The Cremation of Sam McGee

The gold-rush ballads of Robert Service, set on a real lake

The Yukon’s folklore was written in verse. Robert Service, the “Bard of the Yukon,” worked in Whitehorse and Dawson in the gold-rush years and turned the country into ballads that every Canadian schoolchild still learns: The Cremation of Sam McGee, set on the “marge of Lake Lebarge,” where a prospector freezing to death makes his partner promise to cremate him, and The Shooting of Dan McGrew. They are tall tales, but they hold the real cold, greed and comradeship of the stampede better than any history. Lake Laberge is a real, hauntingly beautiful lake north of Whitehorse.