The Cremation of Sam McGee

Although he was never a hands-on prospector, never succumbing to the gold fever that in the mid-1890s rocked the West Coast (really the world, thanks to sensationalized news accounts spread by cross-country newspaper empires), Robert W. Service arrived in Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon, in 1894, just in time for what became the Alaskan Gold Rush. Working at newspapers, however, Service was nevertheless enthralled by the tales of the Yukon Stampede that he heard from the locals, nicknamed Sourdoughs, who had ventured out into the arctic wastes in search of gold.

Like the California Gold Rush that electrified antebellum America a generation earlier, the Klondike Stampede attracted more than 100,000 would-be prospectors, few of which had any idea of the harsh conditions they would face. They were young dreamers, searching as much for adventure as for easy wealth. Indeed, historians now estimate fewer than 10% actually found the wealth of which they dreamed. The gold rush lasted barely two years; the boomtowns hastily erected along the Dawson Trail prospered and then collapsed into ghost towns.

The Alaskan Gold Rush, however, has maintained a presence in the American imagination. The Klondike Stampede combined the naïve and romantic pull of adventure tales with the brutal immediacy of

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