74 Poetry for Students
McGee sitting up and smiling. Sam tells Cap to
shut the door so as not to let in the cold.Author Biography.
Robert William Service was born on January 16,
1874, in Preston, Lancashire, England, to Robert
and Emily (Parker) Service. When Emily’s father
died and left a bequest of ten thousand pounds, the
family moved to Glasgow, Scotland. The oldest of
ten children (Service had six brothers and three sis-
ters), Service was sent to live with three maiden
aunts and his paternal grandfather. He returned
home at age eleven and was enrolled in the Hill-
head School. Expelled three years later for defying
the drillmaster, Service was apprenticed at age fif-
teen to a branch of the Commercial Bank of Scot-
land, where he stayed until 1896.
Service resigned from the bank at the end of
March, 1896, to emigrate to North America. He
crossed the Atlantic as a steerage passenger to
Montreal, took a “colonist” train to Canada’s west
coast, and ended up as a farm laborer on Vancou-
ver Island. A little more than eighteen months later,
he headed for California. In his autobiography, Ser-
vice claims to have worked as a tunnel builder inOakland, a handyman in a San Diego brothel, and
a guitar-playing singer in Colorado. Whatever the
actual truth to those claims might be, by 1899 Ser-
vice was again working on a Vancouver Island
ranch. In October of 1903, Service returned to the
banking industry with the Canadian Bank of Com-
merce in Victoria, British Columbia. In 1904 he
was transferred to Whitehorse in the Yukon Terri-
tory, and, at the end of the summer of 1906 he be-
came the branch’s teller.
Service was never a miner. Rather, he learned
of the 1898 Gold Rush through conversations with
old-timers and the research of old records. His vol-
ume of poetry about life in the northern wilderness,
Songs of a Sourdough(1907), quickly went through
fifteen printings, and Service was earning royalties
of several thousand dollars a year while still work-
ing as a bank teller in Dawson, even farther north
in the Yukon Territory.
In 1910, Service made his way to Toronto and
New York to arrange for the publication of his
novel, The Trail of ‘98.On his return trip Service
visited his family, who had settled in northern Al-
berta, then set out alone on a perilous journey of
more than two thousand miles to Dawson by canoe
through wilderness waterways. His experiences,
real or imagined, provided material for the best
chapters of his autobiography and inspired the
Mackenzie River ballads of Rhymes of a Rolling
Stone(1912). Service planned to follow in the foot-
steps of Robert Louis Stevenson and travel to Tahiti
in 1912, but the editor of the Toronto Starhired
him as a foreign correspondent, and Service left the
Yukon, never to return.
In 1913, Service arrived in Paris. He married
Germaine Bourgoin on June 12, 1913. Denied ad-
mission to the armed forces because of varicose
veins, Service assumed the role of war correspon-
dent for the Toronto Star.Service joined an Amer-
ican-organized ambulance corps in Paris, and from
these experiences came Rhymes of a Red Cross
Man(1916). For nine months the book topped the
best-seller lists in the United States.
From 1919 to 1929, Service and his wife lived
in Paris, where their only child, a daughter named
Iris, was born. During this time Service became in-
terested in film. Cinematic adaptations of some of
his poems received mixed reviews. By 1931, the
family had moved to Nice, France. The American
edition of The Complete Poemsin 1933 recon-
firmed Service’s reputation, although many people
in North America assumed Service was already
dead. In 1940, Service and his family returned toThe Cremation of Sam McGeeRobert W. Service