Yet though at their feet I have sat,
For God-sake don’t call me a poet,
For I’ve never been guilty of that.
Robert Service arrived in the Yukon thanks to the banking industry. Before he crossed the Atlantic, he had worked for several years in the Commercial Bank of Scotland as a clerk, and carried with him a testimonial from that bank. In 1903, when he could stand the life of a hobo no longer, he used the letter to get himself a job with the Canadian Bank of Commerce. A couple of years later, he was sent to the bank’s branch in Whitehorse.
These were the days when a piano stood in every parlor, and get-togethers in private homes featured acts by each guest—usually in the form of sentimental songs, jaunty piano pieces, or amusing rhymes. Since his Scottish childhood, Service had loved the world of music hall songs and melodramatic doggerel, and he was soon leaning against mantelpieces at various Whitehorse gatherings, reciting “Casey at the Bat” and “Gunga Din.” He had already published some verse in Scottish newspapers, and fired by his social successes he now decided to write an original ballad himself. One night he walked past a bar and heard sounds of revelry within. “The line popped into my mind,” he wrote in the first volume of his autobiography, Ploughman of the Moon. “‘A bunch of the boys were whooping it up,’ and it stuck there. Good enough for a start.” A few days later, he completed “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” the rhyming story of a brawl between two sourdoughs:A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.
When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and glare,
There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.
He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse,
Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.
There was none could place the stranger’s face, though we searched ourselves for a clue.
But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew.
Robert Service wrote his most famous ballads years after the Gold Rush and before he set foot in Dawson City.
The woman who had precipitated the brawl, “the lady that’s known as Lou,” immediately entered Klondike mythology.
Malamutes and moonshine. “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” echoed both the tone and the tenor of Jack London’s Northland stories, already huge bestsellers throughout North America. As Service’s reputation as a Klondike troubadour spread, a Dawson mine manager decided to suggest another subject to him. Robert described the encounter in his memoir: “Portly and important, he was smoking a big cigar with a gilt band. Suddenly he said, ‘I’ll tell you a story Jack London never got.’ Then he spun a yarn of a man who cremated his pal.” The poet liked to pretend that as he strode away into the chilly night air, the first line of the new ballad popped into his head: “There are strange things done in the midnight sun.” In fact, he worked hard at pruning and polishing his rhythms (including altering names, like that of Lake Laberge, to fit a rhyme). Nevertheless, it was not long before “The Cremation of Sam McGee” was finished:There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
Robert Service wrote his two most famous ballads before he even set foot near a gold field. It was not until 1908, a decade after the peak of the Klondike Gold Rush, that the Bank of Commerce transferred him to its Dawson City branch. By then, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee” were already in print, and had earned Service a nickname, the Canadian Kipling. They were included in Service’s 1907 collection, entitled The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses in North America and The Songs of a Sourdough in England, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies. City bankers, shop clerks, and soldiers across the English-speaking world were already rolling up their sleeves, leaning against mantelpieces, and reciting the stories of Dan McGrew and Sam McGee to pre-television audiences hungry for thigh-slapping entertainment. Service had found his market with the same agility as Jack London had found his readers.
Service fans did not always realize the gulf between the poet and his creations. When the trim young bank clerk finally arrived in Dawson, he was overwhelmed by his reception. “Hail to the lousy Bard,” yelled his new bank colleagues, as he pushed open the mess hall door. In vain Service protested that he was not the rip-roaring Dan McGrew type they obviously expected. “You’ve got me wrong, fellows,” he protested. His objections were brushed aside and he was obliged to whoop it up with a bunch of the boys.
In 1909, Robert Service published a second volume of verse, Ballads of a Cheechako, which was filled with characters like Pious Pete and Hard Luck Henry, and stories taken from real events. One of the poems was titled “The Call of the Wild” (a title already famous, thanks to Jack London’s story published three years earlier), and it included London’s popular phrase, “the Great White Silence”:Have you known the Great White Silence, not a snow-gemmed twig aquiver?
(Eternal truths that shame our soothing lies).
Have you broken trail on snowshoes? mushed your huskies up the river,
Dared the unknown, led the way, and clutched the prize?
Ballads of a Cheechako was another astonishingly successful publication. “It succeeded,” Service suggested in his autobiography, “because it was sheerly of the North. It was steeped in the spirit of the Klondike. It was written on the spot and it reeked with reality.” With his reputation as a writer of humorous ballads established, he resigned from the bank so he could write a novel about the Gold Rush. When his boss asked him why he had given his notice, he explained that his salary was $1,000 but his annual royalties were running around $6,000. The bank manager gasped; his teller was making more money than he was. Robert Service remained in Dawson, in a small log cabin on Eighth Avenue, working on a novel he titled The Trail of Ninety-Eight: A Northland Romance.
Service went on to publish dozens more books, including novels and verse collections with alliterative titles (Rhymes of a Rolling Stone in 1912, Rhymes of a Red Cross Man in 1916, Bar-room Ballads in 1940). The Gold Rush novel was not a success (although it was made into a movie), and none of his subsequent books sold as well as his Klondike ballads. He left his little Dawson cabin in 1912 and never returned to the North. When he died in France in 1958, he was bitter that his reputation still rested on Dan McGrew and Sam McGee despite all his subsequent work.
Just as Jack London mythologized the Klondike Gold Rush in his fiction and became a millionaire on the strength of them, so Robert Service became a millionaire on the strength of his Klondike verses. Like London, Service caught the atmosphere of constant, feverish excitement that dominated Front Street during the years when men arrived from the creeks loaded with nuggets, and more fortunes were lost and won in saloons than in the gold fields. He transformed the icy hardships faced by stampeders into romantic struggles, and his mock heroic tone ennobled the Gold Rush.
No matter that his most famous ballads, “The Cremation of Sam McGee” and “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” have all the subtlety and literary gloss of pulp fiction. Throughout the twentieth century, thousands of Service fans on both sides of the Atlantic learned them off by heart. In fact, these two poems caught the experience of stampeders with such accuracy that a handful of Gold Rush veterans started to claim they had known Service while they were in the North, and had been present when Dan McGrew was shot or Sam McGee burned. Decad
es later, at a Sourdough Convention in San Francisco, a stampeder with a better memory decided to call a particular blowhard on this piece of nonsense. The audience would have none of it. They shouted down the man who wanted to correct the record because they preferred their version of events. Robert Service had plumbed the “emotional truth” of the Klondike Gold Rush, and that was good enough for the participants.
The third Klondike myth builder was the most important writer of popular history in twentieth-century Canada: Pierre Berton. Born in Whitehorse in 1920, nearly a quarter of a century after the Gold Rush, Berton was the son of a Klondike stampeder. He spent the first ten years of his life in Dawson, in a small house across the street from Robert Service’s cabin, and as a student in Vancouver spent his summers working in mining camps in the Klondike. He made his career as a journalist, but always felt a strong affinity for the landscape and history of the Yukon. By the 1950s, when he was managing editor of Maclean’s, the largest circulation Canadian magazine, Berton had begun to tap into his readers’ collective hunger for stories about their country—a former colony in search of a national mythology. In particular, there was a renewed interest in the vast territories north of the sixtieth parallel, which had been neglected for too long. The country’s industrial needs created increasing demand for gold, nickel, lead, zinc, and uranium, all of which had been discovered in the North. And the Cold War agreement with the United States to position a string of radar stations from Alaska to Ellesmere Island triggered concern about Canadian sovereignty in the attic of the continent.
Berton, a tall, gangling man with a shock of red hair and an irrepressible sense of humor, would write over fifty books before his death, aged eighty-four, in 2004. But among his greatest was the book that blended his own love of the North with the national mood. Entitled Klondike in Canada and The Klondike Fever in the United States, and subtitled in both countries The Life and Death of the Last Great Gold Rush, it appeared in 1958. (A revised edition was published in 1972.) Berton did extensive research for his book, mining vast numbers of personal accounts, interviewing old-timers across the United States and Canada, and even tracking down Belinda Mulrooney, then in her late eighties, in Seattle. The book was a huge success throughout North America: in the United States, it was selected for the Book-of-the-Month Club and in Canada it won the Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction.
Pierre Berton revived the Klondike legends for a new generation, and added to the excitement with melodramatic recitations of Service’s ballads.
Pierre Berton described the brutality of the journeys into the Yukon with chilling accuracy, and did not minimize the incredibly hard work of mining on the creeks. And yet there was a “good old days” undertone: Klondike reverberated with the exuberance and sweaty machismo that Berton enjoyed in London’s stories and Service’s ballads. Berton used the same anecdotes from Dawson’s saloons that London had reshaped into fiction, and there are echoes of London’s stories in Berton’s taut depictions of loneliness and horror. Berton’s own boisterous personality gave the book added momentum. At the drop of a hat, the author would reinforce the grandeur of the experience with energetic and theatrical performances of “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.”
Berton had revived and polished legends of the Klondike for a new generation of readers in the late twentieth century. Like his two predecessors, he celebrated physical courage and manly strength in a period when such attributes were less valued. He also brought a new element to the story: the idea, in his own words, that the Klondike experience was about “man’s search for himself as much as for gold.” Like London and Service, he transformed the muck and misery of the Klondike Gold Rush into literary gold. Thanks to Jack London, Robert Service, and Pierre Berton, Klondike mythology endures.
Although the gumboot miners had left, residents of Dawson City in 1899 were optimistic that the gold creeks would continue to guarantee them a prosperous future.
AFTERLIVES
What Happened to the Six Gold Diggers?
