150 U. S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 217 



western mountains of America. The Porcupine Valley thus forms 

 the eastern 250 miles of a corridor extending over thirty degrees of 

 longitude from the Bering and western arctic coasts nearly to the 

 central arctic coast and the great interior valley of North America. 



The Porcupine Eiver provided the first route for Canadian com- 

 merce between the Mackenzie Valley and interior Alaska. After 

 having established Fort McPherson in 1840 John Bell crossed the 

 Richardson Mountains in 1844 with Indian guides and traveled down 

 Bell River to the Porcupine and southwestward to its junction with 

 the Yukon (Osgood, 1936). In 1847 Alexander Murray traveled 

 the same course to establish Fort Yukon as a trading post for the 

 Hudson's Bay Company, and in his journal (1910) vividly described 

 the Kutchin people, the animals, and the country. Related Kutchin 

 tribes lived on the Peel River, where they traded with Fort MacPher- 

 son, and on the Porcupine, upper Yukon, and Chandalar Rivers, 

 where Murray sought their furs in exchange for the scarce and costly 

 trade goods which his company had transported across the continent. 

 Sir John Richardson, one of the earliest biologists (1829) to evidence 

 his understanding of the geographical distribution of life over all 

 northern North America, quickly recognized the importance of 

 Murray's location by soliciting from him information about the mi- 

 grations of birds. Murray's reply, which Sir John quotes (1852), 

 provides in brief and vivid expressions the first recorded information 

 of the great spring migration of birds passing the upper Yukon and 

 lower Porcupine Valleys. 



Travel along the Porcupine was then easier than through the moun- 

 tains by way of the Liard to the headwaters of the Yukon. In the 

 early times the Kutchin people were better disposed toward the white 

 fur traders than were the Indians near the head of the Yukon River, 

 where the Chilkoot Tlingit, with the intention of reserving the area 

 for their own trade, destroyed the early Fort Selkirk. Above the 

 junction of the Bell River with the Porcupine, Lapierre House was es- 

 tablished on the west side of MacDougall Pass as an intermediate sta- 

 tion between Fort Yukon and Fort MacPherson. There Robert Ken- 

 nicott visited briefly in 1860, 1861, and 1862 (Preble, 1908). In 

 September Kennicott traveled down the Porcupine to stay at Fort 

 Yukon until the summer of 1861. From his inspiring influence upon 

 the educated employees of the Hudson's Bay Company there developed 

 that interest for natural history which produced collections upon which 

 most of our early knowledge of northern Mackenzie depends. One of 

 these, B. R. Ross (1861 and 1862), then in charge of the Mackenzie 

 district, was first to report observations on birds in northern interior 

 Yukon from Lapierre House, and he also gathered an extensive col- 

 lection. By 1900 steam transportation on the Yukon and traffic over 



