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For as long as 4500 years,
ancestors of the Southern Tutchones have lived
in camps on the lakeshores and valleys hunting
caribou and moose and fishing for salmon or
char, their most reliable food. Permanent villages
along the Tatshenshini and Alsek watersheds
were centres of trade and contact with coastal
tribes. While the major ice sheets withdrew
12 500 years ago, several long glaciers in the
interior still sporadically push forward and
fall back, affecting landforms. When a lakebed
turns to grassland, which gradually becomes
forest, hunting grounds and encampments must
also be modified to follow altering terrain
and animal habitats. In 1850, when the Lowell
Glacier dam suddenly broke, the waters of the
lake roared to the ocean in a wave of water
7 metres high and 15 metres wide. Oral history
of the Tutchones tells of the tragedy at Dry
Bay when many villagers were swept into the
sea by the great wall of water.
One of the most extraordinary
characters of this time was Kohklux, chief of
the Chilkat nation. It is recorded that in 1854,
Kohklux traveled 320 kilometres inland to the
HudsonĘs Bay trading post at Fort Selkirk and
burned it to the ground. Years later, as a favour
to an American surveyor, George Davidson, who
would later describe him as -“a commanding
presence who carried a bullet hole in his cheek
[and] was held to be the greatest warrior of
all the tribes north and west of the [Stikine
River]”-, he drew up a fairly detailed
map of the southwestern Yukon Territory. Over
30 years later, when the Canadian-Alaskan boundary
was in dispute, Davidson published this map.
History also tells of Jack
Dalton, the first white man to explore the Kluane
interior in 1890-1891. He would later build
his own trading post at Neskatabeen and, when
gold was discovered at Dawson Creek, he was
able to charge prospectors $2.50 per horse to
cross his part of the trail or as much as $250
to guide miners from the coast to the Yukon
gold fields. He later drove and rafted herds
of cattle to Dawson to capitalize on the demand
for beef.
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