MacBride Museum of Yukon History

The MacBride Museum covers Yukon history from the pre-contact Indigenous era through the Klondike Gold Rush and into the 20th century. The collection includes Gold Rush artefacts, Indigenous materials, natural history specimens, and the kind of practical tools and equipment that kept people alive in a remote northern territory for 150 years. The outdoor display of heavy equipment — old locomotives, mining machinery, riverboat parts — is particularly striking.

The museum is in downtown Whitehorse, within walking distance of the S.S. Klondike and the waterfront. The Gold Rush exhibits are the core of the collection and include photographs, maps, and personal items left by the tens of thousands who passed through on their way to Dawson City. Combined with the Beringia Centre, it gives a thorough picture of human activity in the Yukon from the Ice Age onwards.

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Among the museum's exhibits is a telegraph office that was once connected to the Yukon Telegraph system — a 3,000-kilometre line built through some of the world's most remote terrain in 1899-1901 to connect the Klondike goldfields to the outside world. The linemen who maintained it in winter lived in isolation cabins days apart, checking in twice daily by tapping out their position on the wire.

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