Prisoners of the North

by Berton, Pierre

There are strange things done after half past one

  By the men who search for gold;

  The arctic histories have their eerie mysteries

  That would make your feet go cold

  The Aurora Borealis has seen where Montreal is

  But the queerest it ever did spot

  Was the night on the periphery of Lake McKiflery

  I cremated Sam McKlot.

  In this early version of the ballad, we can see Service struggling to develop the galloping rhythm that gave his work such an appeal to platform performers. Here he introduced the inner rhyming that is not present in “McGrew” but marks so many of his later ballads. Each of his lines is seven beats long, divided into two sections; the first four beats contain the inner rhyme: “The Arctic trails have their secret tales” while the next three beats repeat, amplify, or expand the original statement, “that would make your blood run cold.”

  Service’s audiences were used to this pattern through the nursery rhymes of childhood (“Jack and Jill,” “Old King Cole,” for example) and school-book standbys such as “The Wreck of the Hesperus.” Service himself was brought up with this metre, and in his ballads he rarely departed from it. But it must have galled him in later years to realize that these twin efforts, which he tossed aside in a drawer with his shirts, should be the ones that would enshrine his reputation. He wrote some two thousand verses and published at least a thousand, but these two ballads, along with “The Spell of the Yukon”—a phrase he put into the language—are the only ones that are still remembered, and all from that first collection. Of the three, the one he loathed, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” is still the most often quoted.

  The two ballads are quite different. “McGrew” preserves the theatrical unities; it takes place on a single set, the Malamute Saloon, and in “real” time: the entire action occupies not much more than ten minutes. “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” by contrast, is acted out like a wide-screen movie. It moves through time and space along the Dawson Trail to Lake Laberge, and it depends entirely on its Yukon environment (“And the heavens scowled and the huskies howled and the wind began to blow”). “McGrew,” by contrast, is that old standby, the Western shoot-’em-up, or it seems to be.

  Service’s personal lexicon was crowded with short, blunt words that fitted his subjects. In “McGee,” for instance, there is scarcely a word longer than two syllables, and the exception “cre-ma-tor-ium” is spelled out thus for bizarre and comic effect. Service changed “search for gold” to “moil for gold” and made that unexpected verb his own. It is so intrinsically connected to the ballad that I doubt any writer would dare use it for fear of being called a copycat. (Curiously, one Service scholar, Edward Hirsch, managed to get it wrong when he quoted the line as “men who toil for gold.”) Occasionally, when Service couldn’t find an offbeat word to suit his purpose, he made one up. Thus, in “McGrew,” the stranger’s eyes “went rubbering round the room.” It’s not in the Oxford dictionary as a verb, but it certainly fits.

  The author of “McGee” was not above adding a bizarre and mystic note to his work—as when he flings the frozen corpse into the roaring furnace of a derelict steamboat, the Alice May, which lies rotting on Lake Laberge (or Lebarge, as he spells it), to pin down the rhyme. There was indeed a derelict steamer, Olive May, rotting away at the southern tip of the lake not far from Whitehorse, which Service would have encountered on one of his lonely walks. As a youth he had been fascinated and horrified by the stories of martyrs burned at the stake in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and that surely was in his mind when he revised the ballad, with McGee thawing out gratefully “in the heart of the furnace roar” and providing Service with a tag line that always brought a laugh from his audience: “it’s the first time I’ve been warm!”

  Some critics believe that “McGee” is the better of the two ballads; certainly it has received as much applause. There is little doubt, however, that it has been outdistanced by “McGrew,” and I believe a case can be made that of the pair “McGrew” is a superior work.

  What is it that gives this piece of verse so much staying power? Service saw it as a drama in three acts. In the first, he sets the scene, introduces the characters, and supplied the tension. A solo game is in progress (solo, which resembles pinochle, is rarely played today), and here we meet the villain, Dan McGrew, and his girlfriend, the faithless Lou. The door is flung open and a stranger, “dog dirty and loaded for bear,” stumbles into the bar, flings down a poke of gold, and stands everybody a drink. We don’t know who he is, but he gets our respect when he staggers over to the ragtime piano.

