YUKON-CHARLEY RIVERS Yukon Frontiers Historic Resource Study of the Proposed Yukon-Charley National River

This study has illustrated the continuity of themes and the common roots in the past of Alaska and the continental United States not only in history but in development, technology, philosophy, and lifeways as well. Yet at the same time it has characterized Alaska's uniqueness as a result of its environment and different time sequences. Thus various imported social institutions—local, state, and federal governments, commercial and industrial organizations, religious orders, and the military—confronted the Alaskan environment and adapted accordingly. The result projected new ways of life and new perceptions into the nation's continually developing culture.

The passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act allows an opportunity for Americans to keep a tie with the past, maintain a sense of orientation, and recognize continuity in diversity. For under this act the area known as Yukon-Charley may be selected by Congress to be managed by the National Park Service, traditionally the leading agency in historic preservation. Should this occur, the research of this narrative and survey should provide the foundation for historic resource planning and management. Other themes, however, such as the oral history of the Han and Kutchin Indians, need to be studied in greater depth. But most important is the opportunity to control the development of a historic landscape that might otherwise be bombarded with disruptive and intrusive modern roads and pipelines, an opportunity for a visitor to vicariously explore the past and escape the present for a moment, and an opportunity for historic activities and lifestyles to continue.

Throughout all the changing frontiers and massive waves of people that have been described, one factor has appeared constant—the land. Despite the fact that the Army and steamboat companies nearly deforested the land, consuming thousands of cords of wood annuually, the land has essentially returned to its pre-gold-rush appearance. To the modern visitor's eye the forest fire of 1969 wreaked more damage than the exploitive uses of miner, trapper, and townsman. Game populations have come and gone, possibly in response to human populations but also possibly from natural forces. People have also changed. The Indian, as a result of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act now has a different perspective of the land. Once a land user, he is now a land owner. Profit, not harmonious land use, confronts and subjugates traditional cultural values. The white trapper, ironically, has returned to the land to seek the almost mythical historic values of self-sufficiency and self-reliance. Only the land appears static.

It is the land, virtually untouched by modern intrusions, that creates the intangible elements of feeling and association and captures the historic scene. The land remains as it was for each frontier, a wilderness, and thus can be used to interpret any theme. Whether the land merely sets the scene for a trapper's cabin, a gold dredge, an Indian fish camp, or whether it is the sole factor that provokes a feeling of history in the visitor, the land and its preservation are essential to an understanding and appreciation of the patterns of history and the environmental forces that make each event unique yet common to all.