School was not always a happy experience for Service who proved to be independent-minded and a not particularly attentive pupil much given to daydreaming and fantasy and the reading of adventure stories. At the age of fifteen he was expelled from school and forced to enter the world of employment. He first secured an apprentice clerkship in a ship chandler’s office, but soon after found a very junior position with the Commercial Bank of Scotland. Unbeknownst to him, this early experience in banking would serve him especially well and usher him into employment with a Canadian bank and a posting to Canada’s North, but not before, as a newly arrived immigrant, Service would taste hard work as a labourer on a farm near Duncan, British Columbia.
He arrived in Canada on an “emigrant” ship in 1896 and travelled by train westward across great expanses of country, nursing romantic notions about carefree travel and adventure in North America. It was not to be quite the life he had fantasized about as far back as his adolescent days in Scotland. Here Service’s story became a mixture of all the awkwardness, social maladjustment, and difficulty of an immigrant fitting into a seemingly classless new world environment in which Service found himself trying to adapt and to feel at home. He undertook all kinds of work, most of it manual, and seemed to thrive on the sheer physical demands of haying, harvesting, and looking after animals. Some of this appealed to him because it demanded personal fitness, something that became a bit of an obsession with him in later years.
But Service did not settle down or put out roots in the new land. The “drifter” urge that became a powerful undertow in his life pulled him into a kind of benign vagabondism that sent him southward into the United States. What little we know of this fairly extensive period of Service’s life survives as echoes and recollections that went into the making of his later writing. We must bear in mind that Service left Scotland for Canada at the age of twenty-two, and that after arriving in Canada he spent at least half a dozen years as an itinerant labourer and hobo doing odd jobs before he found his way back to Canada, specifically Victoria, British Columbia. There, seriously at loose ends and almost penniless, he was prompted by a stranger to try his luck by applying for a job at the bank across the street from the park bench where he found himself. He applied, and very likely on the strength of his past banking experience in Scotland, he was hired by the Canadian Bank of Commerce, transforming himself, late in 1903, from a guitar-strumming hobo and jack of all trades into a bank clerk with a regular wage. A year later the bank sent him to Whitehorse in Yukon Territory, and his fate and his fiction were, so to speak sealed. Service was locked into a future that would make him widely known as the Bard of the Yukon, even though he had missed the gold rush by some five years. He was thirty years old.
Earlier on, in the course of the years of his so-called vagabondage, Service had heard from time to time of the excitement of the Klondike Gold Rush. The discovery of placer gold in the Klondike River occurred in 1896 and occasioned the gold rush of 1897–98. When Service arrived in Whitehorse in 1904, the tumult and the shouting had pretty much died down, but yarn-spinning old-timers were still about and their stories quickly captivated the young bank clerk. He was struck by the powerful scenery, the sense of brutal adventure, and the rich vein of local lore that fired his imagination. Although most of the prospectors who had made the gold rush such a colourful event in Canadian history had moved on, stories of lucky miners striking it suddenly rich, of gambling on a grand scale, of ruffians, con artists, and harlots, lingered on and were happily told and retold by grizzled northerners given to embroidering their long memories.
The title page of Rhymes of a Red Cross Man (1916).
Somehow, sometime, someone had mentioned in Service’s hearing that the Klondike needed its own Bret Harte (1836–1902), the American writer who had successfully used the California gold rush of the mid-1800s as material for his stories such as those collected in The Luck of Roaring Camp (1870), with titles like “The Outcasts of Poker Flats,” the tone of which echoed eerily for Service. And, of course, the success of Jack London (1876–1916) with The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), to name only two gripping adventure stories fuelled by London’s experiences in the North when he was one of the thousands who swarmed into the Yukon gold fields, very likely prompted Service to try his hand at his own brand of tales of the Northland (as he liked to call it) — only his would be recounted in strongly rhythmed verse.
Service had discovered a talent for rhyming and versifying at an early age. He had also scribbled and published occasionally what he described self-deprecatingly as newspaper verse during his vagabond travels. Now, established in a steady job, and with not a great deal available as entertainment or diversion, he settled into a cabin and into writing in his free time. Harte and London were near contemporaries, and although Service had not had the benefit of an extensive education, he was a reader and had his literary models in the likes of Rudyard Kipling, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson to draw upon.
After his stint in Whitehorse, Service was transferred to Dawson City, but all in all, he did not have a particularly long stay in the North. A few years in the teller’s cage at the bank, some travel and solitary writing in his Dawson City cabin, resulted in a sheaf of poems about which Service felt good enough to be prepared to pay out of his own carefully husbanded savings for its publication. Although biographically Service is not all that forthcoming, he does tell us something of what his life in the Northland had been like, which gives us an insight into how certain poems came to be written, and the style of life that had occasioned them.
At this point in his life Service was in his thirties, and except for much rambling travel mostly along the Pacific coast and in Mexico, the occasional piece of fugitive verse published somewhere in a newspaper, and work at the bank, Service had neither a profession nor a career to call his own. The saving step would be authorship of some kind duly enshrined in book form. The first stepping stone of what would become a wildly successful career as a writer was a clutch of thirty-three pieces of verse, mostly cast in Service’s idea of what a ballad might be, a form that one attempt at definition described as “the name given to a type of verse of unknown authorship dealing with episodes or simple motifs rather than sustained themes written in stanzaic form more or less found suitable for oral transmission.” What also must have appealed to Service with his notions of itinerant minstrelsy was that the ballad lent itself to recitation or song.
Appropriately his first book was called Songs of a Sourdough, and his second Ballads of a Cheechako. In one fell swoop Service had pushed two obscure terms into the limelight of the English language, with sourdough meaning a grouchy or peevish individual, and cheechako meaning a greenhorn or novice. Both terms appear to have been current among the hard-bitten mining folk of the gold fields of Alaska and the Yukon. Northland, another special word, carried with it the ethos of that near-Arctic roof of the American continent, and it was an ethos that Service took happily and readily as his own.
For Service verse-making became a kind of minstrelsy that blended easily with the uncomplicated music that so attracted him. In addition, the North of the gold rush had its own saloon culture echoing richly with song, dance, and sentiment. A recent archaeological find has brought up a music-playing machine, perhaps an early version of the gramophone, which was recovered from the sunken wreck of a riverboat in the Klondike River. Disks on this machine have survived with two pieces of popular music from that time. Hitherto unknown, the pieces were “My Onliest One” and “Rendezvous Waltz.” Clearly stuff of Service’s time, and for Service, verses were ballads, and ballads meant music.
Once launched on this stream of composition,