The strong life that never knows harness;
The wilds where the caribou call;
The freshness, the freedom, the fairness –
O God! How I'm stuck on it all.
“The Spell of the Yukon” (1907)

Robert W. Service, “The Bard of the Yukon,” “The Canadian Kipling,” brought the magic of the Klondike Gold Rush to millions of readers worldwide. His writings captured the essence of Canada's Northern dimension, and his romantic imagination indelibly stamped the land of the midnight sun, northern lights, and arctic wilds upon the popular North American concept of Canada.
 

Although American writers such as Jack London, Rex Beach, James Oliver Curwood, and Zane Grey generated interest in and curiosity about the Yukon, it was the poetry of Robert Service that did the most to spur interest in the land of the midnight sun. In fact, by 1940, Songs of a Sourdough, first published in 1907, had sold over three million copies. [Photo, courtesy National Archives of Canada/PA-110158]

The claim is often made that Service has been the most widely read poet of the twentieth century. He certainly was the most successful in material terms, and while the self-deprecating Service would be the first to admit that quotability is no proof of literary merit, his works occupy more space in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations than those of all other Canadian poets combined. In the half century following the publication of Songs of a Sourdough in 1907, Service churned out more than a dozen other books of verse, numerous collected volumes, six novels, a two-volume autobiography, a song book, and a fitness guide. But his fame would have been assured had it rested solely upon that first slender volume (also released in the American market as The Spell of the Yukon), introducing as it did such immortal classics as “The Law of the Yukon,” “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” This modest tome for which Service is principally remembered began life as a “vanity” run of 100 copies as keepsakes to bestow “with apologetic wistfulness” upon kindly acquaintances. By 1940 it had sold over three million copies and “Dan McGrew” and “Sam McGee” had earned Service more than half a million dollars.

Service’s interest in the Yukon came about almost by accident. Robert William Service was born in Preston, England, in 1874. The family moved to Scotland and Service was educated in Glasgow. He entered the Commercial Bank of Scotland and attended evening classes at the University of Glasgow, but soon gave up formal education in disgust. In 1896 he emigrated to Canada, arriving at Victoria, British Columbia, with five dollars in his pocket. For the next seven years he attended “the College of Hard Knocks, graduating without enthusiasm.” Like Woody Guthrie or Steinbeck’s migrant workers in a later era, he wandered up and down the west coast of North America “in vagabondage.” Almost destitute, he found occasional work as a farm labourer, a potato digger, an orange picker, a tutor and handyman in a rural bordello, a dishwasher, a road worker, and a travelling balladeer. Riding the rails, frequenting soup kitchens, and begging for bread, he meandered towards Mexico in 1898, incredibly almost oblivious to the northward flow of the sea of humanity at the outbreak of the Klondike Gold Rush.

Tiring of the vagabond life and seeking security, in 1903 he accepted work as a bank clerk at the Canadian Bank of Commerce in Victoria. The following year he was transferred to Kamloops and almost immediately to the bank’s branch in Whitehorse. There in the autumn of 1904, at the urging of Stroller White, the editor of the Whitehorse Star, he wrote his most celebrated verse, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” as if “someone was whispering in [his] ear,” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee” a month later while walking home from a party along a woodland trail “in a strange ecstasy.” Thus it was that Songs of a Sourdough, containing Service’s most renowned verse, was written before he ever set foot in the Klondike. Thanks in part to the wizardry of Robert Bond, William Brigg’s best salesman, the collection “took off” in the spring of 1907 and went through 15 printings before the end of the year, each one larger than its predecessor, a feat unheard-of for Canadian verse.

Robert became Whitehorse’s principal tourist attraction, so it was with a sense of relief that the shy and diffident bank clerk was transferred to Dawson in April 1908. Service had missed the heyday of the Gold Rush by a full decade and Dawson had now shrunk from 40,000 to just under 4,000 inhabitants. His new friend and neighbour, Laura Thompson (later Berton), mother of Pierre, had expected, based on his poetry, “a rip-roaring roisterer” but instead found a “shy and non-descript man in his mid thirties,” prim and proper in his high starched collars, with a voice combining an “English inflection, an American drawl and Scottish overtones.”

