The Cremation of Sam McGee
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.
One of Canada’s most beloved poems – among the ranks of Lieutenant-Colonel John McRae’s ‘In Flanders Fields,’ a haunting tribute to the fallen soldiers of the Great War; and Alexander Muir’s ‘The Maple Leaf Forever,’ once a contender for Canada’s national anthem – is the 1907 narrative ballad The Cremation of Sam McGee, written by British-Canadian bank clerk Robert Service. The poem is written from the perspective of a northern sourdough prospecting for gold in Canada’s Yukon Territory in the wake of the Klondike Stampede of 1897. His partner, Sam McGee, is a Tennessean who despises the bitter cold of the subarctic winter. As McGee lays dying from some undisclosed illness, he has the narrator promise to cremate his body in order to spare him the fate of an “icy grave”. The remainder of the poem follows the narrator’s frantic efforts to fulfill his partner’s dying wish, hauling McGee’s frozen corpse across the northern wilds in search of a suitable crematorium. Finally, in an episode referred to in the poem’s opening and closing stanzas as the queerest sight the Northern Lights “ever did see,” the narrator burns McGee’s body in the boiler of a derelict paddle steamer called the Alice May, which he found half-submerged in the frozen “Lake Labarge”. When the prospector checks in on the progress of the cremation, he finds an apparently-living Sam McGee cheerfully sitting among the flames, urging him to close the door so as to keep out the cold. “Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee,” the dead man remarks, “it’s the first time I’ve been warm.” We are left to ponder whether the narrator’s vision is the hallucination of a fevered brain driven to madness by the morbid, taxing undertaking to which McGee swore him to commit, or, as is subtly implied throughout the poem, a preternatural phenomenon.
Although Service’s poem is fictional, many elements of the story are founded on reality. Service took the name ‘Sam McGee’ from a Klondike prospector who had an account at the Canadian Bank of Commerce, at whose branch in Whitehorse, Yukon, Service was employed as a clerk. Although this ‘William Samuel McGee’ on whom Service’s character was loosely based was not cremated, being buried near the village of Beiseker, Alberta, in 1940, more than three decades after the publication of Service’s poem, there was a prospector whose last remains are said to have been incinerated in the boiler furnace of an abandoned steamboat on some Yukon lake.
Many have speculated that Service conceived the idea for his poem from what appears to be a northern legend regarding Dr. Leonard Sugden, a well-known Scots-Canadian physician who practiced in the town of Whitehorse, Yukon – known at the time as White Horse Rapids – in the aftermath of the Klondike Gold Rush. According to this legend, which has several different versions, sometime in 1899 or 1900, Sugden was called out to either Lake Laberge – a widening of the Yukon River north of Whitehorse, on which Service’s ‘Lake Labarge’ is undoubtedly based – or Tagish Lake, located about 40 miles southeast of town – to treat a prosector who had fallen ill with scurvy. Another unlikely version of the legend, based on the 1900 Report of the North-West Mounted Police, identifies the patient as a White Horse-based prospector named Cornelius Curtin, who suffered from pneumonia.
When he reached the unfortunate man, Dr. Sugden found that his would-be patient had already succumbed to his illness. Unable to bury the body in that remote country on account of the permafrost, the physician opted to cremate the corpse in the firebox of a particularly homely paddle-wheeler called the Olive May – apparently the inspiration for Service’s Alice May, which lay half-sunk at either the northerly “Lower End” of Lake Laberge near the Thirty Mile section of the Yukon River, or in Tagish Lake not far from the village of Tagish, Yukon.
