[6] After the gold discovery, two Alaska Commercial Company traders, Jack McQuesten and Arthur Harper, built a post at the mouth of the river.

Between 1968 and 1978, Cassiar Mining extracted about a million metric tons of asbestos from three open pits along Clinton Creek, a tributary of lower Fortymile River in the Yukon.

[7] After abandoning the site, the company went bankrupt in 1992, and the territorial and Canadian governments and others removed or buried mine wastes, stabilized the creek banks, and worked to partly restore the land.

[4] One of the watershed's hydrologic features, the Kink, is an artificial channel that is part of a Class V rapids on the North Fork.

Mining interests blasted the channel through a ridge in 1904 in order to expose 3 miles (5 km) of the original riverbed for prospecting on dry land.