Buried treasure

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/08/2022 (1454 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Can one write about the Dawson City Great Film Find without first detailing the history of the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896-1899, an intense, unique period in Canadian history?

Not according to Michael Gates, the author of Hollywood in the Klondike, who begins his book in 1978, when a bulldozer demolishing a hockey rink turned up hundreds of discarded silent movies buried and preserved in the permafrost.

Gates should know. He’s spent nearly 50 years studying the past in the Yukon. He writes about it extensively.

The title of the book is a misnomer, though, because it’s mostly about how the Yukon changed when prospectors, still thirsty for riches after the California Gold Rush, moved north in the 1870s to sift through the rivers and dig into the clay, enduring starvation, scurvy, tuberculosis and frostbite for their efforts.

The small settlement grew from a jumble of buildings, huts and shanties, “with the words ‘Hotel,’ ‘Saloon,’ and ‘Opera House’” painted on, where, “though bread is often lacking, whiskey is never scarce,” writes Gates. After months of working in brutal sub-Arctic darkness, miners sought human connection and entertainment.

The population exploded when prospectors George Carmack and Skookum Jim uncovered bedrock “studded with gold nuggets” in Bonanza and Eldorado creeks at the end of 1896. Word went south, and within the next year, about 100,000 people headed north to Skagway, Alaska, then hauled 900-plus kilograms of supplies over the brutal Chilkoot Trail. The punishing mountains caused many to return, but in 1898, 40,000 people circulated through Dawson City. Gold dust became the currency of exchange, but after most of the profitable claims were staked (“some lived on champagne, while others ate beans”), many started businesses to service the population, including Alexander Pantages and Sid Grauman, who later found fortune in the south.

Gates notes that “modern” civilization caused the complete displacement of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in people, who had fished and hunted in the area for untold centuries. Their way of life was destroyed rapidly — fish habitat by placer mining and later dredging, and by the poisoning of waterways through the byproducts of gold refining. Forest habitat was razed; the pounding of hammers a constant din as structures were thrown up at a dizzying pace, replaced frequently when they were gutted by fire.

Dawson was dubbed “The Paris of the North,” although when a new vein of gold was discovered in Nome, Alaska, in 1899, most people abandoned it. The number of residents dwindled to less than 1,000 by 1921. Those hardy few established institutions fit for a cosmopolitan city. Gates includes biographies and anecdotes about the colourful vaudeville stars who sang, danced and acted in dance halls and theatres there, and writes about a declining town struggling to maintain its dignity.

That’s why the silent films ended up there, the final stop on a two- to three-year circuit, with Dawson citizens paying to watch them. The copies were too worn for the Hollywood companies to spend money on their return. And so, they became landfill.

But inside the cache was a different treasure. Silents were made using highly flammable cellulose nitrate film; about 75 per cent of Hollywood’s inventory had already been lost to fire or decay. The bulldozer dredged up film history thought to have vanished; film historians have been copying and studying them ever since. Unsurprisingly, Gates is featured in a 2016 documentary of the same name by American filmmaker Bill Morrison.

While the title may be a misnomer, Gates has written a lively, fulsome history of the Yukon, and can that be a bad thing? Hardly.

Harriet Zaidman is a children’s and freelance writer in Winnipeg. Her latest novel, Second Chances, is set in the polio epidemics of the 1950s.