Haines Junction and Area History, 1890 to 1950 – Part 1

The town of Haines Junction in the southwest Yukon is relatively new, having its beginning in 1943 with the construction of the Alaska Highway and Haines Highway through the area.  In the 80 years since, the community and surrounding area has gradually grown to a population around the 1,000 mark.  It owes its existence primarily to roads, the first built for access to goldfields and two more for wartime measures.

The future site of Haines Junction was determined, in part, long before the town came into being by two related events, the Kluane gold rush of 1903 and the Kluane Wagon Road of 1904.  The Kluane Wagon Road eventually became the route for much of the ‘pioneer road’ of 1942, including through the site that became Haines Junction.  The location was made permanent in 1943 by two more related events, the upgrading of the pioneer road into the Alaska Highway and the building of the Haines Road (now officially called the Haines Highway).

The junction of these two highways resulted in the start of the town built around it and gave it its name.  The location of this junction, however, was not determined very far in advance.  Had different decisions been made in the routes of both highways, the junction of them and perhaps the community may have ended up 40 miles to the east at Champagne or three miles to the north near Pine Lake. 

This article provides historical and geographical context for how and why Haines Junction came to be where it is.  It also documents the early developments in the community up until the first survey of town lots in 1950.  By that time, the first government services, businesses, and residences had been established and the town had a population of around 100.

The article is divided into three parts:

Part 1:  Before Haines Junction – the Area History to World War II (starts below)

• the general history of the southwest Yukon along the Whitehorse to Kluane corridor from 1890 to the beginning of the Second World War.

Part 2:  Why Haines Junction is here – the Alaska Highway and Haines Road (link)

• how the building of the pioneer road, the Alaska Highway, and the Haines Road came together to establish a camp at the site that would become Haines Junction.  It had not been planned this way and is the result of some fortuitous decisions. 

Part 3:  The Beginning of Haines Junction (link)

• the establishment of Haines Junction as a community and its first developments up until 1950, when the first lots were surveyed in the new town.

Part 1:  Before Haines Junction – Area History to World War II

Haines Junction is unlike many other Yukon communities.  Some were established trading centers, some were built in areas of mineral resource discoveries, some were transportation hubs along the Yukon’s waterways and early roads, and some were combinations of these.  Haines Junction, on the other hand, was a product of a modern road intersection and grew to provide highway maintenance and other government functions as well as to serve tourist and local needs.

Haines Junction is situated in a geographic feature called the Shakwak Trench, a wide valley that runs northwest along the frontal ranges of the St. Elias Mountains from the elbow of Kusawa Lake to the Kluane Lake area and on into Alaska.  Joining into the trench are other valleys, the most notable one in the Yukon running east-west from near Whitehorse to Haines Junction and includes parts of the Takhini and Dezadeash Rivers. 

Before the Kluane Gold Rush (pre–1903)

Haines Junction is located where valleys merge and cross and are natural movement and transportation corridors.  The area is called Dakwäkäda, meaning ‘high cache place’, by the Southern Tutchone people who have used it for a long time.  This central location with its intersection of trails was a good place for camping, getting gophers, and staging from to hunt in the valley and nearby mountains.  The products of the hunts, such as furs and dried meat, were stored in the caches, structures built above the ground to provide protection from scavengers until the goods could be taken elsewhere, usually to winter quarters.

Non-First Nations people did not enter this part of the Shakwak Valley until the 1890s, and the early ones skirted around the Dakwäkäda area.  On an 1891 exploratory trip with horses northward from the Shäwshe (Dalton Post) area, Edward Glave and Jack Dalton passed by about seven miles west of present-day Haines Junction on their way through the Kloo Lake area and beyond to Kluane Lake.  A few years later, Dalton began commercial use of a coastal Tlingit trading trail going north from near Haines, Alaska, and its closest point was 27 miles southeast of what is now Haines Junction.

In July 1900 J.J. McArthur, a Dominion of Canada topographic surveyor, made a trip from Shäwshe along some of the same trails used by Glave and Dalton nine years earlier.  From a location seven miles to the west of Haines Junction, where the Dezadeash River turns to flow south, McArthur took the first known photo of the valley area where Haines Junction would later be located.

