October 15, 2022 – Beiseker, Alberta
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
Robert W. Service
Sam McGee was a road builder and sometimes prospector. When this famous poem was written about him in 1907, he wasn’t dead, and he wasn’t from Tennessee.
Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam ’round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell.
Though he’d often say in his homely way that “he’d sooner live in hell.”
William “Samuel” McGee was born in Lindsay, Ontario. In his early years he worked on a road construction crew which took him to San Francisco, then to the Yukon Territory during the Klondike gold rush. McGee was employed as a labourer on the Whitehorse–Carcross wagon road and did some prospecting on his days off. What little money McGee earned he deposited in The Canadian Bank of Commerce in Whitehorse, Yukon.
The real Sam McGee wasn’t cremated, he is buried in a cemetery near Beiseker, Alberta.
Sam McGee was an interesting character but not notable in a public way. His fame only began when his name was noticed on a Yukon bank ledger.
Robert W. Service was an aspiring writer living in Whitehorse in 1907. During the day, Service worked as a bank teller. He spent long winter nights conducting research and writing stories. A rooming house acquaintance, Dr. Leonard Sugden, told Service a tale one evening about how he had cremated a sailor’s corpse in the boiler of the steamer Olive May.
The macabre story set Service’s creative wheels in motion. Inspired by the tale, Service borrowed one of his bank customer’s names (because it rhymed with “Tennessee”) and wrote The Cremation of Sam McGee.
The poem Service compiled from a borrowed story and a borrowed name, became a Canadian classic. The Cremation of Sam McGee is among the most beloved poems of the 20th century and continues to be studied in Canadian schools to this day.
The real Sam McGee was much less recognizable than his namesake in the poem. Sam drifted from an unsuccessful career as a prospector in the Yukon, to construction jobs in Montana and British Columbia. He tried his hand at farming near Edmonton for a while but spent his golden years destitute, living with his daughter near Beiseker, Alberta.
Sam spent most of his life in the south but he never lost his affection for the land of the northern lights. Sam McGee returned to the Yukon on two occasions after his “cremation”. On the last trip back in 1938 he found a souvenir shop selling packets of “genuine ashes of Sam McGee”.
Sam McGee is probably the only man who ever bought his own cremation dust.
I plan on traveling to Beiseker soon to visit Sam McGee’s gravesite. Let me know if you want to ride along. In the meantime, check out this video. Johnny Cash narrates The Cremation of Sam McGee while Ted Harrison’s artwork depicting the story, scrolls across the screen.
Some planks I tore from the cabin floor,
and I lit the boiler fire;
Some coal I found that was lying around,
and I heaped the fuel higher;
The flames just soared,
and the furnace roared
—such a blaze you seldom see;
And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal,
and I stuffed in …
…Sam McGee.
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