Watch the Eye Witness episode on Yellowknife from 1948. Skip to 4:29 for the Yellowknife segment of the show.
“People are now here to live, not just to camp. They’re building a new town.”
So states a narrator over one of the latest archive videos released by the National Film Board: an edition of Eye Witness that explores Yellowknife in the late 1940s.
Eye Witness 3, released in 1948 and published to the National Film Board’s website this year, first shows European immigrants arriving in Halifax before the film makes its way to Yellowknife via Great Slave Lake.
Crews are shown dragging a huge hydro turbine across the lake. Later in the movie, work is shown taking place at Snare River to create one of the first hydro dams that would power Yellowknife in its earliest days.
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“With luck, Snare River should start delivering power next November,” the narrator continues. The Snare system is still the city’s primary power source now.
Eye Witness was a documentary series designed to show Canada to Canadians that ran from 1947 to 1958. The show’s first producer was Don Mulholland, who worked on the Yellowknife episode and dispatched a camera operator to Yellowknife to record a sense of how the young community was growing.
The film focuses exclusively on Yellowknife’s growth, its gold mines and the growing fishing industry, alongside the difficulties of northern logistics. There’s no mention of the North’s Indigenous peoples and nobody is interviewed. (Full production teams only began travelling alongside camera operators in later episodes of Eye Witness.)
There are some general views of Yellowknife that remain recognizable today, particularly aerial shots at the end of the reel where what is now Old Town and Latham Island can be seen – without the causeway that now connects Latham Island to the rest of the city.
To see the Yellowknife segment of the video only, skip to the 4:29 mark.