These early expeditions came into the region from the south and bypassed the site where Haines Junction would later be located.  There is no record of any east-west travel by newcomers through the Whitehorse-Kluane Lake corridor, and therefore the site, until after the discovery of gold in creeks to the north of Kloo Lake in the summer of 1903.

The Kluane Gold Rush and Kluane Wagon Road (1903–1904)

Gold was discovered on Fourth of July and Ruby Creeks north of Kloo Lake in early July 1903 by Dawson Charlie and Skookum Jim of the Klondike gold discovery fame.  Acting on information from First Nation people of the Kloo Lake area, they headed west from Whitehorse with horses and staked the first placer gold claims.  These discoveries, along with later ones near Kluane Lake, sparked a stampede of prospective gold miners into the area over the rest of that summer and fall.  Initially they all would have followed a First Nations foot trail which passed through or near where the townsite of Haines Junction would be established 40 years later. (see link to related Ruby Camp article at end)

In the fall of 1904 the Kluane Wagon Road was built from a point on the Whitehorse-Dawson Overland Trail 32 miles northwest of Whitehorse.  It went for 122 miles to Silver City on the southeast shore of Kluane Lake, with a side branch to north of Kloo Lake to provide better access for the gold miners.  In many sections it appears to have deviated from the original walking trail to go where it could better accommodate horses pulling loaded wagons. 

Most of the Kluane Wagon Road was a single route, but for a 16-mile stretch between Marshall Creek and Bear Creek there came to be separate summer and winter routes.  The future site of Haines Junction was between those two points and located on the summer route, which can be seen in a 1948 air photo when the community was in its infancy.  For almost 40 years there was traffic through this site, but nobody during that time would have had a reason to think there might someday be a community there.   (see links to related Kluane Wagon Road articles at end)

The Traffic Before the Town (1904–1942)

For 40 years before a community was established at Haines Junction, there was traffic through the site for a variety of purposes.  While the rush to the gold creeks of the Kloo Lake and Kluane Lake areas subsided fairly quickly, a level of mining activity persisted over the years along with other economic and governmental endeavors that also arose.

Among the earliest people to use the Kluane Wagon Road on a regular basis and for the longest period of time were Gene and Louis Jacquot, who established themselves at Burwash Landing in 1904.  They built and operated a trading post, store, roadhouse, and later a big game outfitting business, all of which required considerable travel and freighting over the wagon road throughout the years of its existence. 

Beginning in 1904 with Richard McConnell, parties with the Geological Survey of Canada used the Kluane Wagon Road to study and map the geology and topography of the Shakwak Valley and beyond.  Many of the early and good quality photos that document this area and its history, particularly during the 1910s, were taken by these government scientists.

In 1909 a crew for the proposed Alaska Midland Railway project from Haines to Fairbanks conducted a survey of the route, which was the same as that taken decades later by the Haines Road and the northern 400 or so miles of the Alaska Highway.  The survey crew took photos along the way and passed through very close to the location of Haines Junction, but unfortunately no photos from this area resulted.  This was one of the more serious of many railway proposals that arose following the Klondike gold rush and would have altered the course of history in the southwest Yukon had it advanced.   

From 1909 through 1913 the Alaska-Yukon boundary survey parties used the Kluane Wagon Road to access the southwest Yukon section of their work.  By 1910 the big game hunting industry began in the upper White River area, meaning increased traffic on the wagon road in the summers and falls.  A few years later the development of a fur farming industry in the southwest Yukon added to the activity along the road.  For a couple of years beginning in 1913, a small gold rush to Chisana, Alaska, just over the border in the White River area, created a significant spike in use of the Kluane Wagon Road as well as a new wagon trail to the White River country.   

These local industries and government projects over the decades supported the operation of a number of roadhouses, most of which were short-lived, opening and closing as circumstances dictated.  The ones at Champagne and Bear Creek, though, persisted for the duration of the wagon road’s existence and on into the time of the Alaska Highway.

