THE WORKS OF ROBERT W. SERVICE ARE PUBLIC DOMAIN.
Any claim as to copy rights, LINKING TO MY OR OTHER WEBSITES, claims of ownership, usage control, or other, of his OR ANY OTHER SUCH PUBLIC MATERIAL; by Amazon, Bryant McGill, Google, or Wikipedia amounts to Pure, Blatant, Plagiarism and are highly ILLEGAL.
There is a
small body of Robert W. Service's work, that has never been officially
published (any material that has been put on paper or produced in any substantial,
permanent, form has been published; and,
in Canada at least, is automatically subject to copyright law-date or official/commercial publication is NOT needed.) but in the briefest
of ways, in biographies. Due I'm sure partly to Robert's "thrifty"
nature, he would often, when invited to social occasions such as birthday
parties, compose a poem for the guest of honour rather than purchase a more
conventional gift. Unfortunately, because of their very nature, these poems
have almost completely vanished. Yet, judging from the one reproduced here,
they have the potential to tell a great deal about everyday life as it was seen
by a Whitehorse
bank clerk.
"Bob
Smart's Dream" seems to have been written for a banquet held upon the
resignation of J.P.Rogers, the Superintendent of the White Pass & Yukon
Route. It was held on March 19, 1906, and the Whitehorse Star reported that all
of Whitehorse's dignitaries were there; many of them feature in Service's poem:
Bob Smart had
been the Government Assayer at Whitehorse since 1903;
J.P.Whitney
owned one of the two largest general stores in town;
Bob Lowe was
the member of the Territorial Council;
Bill Grainger
owned a great deal of mining property in the southern Yukon;
Barney McGee
had just gone into partnership with Pete Richen in the Commercial Hotel, where
the banquet was held;
Bill Clark
had been mining around Whitehorse since it was first settled; the Deacon was
the nickname of lawyer Willard Phelps.
The
sentiments spelled out in this piece seem to have been typical of the attitudes
of the day, when mining at Whitehorse, Windy Arm and the Wheaton Valley was
booming. Luckily, much of the progress envisioned never came to pass. There are
no stamp mills, no smelter, no 18-storey buildings, no White Pass & Yukon
"flyer" to Dawson (or even to Whitehorse any more). The
"club" (the North Star Athletic Club) no longer exists, nor does
Taylor & Drury's store. And Ear Lake is a gravel pit, not a park. But the
steel bridge was built, and "the villas with gardens a flower" are in
abundance. All in all, I think that Bob and the Deacon and Barney McGee would
be pleased.
Bob
Smart's Dream
This is my dream of Whitehorse
When fifty years have sped,
As after the Rogers' Banquet
I lay asleep in my bed.
I tottered along the sidewalk
That was made of real cement;
A skyscraper loomed above me,
Where once I remembered a tent.
I heard the roar of a trolley,
And I stumbled out of the way;
I dodged a few automobiles,
And I felt I was getting quite gay.
I thought I'd cross the Yukon,
Over the big steel bridge;
I heard the roar of the stamp mills
Up on the western ridge.
Crushing the quartz from bullion,
And borne on the evening breeze
I sniffed the fumes of the smelter
And the suphur made me sneeze.
So I thought I'd go to Ear Lake Park
Where nature was fresh and fair;
('Twas donated by J.P.Whitney,
The multi-millionaire.)
Out past the smiling suburbs,
The villas with gardens aflower,
The factories down by the rapids
Run by the water power.
I took a car to the Canyon
And transferred up to the Park
And I sat on a bench by the fountain
Feeling as old as the Ark.
I sighed for the ancient landmarks,
The men that I used to know,
Till I stumbled against a statue,
And spelled out the name - Bob Lowe.
A litle chap who saw me
Said with evident pride:
"That is a bust of my grandpa:
It's twenty years since he died.
And if you think I'm fooling,
Ask that boy and you'll see -
He's little Billy Grainger, my
playmate,
And that's little Barney McGee."
Then I turned once more to the city,
With its streets like canyons aroar;
And the lights of Taylor & Drury's
Colossal department store:
The eighteen storey steel palace
Where once stood the White Pass Hotel,
The silent rush of its elevators
The clamor of bell upon bell.
And over there at the depot
The hurry, the crush and the din,
The flyer just starting for Dawson,
The bullion express coming in.
The business blocks all abustle,
The theatres all alight,
The Home of Indigent Sourdoughs
Endowed by Armstrong and White.
And everywhere were strangers,
And I thought in the midst of these
Of Old Bill Clark in his homespun,
And debonnaire Mr.Breze:
And Fish, and Doc and the Deacon,
And the solo bunch at the club -
Now grown to a stately mansion
That would make the old place look
dub.
It was all so real, so lifelike,
I awoke like a man in a fog,
So I shed a few tears in the darkness,
And groped for the hair of the dog.
This was my dream of Whitehorse
When fifty years have sped,
As I lay asleep in my bed.
___ Robert W. Service, 1905
____________________
Robert
William Service was born into a Scottish family while they were living in
Preston, England. He was schooled in Scotland, attending Hillhead High School
in Glasgow. Service moved to Canada at the age of 21 and travelled to Vancouver
Island, British Columbia with his Buffalo Bill outfit and dreams of becoming a
cowboy. He drifted around western North America, wandering from California to
British Columbia, taking and quitting a series of jobs: Starving in Mexico,
residing in a California bordello, farming on Vancouver Island and pursuing
unrequited love in Vancouver. This sometimes required him to leech off his
parent's Scottish neighbours and friends who had previously emigrated to
Canada.
In 1899,
Service was a store clerk in Cowichan Bay, British Columbia. He mentioned to a
customer (Charles H. Gibbons, editor of the Victoria Daily Colonist) that he
wrote verses, with the result that six poems by "R.S." on the Boer
Wars had appeared in the Colonist by July 1900 – including "The March of
the Dead" that would later appear in his first book. Service's brother, Alex
(Alex was, especially by persons of Scottish decent pronounced Alec or Alick)
was a prisoner of the Boers at the time, having been captured on November 15,
1899, alongside Winston Churchill.
The Colonist
also published Service's "Music in the Bush" on September 18, 1901,
and "The Little Old Log Cabin" on March 16, 1902.
Hired by the
Canadian Bank of Commerce, he worked in a number of its branches before being
posted to the branch in Whitehorse (not Dawson) in the Yukon
Territory in 1904,
six years after the Klondike Gold Rush. Inspired by the vast beauty of the
Yukon wilderness, Service began writing poetry about the things he saw; conversations
with locals led him to write about things he hadn't seen, many of which hadn't
actually happened, as well. He did not set foot in Dawson City until 1908,
arriving in the Klondike ten years after the Gold Rush, but his renown as a
writer was already established.
He
is said to have composed his first;, and shortest, verse, a grace, on his sixth birthday:
God bless the
cakes and bless the jam;
Bless the
cheese and the cold boiled ham:
Bless the
scones Aunt Jeannie makes,
And save us
all from bellyaches. Amen ________
