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Nothing about YELLOWKNIFE - named after the copper knives of Slavey aboriginal people - can hide the fact that it's a city that shouldn't really be here. Its high-rise core of offices and government buildings exists to administer the NWT and support a workforce whose service needs keep a population of some 18,500 occupied in a region whose resources should by rights support only a small town. Even the Hudson's Bay Company closed its trading post here as early as 1823 on the grounds of economics, and except for traces of gold found by prospectors on the way to the Klondike in 1898, the spot was a forgotten backwater until the advent of commercial gold and uranium mining in the 1930s. This prompted the growth of the Old Town on an island and rocky peninsula on Great Slave Lake, and then in 1947 the New Town on the sandy plain behind it. In 1967, the year a road to the outside world was completed (Edmonton is 1524km away by car), Yellowknife replaced Ottawa as the seat of government for the NWT. Oiled by bureaucratic profligacy and the odd gold mine, the city has blossomed ever since, if that's the word for so dispersed and unprepossessing a place. Today, the chances are you'll only be here en route for somewhere else, for this is the hub of many airline routes across the NWT and parts of Nunavut.
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