  Now the second act opens, and it is here that the tale is lifted above the standard Western ballad. Service’s decision to tell the tale of McGrew’s villainy and Lou’s betrayal gives the story its power. He himself was a musician, self-taught on the piano, the banjo, the ukulele, the guitar, and the accordion. We can hear the piano in our minds as the ballad progresses. The man arrived from the creeks turns out to be a gifted musician (“My God How That Man Could Play!”). The music sets the scene in what Service calls the Great Alone: the ice-sheathed mountains, reflecting the soft blaze of the Aurora, tell the story of one man’s loneliness, a man driven by his own hunger for gold to the exclusion of all that is natural. The music brings back the memory of a home dominated by a woman’s love, a woman “true as heaven is true” and superimposed on those features is the ghastly rouged face of the strumpet clinging to McGrew. The music modulates to a softer tone followed by an intense feeling of rage and despair, and then, as McGrew coolly continues to play his hand, rises to a crescendo as the audience hears the cry for revenge hidden in the chords that crash to a climax.

  The third act follows. The stranger whirls about on his piano stool, his eyes “blind with blood,” points to McGrew as a “hound of hell,” and the inevitable gun battle follows as the lights go out momentarily and a woman screams through the blackness. The two antagonists lie crumpled on the floor as Lou flings herself upon the body of the dying stranger, clutches him to her breast, and plants kisses on his brow.

  Service, of course, has no intention of continuing with such a melodramatic and saccharine ending. That was never his style. He has a sardonic surprise: Lou’s embrace is simply a cover for her avarice. As the man from the creeks is breathing his last, she has been searching for the same poke he tilted on the bar a short time before. Service has the final line: “The woman that kissed him and pinched his poke was the lady that’s known as Lou.”

  The twist ending was a Service trademark, more suited to his ballads than to his lyric poetry, which he continued to compose without any thought of publication while he went for long tramps in the woods with a book of poetry in his pocket, usually Kipling. One day, he was standing on the heights above Miles Canyon when a new verse popped into his mind. He called it “The Spell of the Yukon.” In the month that followed he wrote something every day during those lonely walks. “I bubbled verse like an artesian well,” he remembered. Then, suddenly, all inspiration ceased.

  He did not realize that hidden away in his bureau drawer lay the seeds of future triumphs. He came upon his “miserable manuscript” one day and decided to show it to Mrs. De Gex, his landlady. She thought his rhymes were “not so dusty” and suggested he combine them into a pamphlet to send to his friends at Christmas: “it would be such a nice souvenir of the Yukon.” Of course, she remarked, he’d have to leave out the rougher poems—“McGrew” and “McGee”—and also such efforts as “My Madonna” and “The Harpy,” which reflected Service’s fascination with fallen women and the seamier side of life.

  Since the bank had given him a hundred-dollar Christmas bonus, he decided to follow her suggestion and have a hundred copies printed to give to his friends as “my final gesture of literary impotence … my farewell to literature, a monument on the grave of my misguided Muse.” He was finished with poetry for good; he would study finance and become “a stuffy little banker.”

  He could not f
oresee that this slim volume would be his epiphany: the mild bank clerk would be transformed, phoenix-like, into a figure of towering reputation for what was, in truth, a mere grab bag of verses old and new, some previously published, others resurrected and revised. In spite of the title, Songs of a Sourdough, half of the poems in the collection had nothing to do with the Yukon. Several, indeed, dealt with the Boer War. None of that seemed to matter to the three million readers who eventually bought the book as edition after edition rolled off the presses. More than half a century later the critic Arthur Phelps noted of Service that “no anthology of Canadian verse dare leave him out. No academic critic knows what to do with him. He has become an event in the working annals of Canada on his own terms.”

  Service kept the “coarse” poems in the collection—the ones that Mrs. De Gex wanted him to leave out. He retained “The Harpy,” in which he wrote sympathetically about a prostitute from her own point of view, and “My Madonna,” where a painting of a woman from the streets ends up in a church being worshipped as the Virgin Mary. He was not an ardent feminist, but he did treat women with understanding. To him, the Yukon itself was feminine. In the opening line of “The Law of the Yukon” the land is “she.” Service sees her as a celibate earth mother longing for men who are “grit to the core” (“Them will I take to my bosom, them will I call my sons”).

