rivers in Alaska.Along this stretch of theYukon, the river is lined with stark reminders of the 1898 goldrush, including rustic log cabins and other historic sites.Archaeologists and paleontologists have studied the riverlands within the Yukon-Charley Preserve and have uncovered112 THE YUKON RIVERevidence that humans have lived there for thousands of years.Today, the preserve is intended to help sustain the region snatural environment.Within the 2.5-million-acre preserve, as well as along moststretches of the Yukon River, nature continues to flourish andrun free, as it has for countless millennia.The wildlife in therolling hills that flank these rivers is abundant, and includeswolves, bears, caribou, and moose.Near Fortymile, a caribouherd migrates annually through the Yukon-Charley Riverbasin.Above these waterways, along the high bluffs that linethe river, peregrine falcons continue to make their nests andraise their young undisturbed.Perhaps 20 percent of theperegrine population of North America is located within theYukon-Charley Preserve.Although the Yukon-Charley Preserve has been establishedto conserve a portion of the Yukon in its natural state, muchof the remainder of the river remains vulnerable.Fortunately,the number of people who reside along the river remainsrelatively low, keeping the overall human impact on the greatriver to a minimum.Though the search for gold no longerinfluences the amount of traffic that traverses the river,the Yukon of the twenty-first century remains vital to thefuture of both Alaska and Yukon Territory.Its waters stilloriginate from crystalline snows that are pure and unpolluted.The river remains so clean that it provides endless recreationfor tens of thousands.To date, no extensive damming system has been placed onthe great northern river to impede its natural flow.During the1960s, plans were developed for the construction of a massivedam at Rampart, Alaska, which would have backed up theflow of the Yukon River for close to 300 miles nearly tothe Canadian border.Although such a dam would have beenone of the largest ever constructed in the world, the projectwas scrapped decades ago but pressure to build one has neverEpilogue 113ceased [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]