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The Dawson City Museum , 5th Avenue and Church Street (mid-May or June to Sept daily 10am-6pm; $5; tel 993-5291), has an adequate historical run-through of the gold rush from the first finds, though you get more out of the displays if you have some background to the period. Fascinating old diaries and newspaper cuttings vividly document the minutiae of pioneer life and events such as the big winter freeze of 1897-98 when temperatures reputedly touched -86°C, and of the summer heat wave of 1898 when the sun shone unbroken for almost 23 hours daily, bringing temperatures up to the upper thirties centigrade. The museum also shows some of the hundreds of old films that were discovered under the floorboards of a Dawson building a few years back. Its highlight - in fact, one of Dawson's highlights - is the wistful award-winning black-and-white film, City of Gold , a wonderful documentary which first drew the attention of the federal government to Dawson's decline in the 1950s. The museum also holds interesting touring exhibitions in the wood-framed rooms upstairs that once housed the council offices. You might also take a tour of the museum building (summer daily 11am, 1pm & 5pm), the former Territorial Administration Building (1901), during which you're shown the old court chambers (still occasionally used), the resource library and archive, the Visible Storage area (with some 6000 of the museum's 30,000 artefacts) and (outside) a view of the Victory Gardens (1910). The obvious locomotives outside the museum, incidentally, ran to Dawson from the gold fields between 1906 and 1914.
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