Yukon who is who

Robert William Service (1874 - 1958)

Robert Service was born in England and moved to Canada when he was twenty-one with dreams of becoming a cowboy. He was a romantic and always a writer. More than a third of the poems in Robert Service’s first book were written before he moved north in 1904. He was working for the Canadian Bank of Commerce in Kamloops when the bank transferred him to Whitehorse.¹⁾

There was a little steamer called the Alice May [Olive May] beached on an island in the centre of Lake Laberge. Robert Service was always doing a lot of roaming around and he got his inspiration for the poem when he ran across the Alice May and Sam McGee freighting on the lake in the bitter cold weather.²⁾ McGee’s name was used by Robert Service in the poem “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” published in 1907 as part of Service’s collection The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses. In 1938, the real Sam McGee noticed Yukon tourists buying urns of “genuine ashes of Sam McGee.”³⁾

In January 1906, Robert Service wrote a poem with all the elements of the Thomas Hume story. In November 1904, Mike Mahoney accepted a job of freighting the corpse of Thomas Hume, the Alaska territorial judge, from Fairbanks to Valdez for shipment down south. The Hume family was willing to pay $5,000 so Mahoney embarked on a seventeen-day trip with a 250-pound coffin. He left Fairbanks at -35 and ran into a two-day blizzard. He lost two dogs to wolves and was rescued by two men from near Valdez on the 26th day. The trip was covered in the local newspapers.⁴⁾

Elmer White left Dawson for Whitehorse in 1904 to edit the White Horse Star. His article about the fictional ice worm and cold weather blue ice won the attention of the Smithsonian Institute, who took the article seriously. Southern newspapers picked up the story and in January 1907 a Philadelphia paper expanded on the live history of the ice worm. Taylor & Drury ran an ad for winter clothing in 1906, warning people to buy before the blue ice came. Robert Service later wrote a poem about the worms and included White's follies in other poems. White encouraged Service to publish his poems.⁵⁾

Service worked and lived in Dawson between 1909 and 1912 and is remembered in Whitehorse by the Robert Service Campground and in Dawson by the Robert Service School and recitals at Parks Canada’s Robert Service Cabin National Historic Site.