January-February 2020 There’s a land where the mountains are nameless, And the rivers all run God knows where; There are lives that are erring and aimless, And deaths that just hang by a hair; There are hardships that nobody reckons; There are valleys unpeopled and still; There’s a land—oh, it beckons and beckons, And I want to go back—and I will. from The Spell of the Yukon
Robert W. Service, c. 1912
Robert Service Robert William Service (1874–1958) was a British-Canadian poet and writer, best known for his colorfully vivid descriptions of the land and the people of the Yukon Territory. Although he did not arrive in Dawson City until ten years after the great gold rush of 1898, his poetry and writings of the era helped shape the romantic ideals of the Klondike. He was born in Preston, in the English county of Lancashire, on January 16, 1874, the first born child of a Scottish bank clerk who married the daughter of a wealthy distillery family. He would have nine siblings, six brothers and three sisters, and his parents apparently felt the stress of his father’s work not going well. At the age of five, Robert and his younger brother John were sent to live with an uncle, the postmaster of Kilwinning, Scotland. In 1883, when Robert was nine years old, his mother received a legacy and the Service family moved from Preston, Lancashire to Scotland's largest city, Glasgow, and Robert and his brother rejoined the large family. At school his sense of humor and his easy facility with words made his company enjoyable. By the age of thirteen he dreamed of going to sea, but his parents did not approve, so he took his first job, in a shipping office. After that company failed, Robert, then 14, accepted a position as an apprentice at the Commercial Bank of Scotland, which would become the Royal Bank of Scotland.
alaskan-history.com
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