The Keno City Mining Museum building is Jackson Hall, Keno City’s old community centre built in the 1920s. This museum captures the gold and silver mining history of the area dating from the early 1900s. Displays of early tools and equipment, as well as memorabilia and photographs, offer the visitor precious glimpses into the experiences of everyday life in isolated northern mining communities. The Museum also boasts a fine gift shop featuring Keno City and mining-related souvenirs, plus a variety of works by some of the Yukon’s most gifted artists. Next door to the museum, the Alpine Interpretive Centre interprets the area’s natural history and serves as the starting point to a network of marked hiking trails.

SPOTLIGHT:

Crawler Tractor

Caterpillar’ track type tractor is labelled on the back, “The Fuel Crawler Co. 1919”

Caterpillar’ track type tractors were marketed as the necessary horseless farm implement of the twentieth century. In Yukon, ‘Caterpillar’ track trains replaced the horses for hauling freight. They first were used for hauling freight around the mines and transport goods between the communities. Eventually the tractors were used as an alternate for horses on the Overland Trail which ran from Whitehorse to Dawson City. The inaugural ‘Cat’ driven over land trip was driven by Emil Forrest and Cam Smith in the spring of 1925. It took them 16 days to complete. The men took longer then expected to complete the trek because they stopped periodically along the way to widen the trail where ever it was needed.

In 1922, the first 5-ton Holt gasoline tractor was unloaded from the barge in Mayo. Twenty horse drivers, dubbed ‘Skinners’ by the locals, turned out to see the machine that would bring about the end of the horse drawn era. After viewing the tractor it is said that the Skinners headed down to Binet’s hotel and drank away their sorrows.