By November 1909, the royalty cheques had dwarfed his salary to such an extent that Robert retired from the Bank rather than accept a transfer. He devoted himself full time to his writing and turned out Ballads of Cheechako (1909), Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (1912), and his first novel, The Trail of Ninety-Eight, a Northland Romance (1910). Ironically for someone so mystically attached to the Canadian North, Service departed from the Yukon in the summer of 1912 and never returned. Laura Berton summarized his literary achievement in the Yukon, noting that of the hundreds of writers who had spent their lives producing whole libraries on the North, many based on first-hand pioneering experiences, “only this quiet, colourless bank clerk succeeded in capturing the strange mixture of magic and tragedy, hope and heartbreak, of which the gold camps of the Yukon are compounded. It is a tribute to him that his books sell nowhere as well as they do in Dawson itself.”

Service departed for Europe as The Toronto Daily Star war correspondent for the Second Balkan War. Settling in Paris in March 1913, he spent most of the remaining 46 years of his life in France, marrying Germaine Bourgoin in June 1913 and acquiring, that same summer, the other love of his life, “Dream Haven,” his home in Lancieux, on the Emerald Coast of Brittany, just west of Dinard. Except for a five-year absence which he and his family spent in Vancouver and Hollywood during the Occupation, he would spend his summers in Brittany and his winters in Paris until 1929 and thereafter in Nice and later Monte Carlo. During World War I, he was briefly correspondent for The Toronto Daily Star, served with the Red Cross Ambulance Service Corps near Verdun, and finally was attached to the Canadian Expeditionary Force, receiving a commission to tour France and report on the activities of Canadian troops.

Following the War, Service continued to write verse and novels loosely based upon his experiences. He was never under any illusion as to the literary merits of his verse: he wrote it to sell. He also had a lifelong healthy loathing of academic, intellectual, and class pretensions. He felt that “stuffed shirtism” was “the camouflage of charlatans.... Dignified men are hypocrites and frauds. No man who has the honesty to see himself as he really is can be anything but humble. Only fools take themselves seriously....” As he explained in Ballads of a Bohemian (1921), “Imagination is the great gift of the gods. Given it, one does not need to look afar for subjects. There is romance in every face.”

With Germaine and his young daughter Iris, Robert visited Hollywood in the early 1920s. He had received $5,000 for the film rights to The Shooting of Dan McGrew (1924), a remake of the 1915 version. In 1929, The Trail of ’98 was also made into a movie starring Dolores del Rio and Ralph Forbes. Service’s own acting debut came in the 1942 remake of Rex Beach’s The Spoilers starring Randolph Scott and John Wayne. In a scene with the film’s dance hall heroine, played by Marlene Dietrich, Robert played himself, forty years younger, busily scribbling “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” in a corner of a saloon. Indeed, “Dan McGrew” had one more reincarnation of note in 1952 in the first-ever production of a ballet with a Canadian theme.

Robert Service died in September 1958, and that immortality he first sensed on opening the package containing his author’s copies of Songs of a Sourdough in the Spring of 1907 has surpassed his wildest dreams. Memorials abound to his memory from the Yukon to Romania, where Queen Marie chose his verses in memory of their mutual friend, Colonel Joe Boyle (1867-1923), DSO, OBE. No poet save Robert Burns has enjoyed such a wide popularity with the common man, and high-profile fans include Ronald Reagan and the Queen Mother.
 

The first edition of Ballads of a Cheechako was published in 1909. A "cheechako" in the Yukon was a newcomer, a man who had never seen the ice go out or had yet to spend his first winter in the Yukon. Songs of a Sourdough, first published in 1907, included sentimental favourites “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” A “sourdough” was one who had spent a full year in the Yukon and had seen ice worms. Reproduced in the United States as The Spell of the Yukon (1909), this combined edition sold over three million volumes. [Courtesy Charles J. Humber Collection]

Of those he made famous through his writing, “The Ragtime Kid,” Hartley Claude Myrick, passed away in Seattle in July 1950. “The Lady known as Lou,” cabaret singer Lulu Johnson, was drowned when the Canadian Pacific Steamer, Princess Sofia, sank in the Lynn Canal on October 25, 1918. And Sam McGee, a Dawson prospector whose name Robert had lifted from the Bank ledger and who actually came from Lindsay, Ontario, left the Yukon in 1909, settled in Great Falls, Montana, and was eventually decently interred in Beiseker, Alberta, having spent much of his life responding to queries about whether he was “warm” enough yet. But Robert Service lives on in the Canadian national imagination which his writings did much to stir and inspire.

Murray Barkley