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The townsite was named in January 1897 after noted Canadian geologist George Mercer Dawson, who had explored the region in 1887. It served as the Yukon's capital from the territory's founding in 1898 until 1952, when the seat was moved to Whitehorse.
The Klondike Gold Rush started in 1896 changed the native summer fish camp into a thriving city of 40,000 by 1898. By 1899Events January events January 1 End of Spanish rule in Cuba. January 1 Queens and Staten Island merge with New York City. January 3 The first known use of the word " automobile", in an editorial in the New York Times''. January 6 Lord Curzon becomes a vic, the gold rush had ended and the town's population plummetted as 8,000 people left. When Dawson was incorporated as a city in 1902Events January-April January 28 The Carnegie Institution is founded in Washington, DC with a $10 million gift from Andrew Carnegie. France, Loisy's L'evangile et l'Eglise which inaugurates the Modernist Crisis February 11 Police beat up universal suffrage, the population was under 5,000.
Many of the major buildings in town are part of the Dawson National Historic Site. There are a number of displays in some of the old buildings, and parks employees dress up like characters from the Klondike Gold Rush. Also in the Dawson area is the Dredge No. 4 National Historic Site of Canada and the S.S. Keno National Historic Site of Canada.
Dawson experiences annual temperature highs of 22°C (71°F) in July and temperature lows of -32°C (-26°F) in January. Dawson has an annual snowfall of 164 cmcm redirects here, alternate uses: cm (disambiguation A centimetre (symbol cm American spelling: centimeter is an SI unit of length. One centimetre is: one-hundredth of one metre one-tenth of a decimetre ten millimetres. millimetre << centimetre << decime and 232 cm of rainfall. Dawson averages 91 frost free days per year.
Today, Dawson City's main industries are tourism and gold mining.
Yukon communities