How Legends Are Made
Robert Service was a British-Canadian writer who worked as a bank clerk in Whitehorse, Yukon. In 1907, he sent his first collection of poetry, Songs of a Sourdough, to a Toronto publisher.
The publisher passed it to its salesman R.B. Bond just as he was leaving by train for a sales tour in the West. As Bond began reading it on the train, he burst out laughing at the poet’s humour.
A fellow traveller was curious, and Bond ended up reading the passage aloud, to the delight of the surrounding listeners. From that moment on, Bond started performing impromptu readings of Robert Service poems in train cars, bookshops, and gentlemen’s clubs. By the time he reached Revelstoke, British Columbia, the first edition had nearly sold out. The well-travelled original edition that Bond read from eventually made its way into the Phil Lind Klondike Gold Rush Collection.
By the time Robert Service died in 1958, he had sold three million copies of Songs of a Sourdough. He was widely recognized as the most celebrated poet of the Klondike and was affectionately known as “the Bard of the Yukon.”
“I wanted the gold, and I sought it;
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy—I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it—
Came out with a fortune last fall,—
Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn’t all.”
– Robert Service, “The Spell of the Yukon”
Next: The Golden Muse