January-February 2020
The geography of Chilkoot Inlet played an important role in the history of Alaska. Rising straight out of its blue-green waters, the Coast Range stood as an almost inpenetrable barrier between the bountiful rivers and bays of the Inside Passage and the equally bountiful interior of rivers, lakes, and valleys. Each place provided a wealth of natural resources in fish, game, and vegetation, and the Native peoples who lived in these areas enjoyed a brisk trade in their respective stores of fish, furs, and other useful resources. There were, however, only a very few routes over the forbidding mountains, and whoever controlled those routes controlled the trade. In his classic memoir, Old Yukon: Tales—Trails—Trials (Washington Law Book Co., 1938) pioneer judge and congressman James Wickersham wrote about the indigenous history of the Chilkoot Inlet: “The Chilkat Indians, and their cousins, the Chilkoots, are members of the Tlingit nation, speak the same language, are divided into the same social clans, and are otherwise so closely related by blood and tribal customs as to constitute one people. “For ages the Chilkats controlled the old Indian trade route from the Chilkat Inlet through their fortified village at Klukwan to the middle Yukon fur country; in the same way the Chilkoots, with the assistance of the dominant Chilkats, controlled the Dyea Trail over the pass to the lakes forming the headwaters of the Yukon River. The ownership and control of these two trade routes, through otherwise impassable mountain ranges, gave these warriors and traders a monopoly of the valuable trade with all the Stick (Tena) Indian tribes in the middle and upper Yukon basin, and made them the richest and most powerful tribe on the coasts of Alaska. They did not hesitate to attack any power that interfered with their age-old claims of established right to these trails and the control of trade over them. In 1852 they learned that the Hudson Bay Company’s trader, Robert Campbell, had erected Fort Selkirk at the junction of the Lewes and
alaskan-history.com
!16
