Beechey Island has been an important landmark for almost every vessel that has entered the High Arctic over the last two centuries. Sir John Franklin explored this region beginning in 1819. In July 1845, Sir John Franklin and his crew of 129 men entered the waters of Lancaster Sound in search of the Northwest Passage. The Franklin party went missing and was never heard from again. The search for the missing expedition began two years later and continued until 1880. Northumberland House on Beechey Island was built in 1852-1853 by Commander W. J. S. Pullen, H.M.S. North Star, of the 1852-54 expedition of Sir Edward Belcher. This was the British Admiralty's final concerted effort to trace Sir John Franklin and his crew. Northumberland House was intended as a supply depot for use by the members of the Franklin expedition, should they return to Beechey Island. It contained a dwelling, store, and smithy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Northumberland House served as a safe winter refuge and site for securing provisions and messages by Canadian and British voyages. Beechey Island was declared a site of territorial historic significance by the Government of the Northwest Territories in 1979.

It was on the second expedition of Franklin that Fort Franklin came into being as the staging area and winter quarters for a party of nearly fifty people. Factor Peter Warren Dease of the Hudson's Bay Company selected one of the most productive Dene fisheries in the Mackenzie River drainage as the location of the Fort. It was known locally as Déline ("where the water flows"), on Sahtu (Great Bear Lake), near the present-day community of the same name. The expedition came into close contact with the Dogrib who wintered there, and with the Hare-Slavey and Gwich'in who journeyed from along the north shore of Sahtu to trade meat and furs. The meat trade with the Dene of Great Bear Lake was essential to the expedition's food supply.

Fort Hope, located on the North Pole River flowing into Repulse Bay, near a place now called Neakongut, was the winter quarters of Dr. John Rae (1813-93) of the Hudson's Bay Company and ten men of the Arctic Expedition of 1846-47. This outpost was used to study the aurora borealis and magnetic fields. On his next stay at Repulse Bay in 1853-54, Rae preferred to live in a snow house less than one kilometre south of Fort Hope. Charged with exploring the coastline between Fury and Hecla Straits and the Boothia landmass, Rae's first Arctic expedition charted 1100 kilometres of coastline around Committee Bay, revealing that Boothia is a peninsula and that the Northwest Passage did not lie in this direction. Covering 21,000 kilometres, often on foot and snow shoe, Rae mounted four expeditions into the Arctic, surveying over 2800 kilometres of coastline previously uncharted by Europeans. He is respected for his ability to travel rapidly and lightly by supporting his party on the resources of the land and using Inuit ways.

Located near Wool Bay outside the City of Yellowknife are the remains of Old Fort Providence, a North West Company, and later a Hudson's Bay Company, trading post. One of the first posts on Great Slave Lake, it was established in 1786 by Peter Pond, a fur trader and explorer, as an outpost camp and used for about two seasons. In 1789, Alexander Mackenzie replaced Pond as the head of the North West Company's operations in the Athabasca region and re-opened the camp as a trading post. On his exploration of the great river called Deh Cho by the Dene and which later came to bear his name, Mackenzie left a trader and a canoe full of goods to set up the post. After its amalgamation with the North West Company, the Hudson's Bay Company assumed control of the post in 1821. By this time Fort Providence had been in decline for some years, and by 1822 had dwindled to only a two-man operation. After thirty-seven years of service, the post was abandoned in 1823. Old Fort Providence should not be confused with the post of the same name located on the Mackenzie River, at the site of the present-day community of Fort Providence.

The East Arm of Great Slave Lake is a land of spectacular beauty. One of the best preserved sites of early exploration in the western Subarctic is Old Fort Reliance. It was originally erected in 1833 as winter headquarters for the Arctic Land Expedition, led by George Back, R.N. His party travelled by way of the Back River to the Arctic Coast in an effort to locate the missing John Ross expedition and conduct scientific studies. In 1855 the fort was rebuilt on a smaller scale by Chief Factor James Anderson of the Hudson's Bay Company. Again it was intended as winter quarters for an overland journey, down the Back River to the Arctic Coast in search of Sir John Franklin and his crew who had disappeared in quest of the elusive Northwest Passage. The final episode of construction at the fort was by an American hunter, named Buffalo Jones who raised a log cabin in 1897, incorporating one of the chimneys into the structure. Today all that remains are the chimneys, storage pits, and the outlines of the log buildings in the earth.