| elevation_footnotes = 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 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.
Geography
Dawson City lies on the Tintina Fault. This fault has created the Tintina Trench and continues eastward for several hundred kilometres. Erosional remnants of lava flows form outcrops immediately north and west of Dawson City.
Climate
Dawson City has a subarctic climate (Köppen climate classification: Dfc), with significantly higher continentality (greater temperature swings) than the territory capital of Whitehorse.
The average temperature in July is and in January is . and the average rainfall in July is and the average snowfall in January is . Dawson has an average total annual snowfall of and averages 77 frost free days per year.
Demographics
thumb|Streetscape and landslide at mountain side; Dawson City, 1964