Prisoners of the North

by Berton, Pierre

  He seldom attended any of the receptions or Government House affairs, and soon people got out of the habit of inviting him. When a distinguished visitor arrived in town, Service would have to be hunted down at the last moment, for they always insisted; and the poet, if pressed, dutifully made an appearance. My mother remembered how Earl Grey, the governor general, on a visit electrified Dawson by asking why Service hadn’t been on the guest list for a reception. “We had all forgotten how important the poet was.”

  Service, who felt he had to undergo every type of experience, wangled permission to attend a hanging that fall. He stayed at the foot of the gibbet until the black flag went up and then, visibly unnerved, moved with uncertain step to the bank mess hall and downed a tumbler of whisky. It was decades before he could bring himself to compose a ballad based on that experience.

  In one of his rare visits to the cottage where the kindergarten teachers lived, he discussed some of the new poems he was writing. “In his soft voice well modulated but strangely vibrant and emotional when he talked of the Yukon,” he read my mother parts of “The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill.” “I cannot say I was greatly impressed,” she remembered, “for it seemed to me a near duplicate of the Sam McGee story, and I said so.

  “I mean it’s the same style—one man’s body stuffed in a fiery furnace—the other’s a frozen corpse sewn up and jammed in a coffin,” she told him.

  “Exactly!” Service exclaimed. “That’s what I tried for. That’s the stuff the public wants. That’s what they pay for. And I mean to give it to them.”

  Service’s thoughts, at this period, were always on his work. He danced with my mother once during one of his rare appearances at the Arctic Brotherhood Hall. In those days each dance number—waltz, two-step, fox trot, and medley—was followed by a long promenade around the floor. When the music stopped for such an interlude the absent-minded poet, deep in creation, forgot to remove his arm from my mother’s waist. As she recalled in I Married the Klondike, “We meandered, thus entwined, around the entire floor, and in those days a man’s arm around a lady’s waist meant a great deal more than it does now. The whole assembly noticed it and grinned and whispered until Service came out of his brown study.”

  Working from midnight to three each morning, Service was able to finish the new book in four months. It consisted largely of ballads in the metre of “Dan McGrew” and “Sam McGee.” Service’s love of alliteration can be seen in the names of the leading characters: Pious Pete, Gum-Boot Ben, Hard Luck Henry. For his several character sketches of Klondike stereotypes—the Black Sheep, the Wood Cutter, the Prospector, and the Telegraph Operator—he chose a different rhythm:

  I will not wash my face;

  I will not brush my hair;

  I “pig” around the place

  There’s nobody to care.

  Nothing but rock and tree;

  Nothing but wood and stone;

  Oh God! it’s hell to be

  Alone, alone, alone.

  I recall such a character when, at the age of six, I drifted with my family down the Yukon River from Whitehorse to Dawson. Above us on the bank stood a lonely cabin, and from it emerged its sole occupant, the telegraph operator. He called to us and insisted we stay for lunch—porcupine stew. When we took our leave and made our way down the bank to our poling boat, he followed. “Don’t go yet. Stay! Stay for dinner. Stay all night. Stay a week!” Every time I pick up Ballads of a Cheechako I think of him.

  The Dawson of Service’s day was still crowded with men who had climbed the passes to reach their goal. No man caught the obsession or the fury of that moment in history better than Service had in his poem The Trail of ‘98—a phrase he embedded in the language. Here he used his words like drumbeats that seem to echo the steady tramp of those who plodded upward toward the summit—in a measured tread that came to be dubbed the Chilkoot Lockstep.

  Never was seen such an army, pitiful, futile, unfit;

  Never was seen such a spirit, manifold courage and grit;

  Never has been such a cohort under one banner enrolled,

  As surged to the ragged-edged Arctic, urged by the arch-tempter—Gold!

  It is easy to see why so many of Service’s readers were convinced that the poet had been in the forefront of that army. As he himself put it, “It was written on the spot and reeking with reality.” He sent the manuscript to his publisher who promptly returned it, complaining of “the coarseness of the language and my lack of morality.” A brief struggle followed by telegraph, which Service won by threatening to offer the book to a rival publisher. Once published, the book became another best-seller.

