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    Ballads of a Cheechako
    Ballads of a Cheechako
    Ballads of a Cheechako
    Ebook106 pages2 hours

    Ballads of a Cheechako

    By Robert W. Service

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    About this ebook

    This antiquarian book contains a collection of poems written by Robert William Service. A delightful collection of poetic tales of northern gold rush living that offers incredible insights into the lives and outlooks of the men and women of the region, these poems will appeal to any lovers of poetry, and constitute a veritable must-read for fans of Service’s work. The poems include: “To The Man of the High North”, “Men of the High North”, “The Ballad of the Northern Lights”, “The Ballad of the Black Fox Skin”, “The Ballad of Pious Pete”, “The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill”, and many others. Robert William Service was a British-Canadian poet and writer, best known for his poems "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee". Many vintage texts such as this are increasingly hard to come by and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition. It comes complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateMay 20, 2015
    ISBN9781473374843
    Ballads of a Cheechako
    Author

    Robert W. Service

    Robert W. Service (1874-1958) was born in Preston, Lancashire, England, and came to Canada in 1895, eventually ending up in Yukon Territory in 1904, five years after the Klondike Gold Rush. His many books include the poetry collection The Songs of a Sourdough, the novel The Trail of '98, and the autobiography Ploughman of the Moon. Service later moved to France, where he died.

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      Book preview

      Ballads of a Cheechako - Robert W. Service

      BALLADS OF A CHEECHAKO

      by

      Robert W. Service

      [British-born Canadian Poet—1874-1958.]

      Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.

      This book is copyright and may not be

      reproduced or copied in any way without

      the express permission of the publisher in writing

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      Contents

      Robert William Service

      To the Man of the High North

      Men of the High North

      The Ballad of the Northern Lights

      The Ballad of the Black Fox Skin

      II.

      III.

      IV.

      The Ballad of Pious Pete

      The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill

      The Ballad of One-Eyed Mike

      The Ballad of the Brand

      The Ballad of Hard-Luck Henry

      The Man from Eldorado

      II.

      III.

      IV.

      V.

      The Telegraph Operator

      The Song of the Mouth-Organ

      The Trail of Ninety-Eight.

      I.

      II.

      III.

      The Ballad of Gum-Boot Ben

      Clancy of the Mounted Police

      Lost

      L’Envoi

      CONTENTS OF FIRST LINES:

      To the Man of the High North

      My rhymes are rough, and often in my rhyming

      Men of the High North

      Men of the High North, the wild sky is blazing;

      The Ballad of the Northern Lights

      One of the Down and Out—that’s me.Stare at me well, ay, stare!

      The Ballad of the Black Fox Skin

      There was Claw-fingered Kitty and Windy Ike living the life of shame,

      The Ballad of Pious Pete

      I tried to refine that neighbor of mine, honest to God, I did.

      The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill

      I took a contract to bury the body of blasphemous Bill MacKie,

      The Ballad of One-Eyed Mike

      This is the tale that was told to me by the man with the crystal eye,

      The Ballad of the Brand

      ‘Twas up in a land long famed for gold, where women were far and rare,

      The Ballad of Hard-Luck Henry

      Now wouldn’t you expect to find a man an awful crank

      The Man from Eldorado

      He’s the man from Eldorado, and he’s just arrived in town,

      My Friends

      The man above was a murderer, the man below was a thief;

      The Prospector

      I strolled up old Bonanza, where I staked in ninety-eight,

      The Black Sheep

      Hark to the ewe that bore him:

      The Telegraph Operator

      I will not wash my face;

      The Wood-Cutter

      The sky is like an envelope,

      The Song of the Mouth-Organ

      I’m a homely little bit of tin and bone;

      The Trail of Ninety-Eight

      Gold!We leapt from our benches.Gold!We sprang from our stools.

      The Ballad of Gum-Boot Ben

      He was an old prospector with a vision bleared and dim.

      Clancy of the Mounted Police

      In the little Crimson Manual it’s written plain and clear

      Lost

      "Black is the sky, but the land is white—

      L’Envoi

      We talked of yesteryears, of trails and treasure,

      Robert William Service

      Robert William Service was born on 16 January 1874, in Preston, Lancashire, England.Best known as a poet and writer, labelled ‘the Bard of the Yukon’, Service’s tales have often been considered doggerel by the literary elite, yet remain extremely popular to this day.He was the first of ten children, and spent much of his early education in Kilwinning and Glasgow, Scotland.His father was a banker, originally from Kilwinning, who decided to send his son to live with his Scottish relatives from the age of five.After leaving school, Service joined the Commercial Bank of Scotland, but utilised much of his spare time reading and writing poetry.Service was reportedly already selling his verses by this point.The banking profession bored him however, and he travelled to Canada, with dreams of becoming a Cowboy.He drifted around western North America, ‘wandering from California to British Columbia… starving in Mexico, residing in a California bordello, farming on Vancouver Island and pursuing unrequited love in Vancouver.’Whilst working as a store clerk in British Columbia, Service mentioned to a customer that he wrote poetry, and as a result, six of his poems on the Boer War appeared in the Colonist in July 1900.Throughout this peripatetic period, Service continued writing and saving his verses, and more than a third of the poems which made up his first volume had been written before he moved north in 1904.But it was in Whitehorse, a frontier town located on the Yukon River at the White Horse Rapids, that Service penned his most famous poems; The Shooting of Dam McGrew, The Cremation of Sam McGee and The Call of the Wild.All of these works detailed the local people and countryside; drawn from events he witnessed himself as well as local conversations and gossip.After having collected enough poems for a book, Service sent the collection to his father, who had emigrated to Toronto, and asked him to find a printing house to duplicate them in booklet form.  The poems were so popular however, that his cheque was returned along with a contract offering ten percent royalties for the book.This book became Songs of a Sourdough, and was such a success that it went through seven printings even before its official release date.In 1908, the bank Robert Service worked for transferred him to the town of Dawson, where he met and talked with the veterans of the Gold Rush.He used their tales to write his second book of verse, Ballads of a Cheechako, published later that year.This too was a great success.After this, Service served as a correspondent for the Toronto Star during the Balkan Wars, later moving to Paris in 1913, where he spent the great majority of the rest of his life.It was here that he married Germaine Bourgoin, a daughter of a distillery owner, with whom he purchased a summer home at Lancieux, Cotes-D’Armor, in the Brittany region of France.In his early forties, on the outbreak of World War One, Service attempted to enlist in the army, but was turned down on health grounds.He eventually served as a stretcher bearer and ambulance driver with the

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