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Packtrain in Dawson, 1899 (photographed by Eric A. Hegg)
Prior to the late modern period the area was used for hunting and gathering by the Hän-speaking people of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in and their forebears. The heart of their homeland was Tr'ochëk, a fishing camp at the confluence of the Klondike River and Yukon River, now a National Historic Site of Canada, just across the Klondike River from modern Dawson City. This site was also an important summer gathering spot and a base for moose-hunting on the Klondike Valley.
The current settlement was founded by Joseph Ladue and named in January 1897 after noted Canadian geologist George M. Dawson, who had explored and mapped the region in 1887. It served as Yukon's capital from the territory's founding in 1898 until 1952, when the seat was moved to Whitehorse.
View of 3rd Street c. 1899 by Eric A. Hegg
1941 aerial photo
Dawson City was the centre of the Klondike Gold Rush. It began in 1896 and changed the First Nations camp into a thriving city of 16,000–17,000 by 1898. By 1899, the gold rush had ended and the town's population plummeted as all but 8,000 people left. When Dawson was incorporated as a city in 1902, the population was under 5,000. St. Paul's Anglican Church, also built that same year, is a National Historic Site. The downtown was devastated by fire in November 1897 (started when dance hall girl Dolly Mitchell threw a lamp at another girl in an argument), 1899 (started in the Bodega Saloon), 1900 (started at the Monte Carlo Theatre) and flooding in 1925, 1944, 1966, 1969 and 1979.
The population dropped after World War II when the Alaska Highway bypassed it 518 kilometres (322 mi) to the south. The economic damage to Dawson City was such that Whitehorse, the highway's hub, replaced it as territorial capital in 1953. Dawson City's population languished around the 600–900 mark through the 1960s and 1970s, but has risen and held stable since then. The high price of gold has made modern placer mining operations profitable, and the growth of the tourism industry has encouraged the development of facilities. In the early 1950s, Dawson was linked by road to Alaska, and in fall 1955, with Whitehorse along a road that now forms part of the Klondike Highway.
In 1978, another kind of buried treasure was discovered with the Dawson Film Find when a construction excavation inadvertently uncovered a forgotten collection of more than 500 discarded films on highly flammable nitrate film stock from the early 20th century that were buried in (and preserved by) the permafrost. These silent-era film reels, dating from "between 1903 and 1929, were uncovered in the rubble beneath [an] old hockey rink". Owing to its dangerous chemical volatility, the historical find was moved by military transport to Library and Archives Canada and the U.S. Library of Congress for both transfer to safety film and storage. A documentary about the find, Dawson City: Frozen Time, was released in 2016.
Another film, City of Gold (1957) , by Colin Low and Wolf Koenig, and narrated by Pierre Berton, chronicling Dawson City during the Klondike Gold Rush, made innovative use of archival photos, winning First Prize for documentary film at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival.
The City of Dawson and the nearby ghost town of Forty Mile are featured prominently in the novels and short stories of American author Jack London, including The Call of the Wild. London lived in the Dawson area from October 1897 to June 1898. Other writers who lived in and wrote of Dawson City include Pierre Berton and the poet Robert Service. The childhood home of the former is now used as a residency and retreat for professional writers administered by the Writers' Trust of Canada.
In 2023, the Dawson City townsite became part of the Tr’ondëk-Klondike UNESCO World Heritage Site, because of its archaeological record highlighting the transformation of the site from predominantly Indigenous to predominantly European use, and the adaptations that the Indigenous people made in response to European colonialism.
On May 17, 2026, the iconic Gold Rush-era Westminster Hotel was razed to the ground by a fire.
