who accompanied his narratives with music — the guitar or accordion in Service’s case — would have blended nicely with his sense of Celtic tradition.
3. Although Service wrote and published two ample volumes of autobiography, these tend to focus on incidents and travel adventures that formed an important component of his life, but the connected narrativity that one normally expects to find in life writing is tightly controlled and not inviting or revelatory of Service’s human side.
4. While the title of the book printed on the cover reads The Trail of Ninety-Eight [:] A Northland Romance, the bibliographically correct title since it appears on the title page reads The Trail of ’98 {;} A Northland Romance. What is noteworthy is that this first and best major work of prose fiction by Service was illustrated by Maynard Dixon (1875–1946), an American painter and illustrator largely of western themes whose origins in California and much painting of the American West and Southwest celebrated territory through which Service had drifted in his hobo days and for which he had an affinity. An appropriate if unusual choice. Dixon, not unlike Service, was also a self-taught artist.
5. The term apache was current in the 1920s and 1930s and was used to describe pimps and hustlers and the general — usually male — low-life of the Paris underworld.
The front jacket of Harper of Heaven (1948).
Select Bibliography
Principal Works of Robert William Service
Poetry
Songs of a Sourdough (1907)
Ballads of a Cheechako (1909)
Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (1912)
Rhymes of a Red Cross Man (1916)
Ballads of a Bohemian (1921)
The Complete Poems of Robert Service (1933)
Bar-Room Ballads: A Book of Verse (1940)
Rhymes of a Roughneck: A Book of Verse (1950)
More Collected Verse (1955)
Later Collected Verse (1960)
Prose
The Trail of ’98: A Northland Romance (1910)
The Pretender: A Story of the Latin Quarter (1914)
The Poisoned Paradise: A Romance of Monte Carlo (1922)
The Roughneck: A Tale of Tahiti (1923)
The Master of the Microbe: A Fantastic Romance (1926)
The House of Fear: A Novel (1927)
Why Not Grow Young? or Living for Longevity (1928)
Ploughman of the Moon: An Adventure into Memory (1945)
Harper of Heaven: A Record of Radiant Living (1948)
About Robert Service
There is considerable fugitive journalism about Service, but Carl F. Klinck’s Robert Service: A Biography (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1976) remains the best study to date of a remarkable life.
Frontispiece photograph of a mature, healthy Service that appeared in Ploughman of the Moon: An Adventure into Memory (1945).
From The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses
Robert Service’s log cabin in Dawson City, Yukon.
The Law of the Yukon
This is the law of the Yukon, and ever she makes it plain:
“Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane —
Strong for the red rage of battle; sane, for I harry them sore;
Send me men girt for the combat, men who are grit to the core;
Swift as the panther in triumph, fierce as the bear in defeat,
Sired of a bulldog parent, steeled in the furnace heat.
Send me the best of your breeding, lend me your chosen ones;
Them will I take to my bosom, them will I call my sons;
Them will I gild with my treasure, them will I glut with my meat;
But the others — the misfits, the failures — I trample under my feet.
Dissolute, damned and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain,
Ye would send me the spawn of your gutters — Go! take back your spawn again.
“Wild and wide are my borders, stern as death is my sway;
From my ruthless throne I have ruled alone for a million years and a day;
Hugging my mighty treasure, waiting for man to come,
Till he swept like a turbid torrent, and after him swept — the scum.
The pallid pimp of the deadline, the enervate of the pen,
One by one I weeded them out, for all that I sought was — Men.
One by one I dismayed them, frighting them sore with my glooms;
One by one I betrayed them unto my manifold dooms.
Drowned them like rats in my rivers, starved them like curs on my plains,
Rotted the flesh that was left them, poisoned the blood in their veins;
Burst with my winter upon them, searing forever their sight,
Lashed them with fungus-white faces, whimpering wild in the night;
“Staggering blind through the storm-whirl, stumbling mad through the snow,
Frozen stiff in the ice pack, brittle and bent like a bow;
Featureless, formless, forsaken, scented by wolves in their flight,
Left for the wind to make music through ribs that are glittering white;
Gnawing the back crust of failure, searching the pit of despair,
Crooking the toe in the trigger, trying to patter a prayer;
Going outside with an escort, raving with lips all afoam,
Writing a cheque for a million, driveling feebly of home;
Lost
