Explore Our Region
Yellowknife
Yellowknife has a reputation as a friendly little city, a happy reminder of its frontier past. Seventy years ago prospectors found gold here on the shores of Great Slave Lake, and a rough but friendly little tent camp grew up where Yellowknife stands today. You can still see some of the original buildings, and wander the picturesque streets and lanes echoing with stories of danger, determination and joie de vivre.
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Today Yellowknife is a culturally rich city, capital of the Northwest Territories, and home to more than 18,000 people. Many aboriginal people living here are descendants of the Yellowknives, the Dogrib Dene and Metis families who have historical ties to the area. However, settlers have come from around the world to Yellowknife. We estimate that we speak over 25 languages (including our own eight official territorial languages). We come today from Beijing to Budapest, Coral Harbour, Nunavut to Capetown, South Africa, and Osaka to Oslo. Chances are, you’ll meet someone from your Canadian home town or your home country, living and working here in Yellowknife.
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People claim the gold is paved with streets in Yellowknife. It’s true, and if you check the sidewalk in front of the Bank of Commerce you’ll find a sample of Yellowknife gold. The two mines, Con and Giant, produced gold for over 60 years, and tunnels burrow far below the city streets, and even out under Yellowknife Bay. Strangely, our name, Yellowknife, comes from copper, not gold.
The explorer Samuel Hearne trekked through this country in 1770, and encountered Aboriginal people who used copper-bladed knives. Their rendezvous place in a bay near the mouth of a river on Great Slave Lake became known as Yellowknife. Arctic enthusiasts will have heard of Sir John Franklin, who also passed through here, in 1821, on his epic journey to the Arctic coast. The locations sketched here by Midshipman Hood, traveling with Franklin, are easy to recognize even today.
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A prospector, enroute to the Klondike, first reported gold in Yellowknife Bay in 1898, and the find was confirmed in 1905. In 1934, with prospectors combing the area, a team from the Geological Survey of Canada pinpointed the seam of gold which started the Yellowknife gold rush. Times were tough in southern Canada, and people streamed Down North, by scow and boat across one of the largest and wildest lakes in the world. The lucky ones traveled on that new-fangled Canadian invention, the bush plane on floats. They set up a tent camp in what is now Old Town, surrounded by polished and glistening Precambrian rock.
By 1937, Yellowknife was a boom town, with a magistrate, a doctor, a liquor store, restaurants, a theatre, and an RCMP constable. The little tent camp quickly became permanent, and after a lull during World War II, expanded to a larger area still known today as New Town.
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Yellowknife was named capital of the Northwest Territories in 1967, when the territorial government moved from Ottawa, Ontario. We became a City in 1970. The only city in the Northwest Territories to date, we are now the mining, communications and administrative center for this vast northern territory.
In the last few years, with the same frontier spirit that built the city, Yellowknifers helped develop the first Canadian diamond mine, northeast of the city. It was five years in the making and cost more than a billion dollars, with a hefty flow of those expenditures going to businesses in Northern Frontier.
Today, Yellowknifers have switched to diamond mining, and diamond cutting and polishing. That’s the reason the “City built on gold” now bills itself as the “Diamond Capital of North America” TM.
Photos by Terry Parker (NWTAT), GNWT, Fran Hurcomb and Ronne Heming (Outcrop).
For more information on the City of Yellowknife go to: www.city.yellowknife.nt.ca
