Pelly Crossing

Pelly Crossing is a town of about 350 people located in the centre of the Yukon. It is about 270 kilometres north of Whitehorse and 260 kilometres south of Dawson on the Klondike highway. It’s a great place to visit and a wonderful place to live.

Most of the people living in Pelly are Native Americans, members of Selkirk First Nation. They are the Hucha Hudan – the “flat land people.” Their culture is part of the Northern Tutchone group of Athapaskan cultures. They share the same language, same traditions, and many kinship ties with Northern Tutchone groups in Mayo and Carmacks.

Pelly Crossing has a surprising number of services for a community of its size. It has three baseball diamonds, a curling rink, an indoor hockey rink, a conference hall, a community hall, a youth centre, an ambulance/firehall, a nursing centre, a gas station/grocery store, as well as a small laundromat, a bank, and a post office. Seasonal services include free riverside camping and an outdoor restaurant. The two largest employers in the community are Selkirk First Nation and Eliza Van Bibber School.

Brief History

People of Selkirk First Nation have always hunted, fished, and trapped in this area but Pelly Crossing itself is a recent development – formerly, people moved seasonally in family groups, fishing at Tatlamun Lake, and hunting up the Macmillan and Pelly Rivers. They met as a group at a Native village several times a year near present-day Fort Selkirk. The area of Fort Selkirk, at the confluence of the Pelly and Yukon Rivers, was an important place for trade with Tlingit groups from the coast, and was also popular because there was a very good set of rapids for fishing nearby. The Hudson’s Bay Company located a fur-trading post here, Fort Selkirk, in the 1850’s. Fort Selkirk gradually became a town.

The economy of the Yukon was changing and leaving Fort Selkirk behind. Most of the First Nations people living in Fort Selkirk gradually moved to Minto, where an RCMP post had been established to the south. Steamers were being abandoned, and a new highway was built from Whitehorse to Dawson which bypassed Fort Selkirk altogether. The government established a new community for the people of Selkirk Nation at the site of the Van Bibber homestead, where the highway crossed the Pelly River, and called it Pelly Crossing.