Robert Service: Under the Spell of the Yukon

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

In 1898, when thousands of fortune-seekers from around the world were
swarming up our northwest coast to the Yukon, the man who more than any
came to immortalize the great gold rush was working on Vancouver Island,
ideally placed to join the throng. Ironically, Robert Service chose
instead to go south and explore the American southwest, and ended up in
the Yukon only when the rush was long over and only because he was
transferred to Whitehorse by his employer, the Bank of Commerce. There
he wrote the poems that brought him fame and fortune. In 1908, when he
arrived in Dawson, the town had shrunk to a mere tenth of what it had
been a decade earlier. Four years later, he left the north forever, and
went to Europe for the Toronto Star. He died in France in 1958, but half
of this sprightly new biography is devoted to the few years he lived in
the north.

Historian and biographer Enid Mallory visited many North American
locales where Service had been, and her photographs provide some of the
illustrations. It is easier, however, to retrace Service’s steps than
to find the man. Of necessity, Service’s two volumes of autobiography
are an essential source, but they are frequently contradictory or
demonstrably wrong, and the biographer must “read between the lines of
his self-told story.” One major episode in his life “comes down to
us in two versions—both of them his own.” Service wrote next to
nothing about his family (he had nine siblings) and nothing about an
ill-fated romance with the daughter of Vancouver’s first mayor, a
story told by no previous biographer. Mallory had access to letters
preserved by the family of the young woman, other correspondence, and
autobiographical recollections of one of Service’s siblings, an Ottawa
doctor who acknowledges that his famous brother “sometimes embellished
or rearranged the facts.”

A Globe and Mail review of a 1976 biography was headlined, “The Real
Robert Service Remains as Elusive as Ever.” Many questions remain, but
Mallory’s use of previously unpublished family papers brings our most
celebrated poet into much clearer focus.