Klondike Gold Rush, Robert service

Among his most famous lines, Robert Service wrote, "Strange things are done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold." Few were stranger than those of Robert Service himself. As for gold, Service found that, too, but in a form unlike that found by any other adventurer in the fabled Klondike.

Panning the river beds or chipping out nuggets from rock faces were not for him. Robert Service came later to the Klondike Gold Rush and he had no interest in prospecting. Rather, he was employed in Dawson as a bank teller. In his spare time he collected stories, tramped the wild country, canoed the rivers and, most all, wrote poetry.

Robert Service was born in England in 1874, then spent his childhood in Glasgow, Scotland. He moved himself to America as a young man, working his way eventually to the West Coast of Canada.

He made no bones about hating hard work, but did it nevertheless, working in a variety of laboring jobs before moving on to clerking. Before his travels took him north, he ventured south to California and Mexico.

In 1906, Service finally made it to the Yukon, as a bank clerk. The Klondike Gold Rush had started ten years earlier and was now nearly over. But the old-timers lingered on and so did their stories as surely as the sawdust and blood on the bar-room floors. Service captured some of this atmosphere in his early ballads and his imagination filled in the gaps.

Service's books were an immediate success. The traveling and adventuring bugs stayed active. In 1912, Service went off to cover the Balkan Wars as a correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star.

1913 was a pivotal year for Service. He discovered Paris. On the coast of Brittany he found a house in the village of Lancieux, which he purchased and dubbed "Dream Haven." Definitely not least that year, he married.

Robert Service remained in Europe during most of World War I. For a brief time he was a correspondent, giving that up to join the ambulance corps, which he left just prior to the American entry into the war.

Throughout this period, Service continued to write, drawing heavily on his experiences. When asked about influences on his work, Service noted in his autobiography:Browning, Tennyson, Burns, and Kipling. In later years, he would spend time with some of his literary contemporaries, such as James Joyce, but they did not particularly influence his writing.

During 1921-22 Service spent time working in Hollywood. His books had attracted movie interest. He managed side sojourns in Tahiti and other exotic locales.

His most momentous trip was a 2000 mile overland trip back to the Yukon, an adventure daunting and dangerous even today. Service was not a man who scoffed at danger, although his measure of the impossible was perhaps further outside the limits than for many other human beings.

During the years prior to World War II, Service traveled extensively in Europe, including a lengthy trip to Russia in 1937. During 1939 and 1940 he lived in Nice, finally leaving France in late 1940 with the Nazis almost nipping at his heels. Most of the war years, he spent in California. He did not return to France, to his beloved "Dream Haven," until the summer of 1947.

While in California, Service worked on several movies, even trying his hand at acting in a couple of them. He had a small role in "The Spoilers", a 1942 production starring John Wayne, Randolph Scott, and Marlene Dietrich.

Having now returned to France, Service settled with his family to work on memoirs, poetry, and occasional essays. He estimated that he had written 2000 pages of poetry and probably 30,000 couplets of verse, a prodigious amount when added to articles, essays, screenplays and thrillers.

Canada claims Service for their own, as does Scotland, And France, though he wrote in

English. His spirit was in keeping with that of the Yukon in its gold rush days, no matter where in the world he might be or be preparing to go. That spirit drove his work.

Robert Service died in 1958, surrounded by his family, at "Dream Haven," Lancieux.