  Dawson City’s Front Street with its false-fronted buildings a few years before Service arrived. The literary gold he panned was better than any prospector’s.

  Service’s poems, alas, did not impress the parents of a pretty young stenographer with whom he kept company. They did not marry. As my mother has recorded, “The report we had was that her family did not approve of Service. His wild verses upset them and, because of his themes, they were convinced that he drank.”

  This attitude to Service’s work gives an insight into the publishing practices and taboos of the time. Lorne Pierce, one of the editors at the Methodist (later Ryerson) Press at the time and eventually his publisher, harboured “an aesthetic dislike for Service’s work” according to a paper given before the Bibliographical Society of Canada in 1996. As a book editor, Pierce dedicated himself and his company to publishing a Canadian literature cultivating “a sympathetic atmosphere in which the sublimest beauty, the sweetest music, the loftiest justice and the divine truth might be expected to take hold and flourish.”

  That, of course, ran counter to everything that Service was producing, but what could his publisher do? To put it crudely, publishers needed the income and the international kudos. By the time his next royalty cheque arrived, Service had achieved his original plan of saving five thousand dollars. He immediately launched into a second plan. “Ten thousand would put me in a spot where I could thumb my nose at the world … having written two books I could now sit down and do nothing for the rest of my life.”

  For the next two years he did just that. In the winter, Dawson vibrated with self-made entertainment: skating parties, bob-sledding, snowshoe treks, formal dinners, and two dances a week, “a glorious time—not much work, lots of fun, money flowing in.” But for Service it all began to pall. In his memoirs he portrays himself as a man too lazy to work, but it is clear that by late 1909 something was gnawing at him. On one of his jaunts up the Klondike Valley it came to him. Why not a novel about the gold rush? The idea, percolating in his mind, began to excite him. He would “recreate a past that otherwise would be lost forever.”

  When the time came to start writing, however, he found he couldn’t do it. “My words came with difficulty. My imagination lagged. Something was wrong.” What he needed, he knew, was seclusion, but he could not find it in the bank. About this time he was offered a handsome promotion to become manager of the Whitehorse branch. Service recoiled. “It would worry me to death. I am a meek soul. I cannot give orders to others.” And he could not leave the Klondike with a novel germinating in his brain. On the spur of the moment, he told the bank manager that he would be leaving his job after the requisite three months’ notice.

  His boss gave him a long look and asked how much he was making. About six thousand dollars a year from his books and one thousand from the bank, Service told him. There was a gasp: “Why, it’s more than I’m making myself.” And that was that.

  Service needed a cabin in which to work and found one on Eighth Avenue overlooking the town. In later years it became a shrine, and I can still remember standing on the kitchen porch of our house across the street, watching Chappie Chapman’s big orange bus disgorge its newest load of Service fans. They had come down the river on the sternwheeler Casca to squeeze into the little room where he wrote his verse using a carpenter’s pencil on huge rolls of brown paper hun
g from the walls. It has since become an official heritage site, and each summer, in the front yard, an actor on contract to the Klondike Visitors Association recites the bard’s poems.

  It was in this cabin that Service wrote his first novel, The Trail of ’98. Its main character is patterned on himself. “I made him a romantic dreamer … at odds with his environment … in short, like myself, he was destined to be a failure; but while I escaped by a fluke I took it out on my poor devil of a hero and gave him the works.” The name of his heroine, Berna, was taken from the label of a can of condensed milk. As Service described her, she “was purely imaginary and unimaginably pure.” (Briggs, his Methodist publisher, had urged him to make her “an inspiration to virtue.”) The novel itself, a best-seller in its time, is virtually unreadable today, the love scenes so saccharine as to cause nausea, the melodrama over the top, the dialogue unreal:

  In this cabin on Eighth Avenue in Dawson, Service wrote some of his best-known work, using a carpenter’s pencil and sheets of brown paper tacked to the walls.

  From under his bristling brows he glared at us. As he swayed there he minded me of an evil beast, a savage creature, a mad, desperate thing. He reeled in the doorway, and to steady himself put out his gloved hand. Then with a malignant laugh, the sneering laugh of a fiend, he stepped into the room.