  Service’s Scottish heritage cautioned him to hedge his bet by laying off a half-interest in the book for fifty dollars to a fellow Scot who occasionally offered him a loan at 10 percent a month. The “village Shylock,” as Service called him, turned the offer down. “Who buys poetry in this blasted burg? … Ye can jist stick yer poetry up yer bonnie wee behind.” When later he learned what a fifty-dollar investment in Songs of a Sourdough might have brought him, Service joked, “I think it broke his heart.… I know,” he added, “it would have broken mine if I had been obliged to give half the dough that book brought me in royalties.”

  Service typed out his selection of rhymes and sent it and a cheque to his father, now in Toronto, who peddled it to William Briggs’s Methodist Book and Publishing House, which did vanity work on the side. The poet almost immediately regretted this rash action. His inferiority complex convinced him that people would laugh at him when the book came out. “It would be the joke of the town.” He had wasted one hundred dollars.

  He didn’t even bother to read the letter the publisher eventually sent. When he finally opened it, a cheque fell out; the firm was returning his money. Only when he read the letter did it dawn on him that he was being offered a contract to publish his work with a royalty of 10 percent on the list price. He could hardly believe it. “The words danced before my eyes … my whole being seemed lit up with rapture.” Service was sure that he must have a guardian angel overseeing his career. That guardian angel finally appeared in the guise of Robert Bond, a twenty-three-year-old salesman for the publisher who had been about to leave on his annual sales trip to the West when the firm’s literary editor handed him a set of proofs. “We’re bringing out a book of poetry for a man who lives in the Yukon. You’re going to the west coast; you may be able to sell some to the trade out there. It’s the author’s publication and we’re printing it for him. Try to sell some for him, if you can.”

  Bond, who was already packed and leaving for the station, stuffed the proofs into his pocket and forgot about them until that night. Sitting in the diner with nothing else to read, he dipped into “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” He was so entertained that he forgot his meal and burst out laughing when he reached the final line. Across the aisle, a commercial traveller asked what he was laughing at.

  “It’s poetry,” Bond told him, and the man’s face fell. “It’s unusual,” he explained, “and it’s Canadian and it might even sell.” He began to read the ballad aloud and as he read, his fellow passenger began to squirm in his chair and then, at the last line, howled with laughter. “He coughed till he choked,” Bond recounted later, “and had to leave the dining-car.”

  In the smoking car after dinner, a crowd had gathered and pressed Bond to read the ballad. “When I finished,” he recalled, “bedlam broke loose—and everybody spoke at once. Some of the men even quoted lines that stuck in their memory.” Others, who had come in late, asked Bond to read the poem again. He did it several times before the night was over, so that by the time they reached Fort William he knew it by heart. He began to walk into bookstores to recite it. Whenever he was able to do that, the store ordered books.

  When the first copies of Songs reached Bond in Revelstoke, he was appalled. “How I swore! It was a poor-looking thin book, bound in green cloth.” The company, disturbed by the frankness of some of the poems, had tried to shuck off responsibility by marking it “Author’s Edition.” To Bond the cover price of seventy-five cents was an insult; he had been quoting it to retailers at a dollar. With the first edition already on the verge of selling out, Bond urged his firm to buy the rights and sell it on a royalty basis. When the first royalty cheque arrived, Service thought there must be some mistake and wrote to ask how long the royalties might continue. Fifty years later, Bond told an interviewer, “I have no doubt he is still wondering, for certainly no Canadian poet, or possibly any poet has received as much as Mr. Service has received.”

  Service near the end of his life would remark that he had made a million dollars out of Songs. He soon managed to increase the royalty rate from 10 percent to 15 and the publisher at once raised the cover price to one dollar, suggesting a future profit to Service of $450,000. But of course the cover price increased over the years, so that Service’s own estimate of a cool million is probably an understatement.

