“Hollywood in the Klondike: Dawson City’s Big Movie Find”
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By Michael Gates; Lost Moose, 2023; 304 pages; $34.95.
In 1978, Michael Gates was a young museum curator living in Dawson City, in Canada’s Yukon Territory, when he met Frank Barrett, a local councilman and deputy mayor. Barrett had been supervising a crew excavating ground beneath a recently demolished ice rink. There, a backhoe removed a load of dirt containing a metal box. Work halted while the contents were examined. It was full of old black and white film reels, dating back to 1917.
The box was one of several that had been stored at an unknown date in a root cellar. The boxes contained many silent films produced in Hollywood in the early 20th century. The permafrost in the root cellar had kept the nitrate film reels chilled and preserved. It was an important discovery, both for its value to film historians and for its selection of titles, which revealed what Dawson’s viewers had seen decades earlier.
For Gates, the find prompted a deep dive into the entertainment options that have existed since Dawson’s early days, and in “Hollywood on the Klondike,” he shares what he found. It’s a story that reflects the growth of Dawson himself, from the 1890s, when hastily erected theaters provided predominantly male stampers with often obscure stage performances, to the rise of moving picture houses two decades later, offering a suitable family fare in what, for that time, becomes a settled community. It is the story of Dawson himself, told through the people and films found on his stages and screens.
Gates begins with a neat summary of the events leading up to the last great gold rush. It’s familiar territory for many readers, but it never gets old. The town came out of nowhere just months after the discovery of the precious metal in 1896 at what became known as Bonanza Creek. Initially, only miners already in the north clustered along the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike rivers, but by 1898 thousands were arriving from the south.
“The Klondike was a case study in the extreme,” Gates writes, as he begins to dispel some of the mythology that has long held popular conceptions of those early days. “Dawson City was nestled in the desert thousands of miles from civilization, but quickly became the most modern and cosmopolitan city.” He adds a page later that “the Mounted Police injected the stability that made Dawson City and the Klondike one of the most orderly gold rushes in history.”
It’s not that the city didn’t lack alcohol, gambling and prostitutes; it’s just that he wasn’t particularly rebellious or violent. As winter closed in on the fall of 1898, prospectors, stuck to the breaking point, crowded into saloons and halls where improvised stages hosted dancing girls, plays, musical performances, burlesque and more. With temperatures sometimes dropping 50 degrees or more below zero, crowded bars offering liquor, food and a show were a welcome relief to single men who were otherwise stuck in tiny cabins.
Drawing on newspaper reports and other historical records, Gates takes readers on a tour of the various establishments that sprang up along Dawson’s Front Street, overlooking the Yukon River. In the chaotic atmosphere of the boom town, these halls and theaters often changed names and ownership, but there were some constants in the entertainment to be had. Stage productions can be classical plays, popular musicals, professional shows, or local productions that capture and sometimes satirize the conditions of the distant burg. Theater names, such as Dawson’s Broadway and Monte Carlo, often demonstrated the aspirations of the frozen city, but others, such as Pioneer Hall and the Horseshoe, reflected reality.
Gates also introduces us to many of the performers who graced those stages during the city’s early years. The Newman Children, already veterans of the Skagway theater, were brought there by their parents in the summer of 1898, quickly becoming a popular act. Ten-year-old Margie danced, sang and acted as patrons showered her with coins and gold nuggets (she tragically died six years later). Versatile performer Cad Wilson captivated the men on stage with her suggestive singing, acting, costumes and routines.
Throughout its early history, Dawson’s buildings were put together quickly and cheaply, and the heavy use of kerosene lanterns and gas lights for winter lighting resulted in frequent fires throughout the city, often consuming theaters in the process. During a fire in April 1899, half of the Opera was destroyed, while the Tivoli Theater was reduced to embers. Within days, however, rebuilding began and both reopened within a month. However, just a year later, another fire in the city destroyed much of an island and demolished the Monte Carlo.
It wasn’t long before electricity came to downtown Dawson, bringing much safer light bulbs and allowing the showing of movies, still a novelty everywhere at the time. The fledgling film industry was growing just as Dawson was settling in, and films circulating across the United States and Canada began to appear on the city’s screens. Dawson was the end of the line for those movies. They were too expensive to ship back, so they went into storage, forgotten for more than half a century before the 1978 find.
By the 1910s, those moving pictures, along with wholesome stage performances, had slowly begun to supplant the more raunchy offerings of the peak years. Mining had shifted from individual prospectors to corporate ventures, and families had settled down. The city, like its entertainment, had been domesticated. “In post-Gold Rush Dawson, theater no longer consisted of ‘uninhibited productions characterized by risqué themes and double entendres,'” Gates writes.
“Hollywood on the Klondike” shows how Dawson went from a boom town to an established community through the entertainment consumed by the residents, a unique approach that gives readers a vivid sense of how the small town adapted to its rapidly changing demographics. Countless names flash across the pages, appearing in quickly rising theatrics and often disappearing soon after. It’s a story of theater that blossoms and falls apart, but somehow survives. Like Dawson himself.
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