  “So! Seems as if I’d lighted on a pretty nest of lovebirds. Ho! Ho! My sweet! You’re not satisfied with one lover, you must have two …”

  What worked for Service in rhyme sadly failed him in prose. Nevertheless, Hollywood bought the novel and made it into a film, starring Dolores del Rio as Berna.

  Service, who never stopped counting his profits, finished the novel in April 1910, and terrified of losing his work in the mails decided to take it personally to his American publisher, Dodd, Mead, in New York. On the train east—the first time he had ever been in a Pullman—he was so rattled by the unaccustomed luxury that he left his wallet on his seat and found it gone with all his money. He wired New York to send fifty dollars to him in Chicago and lived out the intervening days on sixty-five cents—an apple here, a couple of doughnuts there. When he reached New York, his publisher was surprised that he looked so commonplace. “We expected you to arrive in mukluks and a parka driving a dog team down Fifth Avenue,” said one of the staff. “Why didn’t you? It would have been a great ad.”

  After three months in New York, seeing the sights from Broadway to Chinatown and growing fat in the process, Service decided to get back in shape by taking to the road, as in the old days—a little stroll to New Orleans, staying in cheap hotels en route. The stormy weather put him off, and after three days he completed the trip to New Orleans by train. Then, on an impulse, he took a boat to Cuba where he put up at a chic hotel and lived a life of ease for three weeks.

  There was no escape from the furnace-like heat and Service began to long “for the snow and tonic air of the North.” Lingering on the Prado one day, as he idly turned over the pages of an American magazine his eyes fell on an article titled “I Had a Good Mother.” Service, who paid so little attention to his blood relatives, suddenly thought, “I too had a perfectly good mother.” He realized that he hadn’t seen her for fifteen years, his father was dead, and the family had moved briefly to Toronto from Scotland and then to Vegreville, Alberta. Service—being Service—devised a sudden and dramatic storybook plan for a reunion. He would go straight to the family’s homestead unannounced and would walk in as if he’d never been separated from them. By evening he had the opening lines of greeting worked out: “How about a spot of tea? By the way, in case you don’t remember, I’m your first-born.”

  He reached Vegreville in the late autumn with the snow already covering the ground, knocked on the frosted door of a frame farmhouse, and was greeted by a pretty girl. His sister? He had no way of knowing. He said he was an encyclopaedia salesman and she ushered him into a cozy but primitive kitchen. A little elderly woman who was washing dishes at the sink came forward, drying her hands. “Why, if it isn’t our Willie,” she said. As Service noted, “We Scotch are economical in our emotions. We exchanged the same conventional kiss we had indulged in when I left fifteen years before. My sisters were introduced and I pecked at their cheeks.” Then, following his own script, he asked, “What about a cup of tea, Ma? I could do with a spot.”

  He spent the winter of 1910–11 roaming the prairie trails, usually walking twenty miles a day and bunking nightly with accommodating neighbours. By the time spring came he was again in superb physical condition. “I wanted to keep going till I reached the Land of the Midnight Sun,” he thought, so he went back to the homestead and told his family—the two youngest boys and three sisters—that he was returning to Dawson. “Are you crazy?” they asked. He could go anywhere: India, China, the South Seas and “you’re going back to a ghost town where you’ll be as lonely as hell.” Which, of course, is exactly what he longed for—“peace and quiet, to be far from the world.”

  Having made up his mind, Service decided to go back the hard way—not by Pullman car, luxury liner, or paddlewheel steamer—but by the so-called Edmonton Trail, the 2,000-mile route that some of the gold seekers had opted for in ’98 to their eventual regret. The route followed the Mackenzie River almost to the rim of the Arctic Ocean and then curved west in a huge semicircle across the divide that separates the Mackenzie country from the Yukon, eventually reaching Dawson by the back door. The back-breaking effort in hauling boats and barges up and over the Mackenzie Mountains made the Chilkoot Pass seem like a pleasant outing. More men died, drowned, starved, or froze to death using this much vaunted “All-Canadian Route” than on any of the other trails to the Klondike. Not long before Service decided upon the venture, four Mounted Policemen on patrol near Fort McPherson had starved to death trying to reach Dawson. Service’s superb physical condition and his own guardian angel—luck—got him through.