IT IS NEARLY A CENTURY since his death, but Jack London lives on in his Northland tales, which are regularly reprinted and capture his personality better than any biographer could. He was, as E. L. Doctorow described, “a great gobbler-up of the world, physically and intellectually, the kind of writer who went to a place and wrote his dreams into it, the kind of writer who found an Idea and spun his psyche around it.” What Doctorow calls “the cooler, more sophisticated voices of Modernist irony” may dominate literature these days, but Jack London’s vivid descriptions of the most intense year in his life remain powerful and compelling.
Prospector Bill Haskell has enjoyed no such immortality. After retracing his steps over the Chilkoot Pass in late 1897, Bill dragged himself onto a southbound steamer and sailed down the west coast. He was numb with grief after losing his partner, Joe Meeker, and vowed he would never return to Dawson. When he reached Outside, he was staggered by the Klondike frenzy he encountered. Everywhere he went, he heard people planning to head north.
Bill was appalled. “To one who has just returned from a two-years experience in the gold regions of the Yukon, who has seen death and suffering as an incident of everyday life, who knows what mining in Alaska or in the Klondike means . . . and who has seen his dearest friend swept away under the ice by a raging river which can count its victims by the score, these preparations for rushing for fortunes into those frozen mountains appeared like madness.” He was also horrified by the misinformation about the Klondike gold fields that was circulating, so he decided to set down on paper his own experiences in the hope of persuading people to stay away from the North. Published by a company in Hartford, Connecticut, Two Years in the Klondike and Alaskan Gold-Fields: A Thrilling Narrative of Personal Experiences and Adventures in the Wonderful Gold Regions of Alaska and the Klondike appeared in 1898, only months after the author had left the Yukon. It is one of the very few contemporary accounts of the Klondike Gold Rush written by a humble prospector. Even as the author tried to describe the hardships and disappointments, he could not stop himself whetting readers’ appetites for adventure.
What of Bill himself? Despite bitter memories, he found himself drawn back to Dawson: he appears on a town registry in 1901. Then he vanishes. There is no evidence from Yukon registries that he staked another claim, or bought a house, or even died in Dawson. Perhaps he took off to Nome, or drifted south again. Perhaps he took the hard-won gold from his stake on Bonanza and returned to Vermont. Perhaps he was one of the Klondike veterans who volunteered for the trenches of France in World War I. Men who had spent a subarctic winter during the Gold Rush were said to deal with the horrors of trench life better than any other group.
We will never know. Bill’s trail went cold.
Entrepreneur Belinda Mulrooney, in contrast, was in the spotlight on and off until the end of her life. Against the advice of her friends in Dawson, the owner of the Fairview Hotel did agree to wed “Count” Charles Eugene Carbonneau. She knew he was a slippery fellow: in her oral memoir, she made the awkward comment, “I had to get rid of the pest somehow, so we [got] married.” The ceremony took place back in Dawson on October 1, 1900, with a reception at the Fairview Hotel for 250 guests. For a couple of years, she enjoyed being “Countess Carbonneau.” The Carbonneaus took lavish trips to Europe, financed by Belinda’s Klondike millions. One season, they rented an apartment on the Champs Élysées in Paris. The following year, they took a house in Monte Carlo.
Belinda soon realized that Charles had married her for her money and that he was running through it at an alarming clip. She tried to protect her various properties from her husband by bringing her father, John Mulrooney, up to Dawson and signing them over to him. Then, she extricated as many of her business affairs from Charles’s clutches as she could, and in 1904 she moved to Fairbanks, Alaska, to try to rebuild her fortune. Both a mining partnership and a bank were quickly embroiled in lawsuits. When she filed for divorce from Charles in 1906, he retaliated by kidnapping
one of her sisters and confining her to his hotel room. He talked himself out of a criminal conviction, and the divorce went through. “Belinda Gives up Her Title” read the headline in the Yukon World.
Belinda left the North in 1908 and moved to Yakima, Washington, where she planted an orchard and built an immense house that was quickly tagged Carbonneau Castle. She became a well-known local personality and enjoyed entertaining visiting dignitaries such as President Taft. But underneath the newly acquired sophistication was the same vengeful Belinda with a hair-trigger temper. When a former brother-in-law sued her for alleged embezzlement, Belinda lured him to a Seattle hotel room and hired two men to horsewhip him until his back bled. She was fined $150.
Belinda Mulrooney’s life spiraled downhill. In the 1920s, she was forced to sell her castle and orchard, working first as a housekeeper and then as a seamstress. When she was eighty-five she moved into a nursing home, where she enjoyed a tot of whiskey and two cigarettes each day. She died there in 1967, aged ninety-five.
The British journalist Flora Shaw never again had the chance to show the stamina and verve she demonstrated in the Klondike. Once back in London in the fall of 1898, she resumed her post as colonial editor for the Times. The British government paid to print and circulate a pamphlet that reproduced her articles on the Boer War—articles that asserted Britain’s sovereignty in South Africa and argued for the extension of the British Empire. But in 1900, Flora resigned from the newspaper for health reasons. Two years later, she married Sir Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, a high-ranking colonial administrator in the mold of Flora’s other hero, Cecil Rhodes.
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