A Bit Of History...

History

Prehistory
The territory is named after the Yukon River, which means "great river" in Gwich'in.

Disputed evidence of the oldest remains of human inhabitation in North America have been found in the Yukon. A large number of apparently human modified animal bones were discovered in the Old Crow area in the northern Yukon that have been dated to 25,000 - 40,000 years ago by carbon dating. The central and northern Yukon were not glaciated, as they were part of Beringia.

At about 800 AD, a large volcanic eruption in Mount Churchill near the Alaska border blanketed the southern Yukon with ash. That layer of ash can still be seen along the Klondike Highway. Yukon First Nations stories speak fo all the animal and fish dying as a result. Similar stories are told among the Athabaskan-speaking Navaho and Apache, leading to the conclusion by some anthropologists that the migration of Athabaskan peoples into what is now the southwestern United States could have been due to the eruption. After that, the hunting technology saw the replacement of Atlatls with bows and arrows.

Extensive trading newtworks between the coastal Tlingits and the interior First Nations developed, where the the coastal peoples would trade eulachon oil and other coastal goods for native copper and furs found in the interior.

19th Century
European incursions into what later became the Yukon started in the first half of the 19th century. Hudson's Bay Company explorers and traders from Mackenzie River trading posts used two different routes to enter the Yukon and created trading posts along the way. The northern route started in Fort McPherson, Northwest_Territories along the Mackenzie River, crossed the mountains into the Bell and Porcupine Rivers to the Yukon River. The southern route started at Fort Liard, Northwest Territories, then westward along the Liard River to Frances Lake and then along the Pelly River to its juncture with the Yukon River.

After establishing Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories, John Bell crossed the mountains into the Yukon River watershed in 1845, and went down the Rat River (today the Bell River) to its confluence with the Porcupine River. After managing the fur trade at Fort McPherson, he returned to the Bell River, and followed the Porcupine to its juncture with the Yukon River, the eventual site of Fort Yukon. Soon after, Alexander Hunter Murray established trading posts at Lapierre House (1846) and at Fort Yukon (1847) at the juncture of the Porcupine and the Yukon Rivers. Murray drew numerous sketches of fur trade posts and of people and wrote the Journal of the Yukon, 1847–48, which give valuable insight into the culture of local Gwich'in First Nation people at the time. While the post was actually in Russian Alaska, the Hudson's Bay Company continued to trade there until expelled by the US government in 1869, following the Alaska Purchase. A new trading post, Rampart House was established upstream along the Porcupine, but it also proved to be just inside Alaska's boundary.
Sahneuti
Robert Campbell (fur trader), Fort Selkirk, Tlingit attack
missionaries
Expeditions: Frederick Schwatka, George Mercer Dawson, William Ogilvie (surveyor) & the boundary,
mining along the Porcupine River, Stewart River
Klondike Gold Rush

20th Century
mining, decline, YCGC, Alaska Highway, revival, Dempster, land claims,

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukon