The Founding of Fort McPherson
Intrepid–and exhausted–wilderness adventurers of today, paddling the entire 520 kilometre length of the Snake and Peel Rivers to Fort McPherson in the Northwest Territories, stand in awe of the courage and endurance of 19th century Hudson’s Bay officer John Bell.

In the summer of 1839, Bell and his men ascended the Peel to the mouth of the Snake River, then continued–eventually on foot–up the Snake to its headwaters. Bell’s glowing report of abundant animal life and excellent fishing on what he mistakenly thought to be one river, convinced the Hudson’s Bay Company to build a trading post on the lower Peel.

Settled permanently in its present day location by 1858, the post took the name of the Company’s chief fur trader, Murdoch McPherson. An Anglican Mission joined the post in 1860. The presence of American whalers at Herschel Island and the later Yukon Gold Rush also added a police function to Fort McPherson

In 1978, Fort McPherson became one of three communities on the newly constructed Dempster Highway. It is home to the Tetlit Gwich’in First Nations Community, and is now known as “Tetl’it Zheh, house above the river.”

First Nations Living Lightly on the Land

To the wilderness traveller climbing out of a float plane at Duo Lakes, near the headwaters of the Snake, Peel River country may appear to be the ultimate wilderness. No roads. No buildings. No services. Just thousands of kilometres of vast, undisturbed northern terrain.

Even today, to the unpracticed eye, there are few clues that First Nations people have lived on this land for thousands of years. As far-ranging hunters and gatherers, their territory has been immense – so immense that the modern-day centres of their communities lie hundreds of kilometres away, at Fort McPherson in the Northwest Territories and Mayo, in the centre of the Yukon.

Busy overland trading routes and hunting trails once spanned the lands between the tributaries of the Peel, where temporary rafts were used to breach the river gaps. While travel on the river was less frequent, mooseskin boats were sometimes used to carry families from winter hunting grounds to summer fishing camps.

Prospectors on their way to Dawson City, in pursuit of Klondike gold in 1899, relied on the skill and cooperation of First Nations hunters to guide them to the western Yukon.

Today, through a series of Land Claim agreements, two First Nations groups own settlements that include selections in the Snake River watershed:

Tetlit Gwich’in: From the head of the Peel River, into the Richardson Mountains, and throughout all of the Peel’s tributaries (including the Snake), the “people who live at the head of the waters” hunted caribou in the winter and fished for whitefish, grayling and inconnu in the summer. With the establishment of the Hudson’s Bay Fort McPherson fur trading post on the lower Peel in 1840, the Tetlit Gwich’in began to shift their economic activity from cooperative hunting and fishing to more solitary trapping and trading. Permanent lodging at Fort McPherson (Tet’lit Zheh) gradually became their home.

Na-cho Ny’a’k Dun: Also following the caribou, descendants of the Northern Tutchone from the Stewart River region travelled to the Peel tributaries. Here they often traded with the Gwich’in. The “Big River People” now live in Mayo, 350 km. southeast of the Snake River headwaters.