Ballads of a Cheechako

Robert William Service (1874-1958) was a poet and writer. He is mostly well known for his writings on the Canadian North, including the poems The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee. Inspired by the vast beauty of the Yukon wilderness, Service began writing poetry about the things he saw. He collected enough poems for a book, which was published in 1907 in North America as The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses and in England as The Songs of a Sourdough. This made Service wealthy and he became known as the "Canadian Kipling". During World War I he worked as an ambulance driver for the Canadian Red Cross, as well as working as a war correspondent for the Canadian government. He wrote a number of poems about the war, many appearing in a new book, Rhymes of a Red-Cross Man (1916). Amongst his other works are: Ballads of a Cheechako (1909), The Trail of '98: A Northland Romance (1910), Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (1912), Ballads of a Bohemian (1921) and an autobiography, Ploughman of the Moon: An Adventure Into Memory (1945).