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WHITEHORSE is the likeable capital of the Yukon, home to two-thirds of its population (around 24,000 people), the centre of its mining and forestry industries, and a bustling, welcoming stopoff for thousands of summer visitors. Whilst roads bring in today's business, the town owes its existence to the Yukon River , a 3000-kilometre artery that rises in BC's Coast Mountains and flows through the heart of the Yukon and Alaska to the Bering Sea. The river's flood plain and strange escarpment above the present town were long a resting point for Dene peoples, but the spot burgeoned into a full-blown city with the arrival of thousands of stampeders in the spring of 1898. Having braved the Chilkoot Pass to meet the Yukon's upper reaches, men and supplies then had to pause on the shores of Lineman or Bennett Lake before navigating the Mile's Canyon and White Horse rapids southeast of the present town. After the first few boats through had been reduced to matchwood, the Mounties laid down rules allowing only experienced boatmen to take craft through - writer Jack London, one such boatman, made $3000 in the summer of 1898, when more than seven thousand boats left the lakes. After a period the prospectors constructed an eight-kilometre wooden tramway around the rapids, and in time raised a shantytown settlement at the canyon and tramway's northern head to catch their breath before the river journey to Dawson City.

The completion of the White Pass and Yukon Railway (WP&YR) to Whitehorse (newly named after the rapids) put this tentative settlement on a firmer footing - almost at the same time as the gold rush petered out. In the early years of the twentieth century the town's population dwindled quickly from about 10,000 to about 400; for forty years the place slumbered, barely sustained by copper mining and the paddle-wheelers that plied the river carrying freight and the occasional tourist. The town's second boom arrived with the construction of the Alaska Hwy, a kick-start that swelled the town's population from 800 to 40,000 almost overnight, and has stood it in good stead ever since