  Why did he put himself through it? No doubt because he was trying to prove himself. People thought he had toughed it out on the gold-rush trails. He still felt like a fraud among the genuine sourdoughs. This was his way of joining that exclusive fraternity. He was also hoping to soak up new material for another book of verse. More, he wanted to get as far from civilization as he could. In that he was certainly successful. In those days, this far-off corner of Canada was virtually unknown to anyone save the traders, the natives, and a handful of missionaries and Mounted Police. Service was equipping himself to pan untrammelled ground.

  In late May 1911, he took the stagecoach from Edmonton to Athabasca Landing, hoping to get on the Hudson’s Bay Company’s flotilla travelling north. When he discovered the barges had left, he set out in pursuit by birchbark canoe. It took him three days to catch up. The flotilla took him to Fort McMurray, where they were welcomed with enthusiasm. The barge fleet was the first contact the residents had had with the outside world for a year. The festive air was dampened for Service by the local Indian agent, an ex-parson, who, on learning the poet’s destination was Dawson, shook his head solemnly and declared, “Young man, you’re going to your doom.”

  A week later Service boarded the river steamer Grahame and almost confirmed the agent’s doom-saying when against the advice of an old-timer he dived into the swirling Athabasca River, was caught in the undertow, and was swept a mile downstream. He only saved himself by seizing an overhanging branch.

  At Fort Smith, following a twenty-mile portage around a series of rapids, he took another steamer across Great Slave Lake to Fort Simpson, where he bought “the finest birch bark canoe in the North” from a veteran canoe maker. He christened her Coquette. The trip down the Mackenzie from Fort Simpson was marred by the discovery of the corpses of two trappers in a cabin, both dead of gunshot wounds—one a murder, the other a suicide, both the victims of cabin fever. To Service, the Mackenzie was a far more murderous river than the Yukon. “Its law was harder, its tribute higher. It killed most of those that I knew.” At Fort McPherson, he bought some flour and baco
n, and here, at the mouth of the Peel River, an old man with a patriarchal white beard warned him against continuing his mad project. “Don’t! Don’t go on,” he said. “Go back the way you came like a good little boy.” The Mounted Police sergeant on duty had the same advice. “Don’t you do it. Just think of the Lost Patrol.” As Service put it, “I think he expected me to reconstruct the tragedy in verse; but I never like to write about realities, so The Ballad of the Lost Patrol was left ‘unperpetrated.’ ”

  Faced with these warnings, Service worried about his planned trip up the Peel River and over the divide. In a few days, the sternwheeler that had brought him from Fort Simpson would leave on her return journey, and everybody was urging him to board it. He was tempted to follow that advice but could not bring himself to quit. “If you do it,” he told himself, “you’ll never respect yourself again.”

  He faced a journey of one hundred miles over a trail that was all but impassable. It was doubtful if his frail canoe could handle the trip, nor would any of the natives at Fort McPherson agree to carry it to the headwaters. It seemed to Service that he was up a blind alley. “I was planning to spend the next nine months in the Arctic when an unbelievable bit of luck happened to me.” Two men and a woman arrived in a scow, the Ophelia. Her captain, a free trader whom Service called McTosh, announced that he was planning to be the first to take a scow over the mountains and invited Service to sign on as crew member. The poet enthusiastically accepted, and off they went up the Peel, the captain, his wife, and the first mate in Ophelia with Service paddling in Coquette. The river wound its way through the stark tundra, but when they reached the tributary Rat River, Service knew his days of paddling were over. The canoe was hoisted aboard the half-ton barge, and all four toiled to force their way against the increasingly stiff current. It was the hardest work that Service, the self-professed layabout, had done in his life. “It was grotesque, incredible. I had imagined I would use my canoe for most of the trip, and here I was roped in to do a job that would have made a Volga boatman look like a slacker.”