  Only a minority of Service’s readers outside the Yukon realized that he had written the poems without ever having seen the Klondike. Most believed he had actually taken part in the great stampede, as a study of memoirs of that time makes clear. One respected author and jurist, the Honourable James Wickersham, wrote in Old Yukon that in Skagway in 1901, “in one of the banks, a gentlemanly clerk named Bob Service was introduced [to me].” Thames Williamson in Far North Country declared that “Service was in the Klondike during the fevered days of the gold rush.” Glenn Chesney Quiett made the same error in his Pay Dirt. In February 1934, Philip Gershel, aged seventy-one, claimed he was the original Rag Time Kid of Service’s best-known ballad. “I knew Dan McGrew and all the others,” he declared and went on to describe the Lady That’s Known as Lou as “a big blonde, tough but big-hearted.” Gershel said the shooting took place in the Monte Carlo Saloon; Mike Mahoney claimed it happened in the Dominion. “I was right there when it happened,” he insisted to an interviewer in 1936. He claimed that Lou was still alive and living in Dawson City. (James Mackay claimed that she was a cabaret performer who drowned when the Princess Sophia sank off Alaska—in 1918.) Mahoney, the hero of Merrill Denison’s book Klondike Mike, recited “Dan McGrew” so often he came to believe in it. When he was challenged at a Sourdough Convention in Seattle by Monte Snow, who had been in Dawson for all of the gold-rush period and knew that Mahoney’s story was fictitious, the assembly of old-timers gave Klondike Mike the greatest ovation of his life. They did not want to hear the truth.

  Service himself felt that he ought to have been in the stampede and considered himself a bit of a charlatan because he was writing about events in which he had not taken part. In the fall of 1907, having spent three years with the bank, he was due for a three-month leave. He did not relish the idea because he knew it could lead to a reassignment that might take him away from the North. “That would be a catastrophe; I realized how much I loved the Yukon, and how something in my nature linked me to it. I would be heart-broken if I could not return. Besides, I wanted to write more about it, to interpret it. I felt I had another book in me, and would be desperate if I did not get a chance to do it.”

  Fortunately, his guardian angel, this time in the form of the bank inspector, was on hand after Service took his holiday. “You’ll be sorry to hear y
ou’re going back to the North. I have decided to send you to Dawson as teller.”

  Service was more than relieved. “I was keen to get on the job. I wanted to write the story of the Yukon … and the essential story of the Yukon was that of the Klondike.… Here was my land.… I would be its interpreter because I was one with it. And this feeling has never left me … of all my life the eight years I spent there are the ones I would most like to live over.”

  Dawson in 1908 had five times the population of Whitehorse but was on the way to becoming a ghost town. In the evenings, Service wandered abandoned streets, trying “to summon up the ghosts of the argonauts,” gathering material for another book, Ballads of a Cheechako. He was just far enough removed from the manic days of the stampede to stand back and see the romance, the tragedy, the adventure, and the folly. His verses sprang out of incidents that were common occurrences in the Dawson of that time: Clancy, the policeman, mushing into the north to bring back a crazed prospector; the Man from Eldorado hitting town, flinging his money away, and ending up in the gutter; Hard Luck Henry, who gets a message in an egg and tracks down the sender, only to find that she has been married for months (Dawson-bound eggs unfortunately were ripe with age). These themes were not fiction, as “McGrew” was. As a boy in Dawson, I watched Sergeant Cronkhite of the Mounted Police, his parka sugared with frost, mush into town with a crazy man in a straitjacket lashed to his sledge. As a teenager, working on the creeks, I saw a prospector on a binge light his cigar with a ten-dollar bill, fling all his loose change into the gutter, and lose his year’s take in a blackjack game. The eggs we ate, like Hard Luck Henry’s, came in over the ice packed in water glass, strong as cheese, orange as the setting sun.

  My mother, then a kindergarten teacher, remembered Service strolling curiously about in the spring sunshine, peering at the boarded-up gaming houses and the shuttered dance halls. “He was a good mixer among men and spent a lot of time with sourdoughs, but we could never get him to any of our parties. ‘I’m not a party man,’ he would say. ‘Ask me sometime when you’re by yourselves.’ ”