The Gold Rush was on. In the late 1890s, thousands of miners flocked to the Yukon Territory

in Western Canada, not far from its border with the future American state of Alaska.

The miners converged on a sleepy fishing village called Dawson at the confluence of the Yukon

and Kondike rivers. Dawson became the epicenter of the Kondike Gold Rush, one of the last

gold rushes in North America. But the boom was brief. After just two years, the mines

were played out and the miners had largely moved on to strikes in British Columbia and Alaska.

About 1300 hardy souls stayed in Dawson City and they were literally at the end of the

line. The Kondike Highway dead ended at Dawson City. If you wanted to go past it, you had to blaze

your own trail. So in the early 1900s, the people of Dawson had film reels delivered to their

small community to keep up with events in the outside world. But it was a one-way trip for the films.

When they arrived in Dawson, they never left. The townsfolk watched all kinds of things,

feature films, comedy shorts, human interest stories, and newsreels of current events.

In those days, the film reels were made with a nitrate base, which meant they were extremely

flammable and could decompose easily if they weren't stored in the proper conditions.

After the people of Dawson watched their films, they didn't want to just toss them in a pile or

throw them in the river, so they buried them. They buried them under an abandoned swimming pool that

was being used as an ice rink. More than 50 years passed, and then the town of Dawson decided

it wanted to get rid of that old ice rink, so construction workers dug it up. When they did,

they discovered a treasure trove of old films that were perfectly preserved in the cold ground

under the rink. It took many years to safely transport the combustible films to a laboratory

to have them digitized for modern consumption, and some of them have still never been seen.

But in 2014, a Chicago filmmaker named Bill Morrison visited the Library and Archives Canada

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