Life along the Kluane Wagon Road and through the area of mixed grassland, aspen and spruce that would one day become Haines Junction carried on with the ebb and flow of these various activities.  From Takhini River to Kluane Lake, the constants through all these years were the businesses and settlements at Champagne, Canyon Creek, Bear Creek, Kloo Lake, Silver City and Burwash Landing.  As a new decade began in 1940, however, a new and larger road through the southwest Yukon was on the horizon that would bring big changes to these places and create new ones.  

World War II and the Southern Yukon (1939 – 1942)

Kluane region people would have been aware of the onset of war in 1939 on the other side of the world and followed news of it when they could.  For most people it likely had little direct effect on their lives, but that would begin to change at the end of 1941, brought on by events far away at an island paradise in the Pacific.

The bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941 led to a call to action that was explained this way in a 1946 US House of Representatives review of the Alaska Highway: “military ground and aerial forces and navy strength in [Alaska] were believed to be too weak to withstand a direct Japanese assault” and “an overland supply route to supplement and, if necessary, replace marine transportation to Alaska was held to be a military imperative”.

A road to Alaska from southern Canada had long been contemplated and discussed by the Canadian and American governments, but the threat to Alaska and beyond from the Japanese aggression in the Pacific spurred the decision to do it.  The “overland supply route” would be the Alaska Highway and its related projects in the southern Yukon, a ripple effect of the war. 

By February 14, 1942 the decision had been made to proceed with the construction of the road.  The route selected was from Dawson Creek, BC to Big Delta, Alaska to tie in a series of airfields that was in place from Edmonton to Fairbanks, some having just been built in 1941.  The existence of this airfield system, known as the Northwest Staging Route, would have a military purpose by supporting the transport of supplies to Russia for its war effort against Germany.  In turn, the highway would support the airfields by providing ground access between them. 

The plan was for US Army engineer troops to quickly punch through a ‘pioneer road’, which would then be followed up by contractors working under the US Public Roads Administration (PRA) to improve it to the standard of a highway.  Three months after Pearl Harbor, personnel and machinery were on their way north by land and sea to points where they could begin building the new road. 

The story of the influx of thousands of US Army personnel and civilians along with tons of equipment and supplies into northern British Columbia, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Alaska to build the Alaska Highway and associated projects is very familiar to Yukoners.  The pushing of the Alaska Highway through the northern wilderness by southern people in terrain and weather conditions they were unaccustomed to is well captured in print, images and some video. 

The common perception of the Alaska Highway is that it was built by US Army soldiers.  They got it started, but this view overlooks the large contribution made by civilian workers under the employ of the US Public Roads Administration (PRA) and its contractors.  The pioneer road construction in 1942 involved a little over 11,000 US Army personnel, assisted by 7,500 people working under the PRA.  By early 1943, most of the Army people were gone and during the remainder of that year a peak PRA force of 15,900 people (3,700 of them Canadians) transformed the pioneer road into a highway.  Of the $138 Million spent on building the pioneer road and Alaska Highway, $122 Million (88.5%) of it was for work undertaken by the PRA (there are different dollar figures used in various sources, but the point here is to show the proportion of work contribution by these two entities).

A project connected with the Alaska Highway that was mostly carried out by the PRA was the building of the Haines Road in 1943.  This road did not achieve a high profile in the Alaska Highway story, but as will be shown it played a role in the war effort by providing an alternate transportation artery from the coast that also benefitted Yukoners at the time. 

Summary

For the first four decades of the 1900s, the people of the Kluane region in the southwest Yukon lived relatively quiet lives close to the land.  They engaged in hunting, trapping, fishing, fur farming, big game hunting, mining, freighting, and operating trading posts and roadhouses.  The travel and transportation means to carry out these activities was enhanced by the Kluane Wagon Road when it was built in 1904.

The Second World War resulted in thousands of outside people coming into the region in 1942-43 to build the pioneer road, Alaska Highway and Haines Road.  This brought profound change and effects on existing communities and populations that had never known such a scale of activity.   Another effect of these highways was the creation of a new Yukon community on the Dezadeash River that for many people is ‘home’. 

Link to Part 2:  Why Haines Junction is here – the Alaska Highway and Haines Road

Link to related article: Ruby Camp

Link to related article: Kluane Wagon Road

Link to related article: Roadhouses of the Kluane Wagon Road