Original subtitles

This is fascinating.

These are World Series shots from 1917-1919, look at that.

We'll get to the players and everything else in a moment.

That's the Reds and the White Sox, that's gotta be 1919.

Here's Bill Morrison, he's a documentarian.

He put all this together here.

What a fascinating job.

Bill, welcome, how are you today?

Good. Good to be here, Chris.

Just finding this is amazing, in Canada.

Just getting a hold of these videos is fascinating, huh?

It was an incredible story.

I welcome you to the Palace Grand Theater

which belongs to the people of Canada!

Well, I'm excited about this because, you know, I'm 66

and so I know what the silent films were all about.

And because we were at the end of the line up here,

there was no place else to send them.

So, they just got left here.

This today is the world premiere showing of these special films.

And here we got it, right in Dawson, in the Palace Grand.

I was going to start with a day in late June of 1978.

And I, at that point, had just become

the curator of collections

for Parks Canada's operation

at Klondike National Historic Sites in Dawson City.

And one day, a staff archaeologist from Winnipeg

walked in and stopped me in the hall and he said,

"I was just down at Diamond Tooth Gertie's

where they were tearing down the old recreation facility behind.

And they're digging up stuff there and," he said,

"it might be worthwhile to go and have a look."

So I went down to the site

and there had been some disturbance on the surface.

There was all kinds of strange debris lying about

including things like chicken wire

and broken curling rocks and bottles

and there were these metal containers

that contained reels of film,

also reels of film that were just lying randomly about,

and lengths of film lying thither and yon.

And the first question I asked myself

was is this the old nitrate stock?

And there's a very simple test for that.

You snip off a little bit and you light it with a match

and you can tell the difference.

If it's the later variety of safety film,

when you put a match to it it just curls up,

but with the nitrate film

it flares up quite violently.

And it turned out to be nitrate film

so I knew we were working with film

that was older rather than newer.

Talkies, or sound pictures,

generally have made a marvelous stride

of progress in the world of entertainment.

Dawson City sprang up overnight.

A rip-roaring shack town

where the only cheap thing was human life.

Where a lucky man could pluck a fortune out of the earth.

All that went with those days is now only a memory.

But what days they were while they lasted.

I didn't quite know what to do with it.

I examined a few of the reels and you could take them up

and you could start unspooling them like this

and if you held them up to the light

you could see images.

And one I opened and unspooled

and when I looked at it,

it said The Strange Case of Mary Page

which was the name of the film.

And I was later to discover that that film

showed in the theaters in Dawson in 1917.

When I called Klaus Hendricks at the National Archives--

he was their conservator--

he suggested that I speak to Sam Kula.

And Sam was very gregarious,

even in our initial conversation,

and he seemed quite interested

in what I was describing to him.

Well, that of course piqued my curiosity to no end,

so I pursued the matter with him over the telephone.

And he said, "Yes, there is a lot of film there.

There appears to be box after box of film,

not just an odd reel.

And it's coming out of what appears to have been

an old swimming hole that existed in Dawson."

Well, I had difficulty sort of processing this

because swimming pools and Dawson City

and The Far North didn't actually jibe

with my limited understanding of the Canadian North.

But it all came clear

because I decided it was really interesting

and I would go up there and see.

We brought him into town.

I can't remember if we even checked him

into the hotel first,

but we went to the site and examined it,

and he dug around a little bit.

And...

I do recall him saying that he thought

that there was an opportunity here

to recover films that had been lost to the film industry.

We discussed how we could undertake this.

And he realized that it would be difficult

to enter into a contract

with another government branch, bureaucratically,

because it's very complicated.

So I suggested that the museum might be interested

and that's when I contacted Kathy Jones

who was the director of the museum

and asked her if she would come down

to look at the films with us.

And she came down, brought her camera along

and took a few photos as we rooted around in this debris

that was scattered around

and we discussed what we could do with this film

and how we would salvage it.

Immediately after that, I took him to our office

and we sat in my office.

He got on the phone,

he contacted one of his minions in Ottawa

and he dictated the terms of the contract

over the telephone.

And we seemed we had it

almost as fast as it could possibly be delivered.

There was one building that was called the root cellar

and even in the height of summer

it was ice inside, so it was quite cold

and we knew that cold temperatures

would be the ideal place

for storage of these nitrate films.

So as they were uncovered, we hauled them out to Bear Creek

and we stored them inside the old root cellar.

And Kathy put an item in The Klondike Korner

describing what she'd found.

What I put in there, "Does anybody

have any idea what these films

were doing in the ground in the first place?"

And then we get this letter from a former bank manager.

Well, Cliff Thomson said, "I read with interest your query

in The Klondike Korner about these recovered films.

I'd like you to know that it's my fault."

He said a lot more than that, but in essence he said,

"I was the bank manager and in the good old days

the bank managers used to be the agents

for the major film distributors.

So the films would come to Dawson City

and for the most part remained in Dawson City,"

and he said, "Some we tossed into the Yukon River

when space ran out

and then ultimately we stored them

in the basement of the Carnegie Library,"

which was a half a block down

from where this DAAA building stood.

There was a Dawsonite, his name was John Gould,

and he was born and raised in Dawson

and as a child or youngster,

he would go to that old skating rink

for the hockey in the winter

and he said, come springtime when the ground thawed--

The film would start emerging from the ice,

and the kids would light it with a match

and it would flare up.

So he knew it was in the ground,

and then when we had this discovery, like all of us,

it was like, "We got another thing

that's come out of the Dawson permafrost."

And John said, "Well, what's all the hullabaloo about?

I knew it was in the ground."

We kind of looked at each other and said, you know,

"What else is Dawson going to uncover?"

We had a common interest in the history.

Yeah, just any time we got together,

we would spend hours just talking about

this bit of history, that bit of history.

And if Michael had discovered something

that I thought was interesting, I'd say,

"Oh, we've got one of those in the museum,"

or whatever it was.

And Michael and I got engaged

and the community thought it was absolutely hilarious

because I went around town saying,

"Oh, I've gotta go do this,"

and I had an engagement ring on my finger

and it was pretty obvious about what had just happened.

So anyway, we had completed the summer work.

The films had been gone through and they'd been sorted

and we managed to get all of the film

into these two crates and pack them up.

And a moving company was in town

and they were doing a domestic haul from Dawson to Whitehorse

and they agreed to put these two crates

in the back of the van

after they loaded this household of furniture.

And it got to Whitehorse

and when I went into the movers, they said,

"We know what that is, we've heard all about it on the radio

and we're not going to touch it."

I went to Greyhound and I said,

"We've got a couple of crates"

and they-- "Oh we know what that is

and that's hazardous material.

No way we're going to touch it!"

And then I went to Canadian Pacific Air Lines

and same thing.

So now we had the film in Whitehorse

but we couldn't get it any farther.

And so, how do we deal with this?

And one of my colleagues at Parks, a man named Jim Reilly,

said, "Oh, well, the military

handles dangerous stuff like that all the time."

So we suggested this to Sam Kula

and I'm not sure who talked to who,

but in the process they arranged for the Armed Forces

to bring a Hercules Transport into Whitehorse

and they loaded these two crates of nitrate film

on a plane with a battalion or platoon of soldiers

and then they flew from there to Ottawa.

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