INTRODUCTION

No other factors played a more important role in the settlement and eventual abandonment of Fort Selkirk than its history of trade & travel. The coastal Chilkat Tlingit, from what today is the Alaska Panhandle, were the Northern Tutchone’s traditional trading partners. Trade between the groups usually took place at summer fishing camps, one of which is present-day Fort Selkirk.

In the mid-19th century a new trading partner, the Hudson’s Bay Company, came to Fort Selkirk. The competition the white traders’ post posed to the Chilkat Tlingit led to that First Nation pillaging the Hudson’s Bay establishment while the local Northern Tutchone were away fishing in the summer of 1852. Nearly 40 years passed before another white trader ventured back into Fort Selkirk.

In 1889, an American, Arthur Harper, and his native wife set up a new post near the abandoned Hudson’s Bay site. In the years that followed, the Klondike Gold Rush and increased riverboat traffic between Whitehorse and Dawson City resulted in much prosperity coming to Fort Selkirk. The town became a well-established trade and supply centre for a large area stretching up and down the Yukon River. Many shops, hotels and bars came to Fort Selkirk. By the mid 1930's the Hudson’s Bay Company had re-established a post at Fort Selkirk.

Construction of the Alaska Highway in 1942, and of an all-weather road from Mayo to Dawson City in the early 1950's, signalled the end of the riverboat era and the steady stream of traffic to Fort Selkirk. Many people left Fort Selkirk and moved to Minto to work on the highway. As the population dwindled, the businesses that once occupied the town left. Highway travel proved both faster and cheaper than river transport and the people who left Fort Selkirk didn’t return to the remote river community. By the mid-1950's Fort Selkirk was essentially abandoned.