This page is dedicated to stories of  Yellowknife "days gone by".

Help needed...

The people in the photo are fish plant workers on Great Slave Lake (Gros Cap?) during WW-II.

They are either POW or Interned Japanese workers. If anyone has any info regarding this subject, please contact our office by phone or e-mail.

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This is a link to an-online book "Memories of Yellowknife" by Jack Boyd.

 An account of the Boyd family pioneering to Yellowknife, NWT from 1965 until 1969

http://bahai-library.com/boyd_memories_yellowknife 

              

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Bank of Commerce with Albert Mercer's Drug Store / Otto Thibert Yellowknife Supplies to the right

 

Christmas at Giant Camp (Ken Hall)

Looking south from Latham Island, "the Northern Prospector" is docked in front of a new Yellowknife Drug & Supplies Store and also contained the Post Office in 1940.

Unloading the "Northern Prospector" .. note the elaborate track system for transporting goods. 

CF-AXN is parked near-by

Pat Nikiforow & Jim St. Marie help celebrate Christmas at the Giant Cafeteria (Ryan Silke)

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Arrival of the Barge Celebration... for more link to NWT Mine Heritage

 

    

(click on above pictures for larger image)...Carr photos

 

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Garski Gold Mine

Sproule Lake

      

            Lou Garskie panning gold.... photo by G. Reimann                          Claim posts...              Sproule Lake...Carr photos

 

Thirty Three miles northeast of Yellowknife is Sproule Lake. In 1947, the Old Parr group of claims were staked by Martin Bode and Louie Garskie. Free gold was found and several of the gold encountered was spectacular enough to attract widespread interest. The gold-bearing quartz bodies though did not travel very deep, therefore interest by big mining outfits came to an end. Garskie was convinced that there was plenty of gold and started to set up his own mine, to mine the pits named Galena, Caribou, Jewellery Shop and High Grade. Here and there, the veins of quartz contained much gold. The gold occurs as coarse grains or filled minute fractures that transected the quartz and extended an inch or so into the wall rock. As a consequence, specimens commonly broke along the fractures and displayed broad films of spectacular looking gold. Lou mined his property until he retired in 1972, taking out a few hundred ounces of gold. I visited his mine in 1982, taking a few pictures of the way he left the mine. The cabin was very rustic and was well protected from intruders, either by bears or humans. Tables near the cabin were completely covered by screws, nails, bolts, and pieces of steel and other objects. The shaft was as he left it. There were several pits and trenches running in many directions, some still contained small amounts of visible gold.

         

Garskie's Cabin and Mine.... Carr photos

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The Gold Range/ Veterans Hotel

The Gold Range is a notorious location with a reputation stretching across the Canadian Arctic. It was built on the site of The Veterans Hotel, which was destroyed by fire in 1956. The Gold Range is commonly known as "The Strange Range", having housed a rough and tumble bar, strip joint, boarding house and cafe complex since it opened in 1958. 

 

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A Brief History of the Yellowknife Post Office

By Kevin O’Reilly

On July 31, 1936 Major Burwash wrote to the Postmaster General requesting a post office at his mine, on the other side of Yellowknife Bay from our present community. Nine men applied for the position of postmaster including Otto Joseph Thibert, who eventually received the appointment after much lobbying and debate.

Yellowknife’s first post office opened in Thibert’s general store, Yellowknife Supplies, on September 27, 1937 in what is now known as Yellowknife’s Old Town. His store is shown as the large white building on the left hand side of the post card in Figure 1.

Canadian Airways initially carried the mails into Yellowknife from Fort Resolution, once a week for 15 cents a pound. This arrangement was put in place even before the post office opened due to the large volume on incoming and outgoing mail via Fort McMurray. By 1943 there were three mail flights into Yellowknife each week and daily service was established in 1949.

Arthur Alexander Umbach became the postmaster on December 1, 1942 and remained in this position until December 6, 1963. The post office continued to operate out of the Yellowknife Supplies store until September 3, 1945 when it was moved into another building that had been used during the construction of the Alaska Highway (East Half of Lot 2, Block 2, 3504 Ingraham Drive). The building was moved up to Yellowknife from Dawson Creek. This building was moved again and reopened closer to the waterfront in the Old Town on July 17, 1946 at 3506 Wiley Street (see Figure 2).

