The Hemisphere: The Yukon Troubadour

As a poet, Robert William Service never sought the level of Percy Bysshe Shelley, would have been as out of place on Parnassus as Shelley in a Klondike saloon. The rhymes that made Service a millionaire w’ooed none of the nine Muses. They reek of male shenanigans and sweat, roar like a Yukon avalanche, teem with rude and lusty characters: Claw-Fingered Kitty, Chewed-Ear Jenkins. Muck-Luck Mag, Blasphemous Bill Mackie. Dangerous Dan McGrew. “Rhyming has my ruin been,” Robert Service once wrote, falling unconsciously into the balladeer’s inversion. “With less deftness I might have produced real poetry.”

Real poetry was not a part of “Wullie” Service’s spirit, or his life. Even as an English-born bank clerk in Glasgow, he dashed off doggerel for the weeklies, and burned with an adventurer’s ambition to make a million dollars, write 1,000 poems, and live for a century. In hot pursuit of these ends, he hopped a freighter to Canada in 1895, a ruddy-faced, guitar-playing, wind-drifted 21-year-old fiddle-foot with a Scottish burr. He worked anywhere, at anything—swilling swine in British Columbia, tending roses for a San

Diego cathouse—and everywhere manufacturing verse.

Dangerous Dan. Lady Luck, who smiled on so many fortune seekers in the Yukon gold fields, smiled there too on Wullie Service. Behind his bank teller’s cage one frozen night in White Horse, he knocked out a raw, rollicking ballad called The Shooting of Dan McGrew, modestly tucked it away in his shirt drawer, months later, in 1907, sent it to a Toronto publisher of church hymnals with a slender assortment of other sourdough rhymes. The story goes that the typesetters swung into a dance as they locked it in the forms.

Then I ducked my head, and the lights

went out, and two guns blazed in the

dark,

And a woman screamed, and the lights

went up, and two men lay stiff and

stark.

Pitched on his head, and pumped full

of lead, was Dangerous Dan McGrew,

While the man from the creeks lay

clutched to the breast of the lady

that’s known as Lou.

In one collection or another, Dangerous Dan grossed its author half a million dollars; and another early Service ballad, The Cremation of Sam McGee, earned such widespread prominence that its real-life namesake (whose name Service casually lifted from a bank ledger) spent all the remaining days of his life parrying the question: “Is it warm enough for you, Sam?”

These popular two ballads by themselves made Service rich. In successive books—Ballads of a Cheechako, Rhymes of a Rolling Stone, Lyrics of a Low Brow —he paid repeated respects to his own talents as a versifier and an avid public’s eagerness to read manly far northern rhymes such as these:

This is the law of the Yukon, and ever

she makes it plain:

“Send not your foolish and feeble; send

me your strong and your sane—

Strong for the red rage of battle; sane,

for I harry them sore;

Send me men girt for the combat, men

-who are grit to the core;

Swift as the panther in triumph, fierce

as the bear in defeat,

Sired of a bulldog parent, steeled in the

furnace heat.”

All told, Wullie Service sold better than 3,000,000 copies of his verse, later learned, to his disappointment, that the world’s readers were far less interested in his fiction (six novels), or his advice on clean living, set forth in Why Not Grow Young?, a paean to raw cabbage and potatoes.

Villa in the Sun. In 1913 Service settled into an expatriate’s life in France. The Service ballads, still selling a steady 20,000 books a year, financed the sybaritic life he led in Brittany, Nice, and in his ocher-faced Monte Carlo villa surveying the azure Mediterranean where Tennyson once slept. For four decades he soaked up the kindly sun. “I want every day of my life to belong to me, to do with as I please,” he said.

And one day last week in the Brittany villa at Lancieux, death at last stilled his rhythmic tongue at 84. He had missed by 16 years his youthful ambition to live to 100, had fallen short of his goal of 1,000 poems. But he had left behind him an ineffaceable imprint of his adventurer’s appetite for the wild far places and the wild far things, in imperishable rhymed memorials to Claw-Fingered Kitty, Chewed-Ear Jenkins and Dangerous Dan McGrew.