Dawson City: Frozen Time
Located in the frigid climate of Canada’s Yukon, Dawson City was born virtually overnight when the discovery of gold in the region led to more than 100,000 would-be prospectors flooding into the area in the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1896, transforming a small settlement into a thriving boom town. While the population declined steeply following the end of the Gold Rush in 1899 (to south of 5,000 by 1902), its stillreasonable size and status as the territorial capital allowed it to remain a far-flung outpost of incipient 20th-century modernity— and thus a particularly distant site for the nascent practice of film exhibition. Dawson City was, effectively, the end of the filmdistribution line: films would arrive in town