In 1947 a new townsite was surveyed and a lot was reserved for a new federal building to include a post office. Yellowknife had outgrown the Old Town and there was a need for improved sanitation with piped water and sewers. After much lobbying, a letter box was placed at the Ingraham Hotel (now known as the Yellowknife Inn) in June 1948 to allow residents of the New Town to mail items.

The post office was finally moved from the Old Town up to the new townsite on August 3, 1953 to be located on the ground floor of a hotel owned by J.I. Glick (Second Street East, near or in the Veterans Hotel rebuilt as the Gold Range Hotel, 5010 50th St.). The post office moved to the new federal building on April 30, 1956 (see Figure 3), where it continues to reside at 4902 50th Street, New Town.

A modern mail processing plant opened near the Yellowknife airport in 1987 to help relieve congestion at the downtown main post office. There is some uncertainty as to the future of the old federal building and Canada Post’s continued tenure at this site is in doubt. Although Yellowknife has had several other post offices, that is beyond the scope of this article, but readers are free to contact the author for further information on this or any other matter concerning Yellowknife’s postal history at kor@theedge.ca.

Figure 1. Yellowknife’s First Post Office. A post card published by Sutherland’s Photos showing Yellowknife c. 1938. The large white building at centre left is the Yellowknife Supplies general store that contained the post office.

Figure 2. Yellowknife Post Office c. 1948. Courtesy of the NWT Archives. Busse Collection. N79-052-4747.

Figure 3. Yellowknife Federal Building c. 1956. Courtesy of the NWT Archives. Busse Collection. N-1979-052-4067.

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Yellowknife 63 years ago.

As published in The Saturday Evening Post, January 19, 1946, "Canada's New Gold Boom" by Gordon Carroll.

The Yellowknife flight starts at Edmonton, where one boards a Canadian Pacific transport plane, more designed for freight than passenger comfort. It is a 5 hour trip, via Ft McMurray and Fort Smith.The plane circles Yellowknife then noses down and lands on a big gravel air strip. The town looks like any other rural community, but after a mud-stained car bounces and slithers you over the 4 mile swamp road connecting you from the airport to Yellowknife's main street, the illusion soon vanishes.

This town is built on a series of rocky knobs and ledges and is not really a town at all, but a hodgepodge of homes & stores and structures of all sizes erected without thought of style or comfort, but only to place a roof over human heads. Canvas tents are pitched alongside log cabins, store fronts adjoin bungalows made of crudely sawed spruce boards. One of Canada's largest banks has its local branch in a shack. Not far away a steel tower (Canadian Signal Corp) rises from a rocky dome. The lone hotel, perched precariously near a cliff, stares down at a bay front where prospectors' canoes are tied to docks built for pontoon planes. Incongruity, that's Yellowknife.

2500 inhabitants present a long roster of human types, from broad-beamed housewives to coppered Indians, from brief-cased salesmen to grizzled trappers & prospectors. Leather jacketed bush pilots lounge in dingy cafes, drinking coffee and smoking endlessly. Except for an occasional movie, amusements are few. No saloons, no gambling houses, no red-light district, not even a smooth sidewalk. Saturday night the local beer parlour opens long enough to consume the scant supply of bottles brought in each week (Calgary Stock & Bohemian Maid). Territories' law allows each adult 1 twenty six ounce bottle per month.

Giant Yellowknife Mine is just across the bay, where geologist Dr. A.S. Dadson in 1944 calculated that previous geologists had missed the significance of the West Bay Fault. He reasoned that somewhere near the fault there would be gold. A test hole was drilled and Dadson was right. Giant stock rose from 40 cents to 11$. Giant Yellowknife Mines started building the shaft that stands today (2006). Photos by Frank Ross.

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April 1979, Senior citizens awarded certificates:  

Ed Baker accepts a Certificate of Achievement from Don Mayne of National Health and Welfare, Edmonton, on behalf of United Senior Services.     Left to right... Bill Rossing, Larry Babiuk, Don Mayne, Ed Baker, Curtis Clark, Gordon Greenaway, Henry Gluesing.

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                                    Yellowknife of Yester-year

Turning over the keys.. CFYK volunteers passing the keys of CFYK Radio to the CBC in 1958. Past employees of CBC celebrate 50 years of CBC radio in Yellowknife.

1980(R Carr)

 

In the summer of 1980, the government decided to net & remove all fish from Jackfish Lake & replace them with rainbow trout &/or char, before finishing the job, the project was halted by a small group of protesters, leaving the lake void of big fish (there were lots of fish in the lake).

 

70's dog race(G.Reimann)