Collecting and sharing Yukon & Alaska history
The subject of Northern history shows up a fair bit on this blog, and a lot on my main Web site (ExploreNorth), but I’ve never really shown you what my passion for history looks like at home. With the weather not being very conducive to outside activities, I’m spending a lot of time with my collection lately.
The first photo shows me getting down to start a review of what’s here, a few days ago. For space reasons, the collection is now mostly paper (the actual artifacts have been donated to 2 Yukon museums), but the thousands of pieces of paper range from photographs and brochures to books and official documents. Anything that relates to the Yukon, Alaska, or Arctic has been the broad focus since my serious collecting started 17 years ago.
One of the subjects that I have a lot of material from is the Yukon Quest sled dog race. This racer’s bib from the 1993 race is the prize in that category.
If there’s a subject that I just never tire of, it’s early transportation. In the past few days, I’ve put this entire 24-page guide to the Richardson and Steese Highways from 1931 online – you can see it here.
I come across some surprising material in my searches. Until the mid-1970s, the U.S. Highway 287 Association promoted U.S. Route 287 as the best tourist route to Alaska. That, too, is now online (though only partly, because it’s size is impossible for me to deal with effectively), here.
In 1985, during the celebration of the National Parks of Canada Centennial, the Klondike Heritage Mail Run carried special envelopes between Seattle and Dawson City via the Chilkoot Pass, and they received special cancellations at several points. As of yesterday, you can see that story here.
And finally, one piece from much further back in the collection – a 1905 grant to allow a Dawson-area placer gold miner to divert water to a group of claims on Trail Gulch.
I have months and months worth of work/pleasure in the basement yet – enough for several winters 🙂 Much of it will end up on ExploreNorth, some of it on the Facebook pages of several groups I belong to, and some of it on eBay as I pare the collection down to a more manageable size.
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