This historical analysis argues that agents of cultural contact - the trading company and mission churches - focussed the activities of native Eskimo and Indian peoples upon the Mackenzie Delta. Centrifugal forces exerted by whaling in the Beaufort Sea and the Klondike Gold Rush were short-lived and resulted in the more rapid acculturation of native peoples involved in them who eventually drifted back towards the Mackenzie Delta. The intensification of trapping after 1920 and the growth of a pattern of settlements confirmed the importance of the Mackenzie Delta in the ecological regimes of Eskimos, Indians and the white trappers who migrated there at this time, and favoured the emergence of a Delta Community.