Yellowknife is the capital and largest city of the Canadian territory of Northwest Territories. The city’s prehistory started in the 1920s, when airplanes were used to explore Canada’s Arctic regions. Uranium and silver were found at Great Bear Lake in the early 1930s and this attracted settlers who soon found other metals as well.

Gold was also found in several places, and the discovery at the later Con Mine started an actual settlement in Yellowknife from 1936-1937. In the summer of 1938, Yellowknife boomed and shops, a tavern, a hotel and a bank were opened, and the Hudson’s Bay Company also established itself here. The population rose to 1,000 in 1940, and over the years more gold mines opened.

In 1967, Yellowknife officially became the capital of the Northwest Territories, and the population continued to grow as the city became the administrative town and later the service center for diamond mines north of the city. Today, the Legislative Building is in Yellowknife as the seat of the Legislative Assembly of the Northwest Territories.

The city center is located on a peninsula in Great Slave Lake, and you can get a good overview of the city and the area from the rock, where the Bush Pilot’s Monument stands as a memorial to the pilots who, with their flights in the unknown area, helped to open and develop this part of Canada. The monument stands on The Rock, which is accessed from the city’s roads by some stairs.

Downtown, you can also visit The Wildcat Café, a cozy cafe and restaurant housed in a building dating from 1937. The restaurant was the first to open in Yellowknife, and the log cabin stands as an lovely example of the early mining cabins of the newly established settlement. The Gold Range Hotel is another historic site in Yellowknife. The current hotel opened in 1958.

The modern center of Yellowknife is located to the southwest of the old town, and it differs from the oldest district. Along Franklin Avenue you can see some of the city’s high-rise buildings and some of Yellowknife’s shops. In this part of town, you can visit the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre, which is a heritage museum for the Northwest Territories.

You can take a walk and explore the city streets and see some of the preserved buildings of Yellowknife over the years. These include the Bank of Toronto’s log cabin from 1944, the Log School House from 1939, which was the first school in the city, and the Fireweed Studio from 1939, which was used to store explosives for mining in the area.