Viciously inhospitable, unique in the world, the remote, austere, breathtakingly beautiful area spanned by the intended route for the Alaska Highway made clear that in the subarctic north nature is a dictator, not a ‘mother’.
Link to another story “The Subarctic North Lay in Wait”
To this day the region is a vast expanse of raw nature with virtually no population. Moose outnumber people and probably always will.
Men had lived in these regions for centuries. Scattered along the length of the proposed highway, they created tiny and tenuous bits of civilization that shaped the environment awaiting the Corps.
The first human inhabitants of the North Country, the people American’s call Indians and Canadian’s call First Nations survived for thousands of years by treading lightly on the land—accepting at the very core of their culture and way of life the absolute dominion of viciously inhospitable nature.
They lived in small family groups, moving constantly to eke subsistence from the environment. They sheltered in huts and teepees made of tanned animal hides and wood, brush or bark that could be taken down, moved and reconstructed easily. Their trails and paths curled like tiny ribbons over the mountains and through the forests.
The migratory patterns of animals and fish determined those of the natives. The spring salmon run found them camped near streams and rivers. Other times of the year found them settled near the paths of migrating moose and caribou.
Ephemeral ribbons of trail through the wilderness reflected constant changes in the environment. Paths over muskeg, permafrost and frozen lakes and streams served only in winter. The rains and thawing temperatures of spring and summer turned the paths into bogs of bottomless mud and muck and melted the ice on the lakes and streams into raging cataracts.
Over millennia small family groups evolved into loosely organized tribes, each with its own language and culture, each dominating a specific area bounded by the limits of their trail systems. Tlingits, for example, lived along the coast in the area that would, one day, include Skagway and Dyea, Alaska. The rugged coastal mountain range separated them from the Inland Tlingits in what would one day be Carcross, Tagish and Teslin, Yukon.
The Tlingits found passages up what would one day be called the Chilkoot, the Chilkat and the White Pass. These passes offered intermittent, occasional passage for travel and trade with the tribe of the interior.
A thorough and more scholarly take on subarctic people