City of Gold

A description and enactment of the discovery of gold by James Marshall, and the role played by John Sutter. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive.

Documents the highlights of a concert version of the musical written by former ABBA members Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, performed in Minnesota. Based on a series of novels detailing a family's poverty-driven migration from Sweden to America in the mid-19th century, we also meet some of the descendants to the emigrants.

Like a modern-day version of Deadwood, a makeshift gold mine on the remote Diosso hillside in Burkina Faso has attracted a swarm of gold-diggers and dynamite blasters, healers and dealers, vendors and prostitutes, children, holy men and barbers. Living in the promiscuous closeness of a crowded and improvised gold town, these men and women are recklessly determined to find the gold that will change their lives. The film explores their desperate quest for fortune and elusive happiness. The gold rush is relentless.

Renowned as the richest gold strike in North American mining history, the Klondike Gold Rush (1896-1899) set off a stampede of over 100,000 people on a colossal journey from Alaska to the gold fields of Canada's Yukon Territory. Filled with the frontier spirit, prospectors came and gave rise to what was one of the largest cities in Canada at that time - Dawson City. The boomtown, which became known as "the Paris of the North", earned the reputation as a place where lives could be revolutionized. Brought to life with excerpts from the celebrated book The Klondike Stampede - published in 1900 by Harper's Weekly correspondent Tappan Adney - and featuring interviews with award-winning author Charlotte Gray, and historians Terrence Cole and Michael Gates, The Klondike Gold Rush is an incredible story of determination, luck, fortune, and loss. In the end, it isn't all about the gold, but rather the journey to the Klondike itself.

During the Alaska gold rush, one way to reach the Klondike was over the Chilkoot Pass. A stationary camera is placed to see a ways down the curving trail. A pack train comes into view and passes in front of us, led by a man on horseback. Eight loaded mules follow, then another cowboy on horseback and a man walking, then eight more laden mules, another cowboy, then nine more mules, a cowboy, and still the pack train stretches as far as the eye can see. A solitary man watches from atop a hillock.