Robert W. Service was born in Preston, north of Liverpool, on January 14, 1874. After spending his childhood in Glasgow and gradusting from school, he was apprenticed as a bank clerk but became restless for something more. He sailed to Canada and the spent the next years doing different kind of jobs up and down the coast of the Pacific Northwest. In 1904, he finally accepted the job of a bank teller in the town of Whitehorse, Yukon, just a few years after gold had been found at Bonanza Creek and the Gold Rush had started. After a little while, the Canadian Bank of Commerce transferred him to a branch in the town of Dawson City, which had quieted down since the Gold Rush. But with the yarns and stories that he had overheard while living in Dawson City, he wrote amazing poetry about myth and legend and kept the flame of the Gold Rush alive.

        Service published his first collection of poetry, Songs of a Sourdough, in London, in 1907 and in the same year, Edward Stern of Philadelphia, and Company, published it in the U.S.A. as The Spell of The Yukon and Other Verses. This volume included narratives of the New York waterfront and European painters, together with "The Cremation of Sam McGee" and "The Shooting of Dan McGrew". These two poems were to become two of the most-memorized poems in the language.

        Under it's many different titles and various editions, this volume was a great success, earning Service enough money to quit his job as a bank clerk in Dawson City in 1909. That same year, Stern and Company published Ballads of a Cheechako, his second and longer collection which enlarged his living roster of northland personalities.

        But Robert Service only depicted the magical land of the Yukon during the Gold Rush in these two books, during the first World War, Service became a correspondant for the Toronto Star which took him to the South Seas and also to France which became his home until his death in 1958. During his lifetime, Service published over two dozen volumes ranging from fiction to poetry and to autobiography, but his fame rested on the vibrant poems he had written about he Gold Rush days.

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