Haines is a small Southeast Alaska community on the Chilkat Peninsula, at the north end of Lynn Canal between Chilkat Inlet and Chilkoot Inlet, about 75 miles (121 km) north-northwest of Juneau and 15.5 miles (25 km) south-southwest of Skagway, Alaska. The area was called “Dtehshuh,” or “Deishú,” meaning “end of the trail,” by the Chilkat Tlingit, who used a portage trail instead of paddling 24 miles (39 km) around the southern tip of the peninsula. The Chilkats were a large and powerful Tlingit tribe, known for their exclusive control of trade routes into the interior, which let them act as middlemen in the fur trade and amass great wealth. They had several clans and many village sites along the Chilkat and Chilkoot rivers, but today only Klukwan remains occupied.

The first Europeans to visit were members of Captain George Vancouver‘s expedition, in July 1794, when Vancouver sent Joseph Whidbey, the sailing master of HMS Discovery, and a small party up Lynn Canal to Chilkat Inlet. The canal was later named for Vancouver’s birthplace, King’s Lynn, Norfolk, England. Explorers and traders grew more frequent in the following decades: Captain Richard Jeffrey Cleveland sailed the American cutter Caroline to the end of Taiya Inlet in 1799, and John D’Wolf led a trading excursion in 1805 aboard the American brig Juno. In 1869, William Henry Seward, his son Frederick, and surveyor George Davidson of the U.S. Coast Survey visited Klukwan to view a total eclipse. In 1879, George Dickinson opened a trading post for the North West Trading Company. In 1881, Samuel Hall Young, a Presbyterian missionary from Fort Wrangell, won permission from the Chilkat to build a mission school for Native children; with financial help from Sheldon Jackson, the school was built on land the Chilkat donated along the portage trail. In 1884 the mission was renamed “Haines,” honoring Francina E. Haines, who chaired the fundraising committee for its construction.

In 1880 a group of miners, including John Lemon and led by Edmund Bean, gained Chilkat permission to enter the interior, adding to pressure on the tribe to open trade access. Through the 1890s their trading income shrank as others began hauling freight over the passes themselves. In 1898 gold was discovered in the Porcupine placer district, spurring action to resolve the Alaska–Canada boundary dispute and prompting Skagway’s garrisoning by U.S. federal troops. From 1898 to 1899 the Klondike Gold Rush transformed the region, and Haines became a supply center for the Dalton Trail, an alternative route from Chilkat Inlet to the Yukon for prospectors. Construction began in 1903 on a permanent military post near Haines; garrisoned in 1904, it was named Fort William H. Seward for the secretary of state who negotiated the 1867 Alaska Purchase from Russia. By 1909 the post covered more than 4,000 acres (1,600 ha) with 85 wood-framed buildings, providing both a policing presence for gold miners and a military one during the Alaska boundary dispute negotiations with Canada. Today Haines sits at the end of the Haines Highway, which begins at Haines Junction on the Alaska Highway and is a popular route for travelers from Southcentral Alaska connecting to the Alaska Marine Highway terminal. Read more here and here. Explore more of Haines and Chilkoot Inlet here: