Yukon Absorbed

As an apple-cheeked youth 40 years ago, immaculate Thomas Duff Pattullo, now Premier of British Columbia, visited the hell-roaring gold-rush town of Dawson, Yukon as secretary to the Canadian Government's first. Yukon Commission. Tough miners and hot-spot sirens goggled at his white trousers, the first ever seen so far north. From that moment romantic Yukon wove a spell around him.

Premier Pattullo. still immaculate but with a bigger girth, announced exultantly last week that British Columbia had closed a deal with the Dominion Government to take over Yukon Territory. As soon as British Columbia's Legislature signs on the dotted line, that province with an area of 573,331 sq. mi. will become, next to Quebec, the largest in Canada, more than ten times as big as New York State. From maps of Canada will disappear the colorful Yukon Territory, made famous by the discovery of gold in 1896 and the hairy-chested poems of Robert William Service.

Yukon lies to the west of Canada's Northwest Territories (Mackenzie, Keewatin and Franklin). These four stretch across the sparsely populated top of the continent. Yukon, jammed between Alaska-and Mackenzie, is washed on the north by the Arctic Ocean. It is a tilted rugged land sloping unevenly eastward from the Rockies and northward from British Columbia's upper border which is the 60th Parallel and where Mount Logan. Canada's highest, looms to 19,850 ft. To get into the Yukon sportsmen and other travelers take a Canadian Pacific steamship from Vancouver to Skagway, Alaska, change to the White Pass & Yukon Railway which snakes across a lake region between mountains to Whitehorse and thence to Dawson.

Set up as a separate political unit soon after the first gleam of gold appeared in the Klondike rapids of the Yukon River, Yukon is at present administered by a federal government Comptroller and a Territorial Council of three. Yukon's sole representative in the Dominion Parliament since October. 1935 has been Mrs. George Black, a dashing woman who left Chicago to join the gold rush of 1898. She exploded angrily last week when Premier Pattullo announced his acquisition, expressed "surprise" that no statement had been made "either in Parliament or by the Prime Minister."

By no means reluctant was the Dominion to surrender control of the Yukon, which has cost it nearly eleven million dollars for its development with almost no direct return to Ottawa. Cheerfully the Government consented to make an annual grant to British Columbia of $125,000 for five years to help meet the expense of taking over.

British Columbians were last week more optimistic than the Dominion. The Yukon's $200,000,000 spate of gold has now become a mere $100,000 yearly trickle, but chilly Yukon's 207,076 sq. mi. are rich with uncut timber, unexploited copper, lead, coal, fish, game. These resources have been landlocked by the lack of railroads, which can presumably be promoted more easily in Vancouver than in Ottawa.

Especially pleased with his deal was Premier Pattullo, who now has a much bigger provincial stick to wave at Ottawa. British Columbia was coaxed to join Canada's other provinces when they federated in 1871 on the promise that the Canadian Pacific Railway would begin to creep across it in two years, be completed in ten. Actually neither the Government nor the Canadian Pacific was in any hurry and the last spike was not driven until 1885, a fact which produced in British Columbia an attitude of injured self pity which its new size should tend to relieve.

U. S. citizens' chief interest in last week's Yukon news was not gold or provincial politics. President Roosevelt has already given his blessing to a scheme for building a $20,000,000 motor highway through British Columbia and the Yukon to Alaska. With the fusion of British Columbia and the Yukon there is a better chance that the road will get under way. This project, endorsed by many a tourist organization and chamber of commerce, is disliked by those who think that such a road might be used for military purposes in the event of war between the U. S. and a Far Eastern power.

-In September 1903, a tribunal of three U. S. citizens, three Britishers met in London to settle the boundary between Alaska and Canada, agreed on the 14151 Meridian for the Alaska-Yukon line.

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