In 1914, the White Pass and Yukon, which had been running steamboats on the upper Yukon River (White Horse to Dawson), bought the Northern Navigation Company, which operated steamboats from Dawson to Tanana (near Fairbanks). This gave it a monopoly on those parts of the river until 1923. When the Alaska Railroad, which had reached the Tanana River in 1922, bought its own steamboats, the White Pass reduced its operations but continued to serve the area.

Click image to download a 3.7-MB PDF of this 20-page booklet.

This booklet promotes the “Yukon River Circle Tour,” but describes only a part of that tour in detail. Apparently, the entire tour consisted of taking an Alaska Railroad train from Seward to Nenana on the Tanana River, then steamboats to Dawson City and White Horse, then the White Pass railroad to Skagway. This booklet describes the route of the river boat from Nenana to Fort Yukon, which is above the Arctic Circle but still well short of Dawson City.

The booklet includes eight somewhat muddy photographs and a map on the back cover that shows Dawson but not White Horse or Skagway. The booklet is undated but refers to a monument erected by the Hudson Bay Company at Fort Yukon in 1927. In the face of competition from the Alaska Railroad, the White Pass Route ended its operations on this segment of the river in 1941, so the booklet must have been issued between these two dates.

We’ve previously seen a 1948 booklet that has the same dimensions as this one (3-1/2″ high by 6″ wide) but more pages (56) and which focuses on the Skagway-to-Dawson portion of the trip. The similarity in size suggests that today’s booklet was probably issued near the end of the 1930s.