Although some writers, without citing any sources, claim that Service learned of this macabre operation from Dr. Sugden himself, with whom he is alleged to have once shared lodging, the so-called ‘Bard of the Yukon’ stated in his 1946 autobiography Ploughman of the Moon that he was made aware of the tale by a wealthy miner whom he met at a house party in White Horse. “He was a big mining man from Dawson,” Service wrote, referring to Dawson City, the epicentre of the Klondike Gold Rush, “and he scarcely acknowledged his introduction to a little bank clerk. Portly and important, he was smoking a big cigar with a gilt band. Suddenly, he said: ‘I’ll tell you a story Jack London never got.’ Then he spun a yarn of a man who cremated his pal. It had a surprise climax which occasioned much laughter. I did not join in, for I had a feeling that here was a decisive moment of destiny. I still remember how a great excitement usurped me. Here was a perfect ballad subject.”
A Workman’s Last Plane Ride
Notwithstanding Service’s fresh pleasant poetry and the ballad’s delightfully eerie twist ending, there is something captivating about The Cremation of Sam McGee which holds readers in thrall as inexorably today as when it was first published in the 1907 collection Songs of a Sourdough, earning it a place in the English curricula of nearly every schoolchild in the Great White North, and making it a favourite recital piece of speech art performers the country over. Perhaps the poem owes its timeless appeal to the haunting image of a lonely traveller carting a frozen corpse through the subartic wastes, braving blizzards, brutal temperatures, wild animals, and rough terrain in a desperate effort to lay to rest a kindred creature’s earthly remains. Service was not the only Northern writer to paint this poignant picture with his pen; the opening chapter of American novelist Jack London’s book White Fang, published one year before Songs of a Sourdough, follows the plight of two men tasked with transporting the corpse of a gentleman adventurer through the Yukon forests by dogsled, stalked all the while by a pack of hungry wolves.
Unsurprisingly, this chilling visual has manifested many times throughout Canadian history, when unexpected deaths in the boreal wilderness necessitated gruelling funerary processions across the land of the midnight sun. Some of these enterprises required a good deal of old-fashioned Canadian ingenuity owing to the unique obstacles inherent to northern life, and many of them make for colourful tales. For example, an article in the April 1st, 1953 issue of Maclean’s magazine on the life of Kelly Chamandy, a Syrian-Canadian entrepreneur who earned minor celebrity for his sale of bear grease pomade, describes the subject’s impromptu assumption of the role of undertaker upon his relocation to the remote northern settlement of Gold Pines (now Ear Falls, Ontario), where he would build a trading post.
“When he went to Gold Pines to start his store there,” wrote journalist Don Delaplante, “he slept the first night with a corpse. He had reached the small camp about midnight in thirty-below-zero weather. The place was in darkness and, as is the custom in the bush, he went from tent to tent till he found a vacancy beside a heavy sleeper in a two-man tent. Kelly threw down his sleeping bag and climbed in. His tent partner didn’t budge in the morning and the trader went for breakfast without disturbing him. Kelly discovered at the cook tent the man had been killed the day before by a bulldozer.
“Transporting the victim’s body back to civilization the next day in an old Jenny plane posed an engineering problem. The corpse was frozen stiff in a full-length posture and wouldn’t fit into the open cockpit in the customary sitting position.
“‘There was one suggestion that it be lashed outside on the skis,’ Kelly remembers. ‘But finally it was wedged into the cockpit in a semi-erect position. It spent the trip out peering over the pilot’s shoulders.’”
Icelandic-Canadians on Northern Lake Winnipeg
Another morbid account of a subarctic funerary cortege appears in folklorist Magus Einarsson’s 1991 book Icelandic-Canadian Oral Narratives. Einarsson learned this tale from one Mr. Gudlaugur Jakobsson, a retired fisherman from Arborg, Manitoba, whose account he recorded in 1969. Jakobsson described how, in 1905, when he was eight years old, his older brother and a crew of local men went on a commercial fishing trip to the northern end of Lake Winnipeg. One of the crew members, a man of eighteen years who lived next door to the Jakobsson family, went to work improperly dressed for the weather.
One day, while they were working on the lake, the fishermen were beset by a winter storm. Many of the young men were severely frostbitten, and the eighteen-year-old froze to death. The hapless crew returned to their work camp the following day, and after sufficiently recovering, decided to head back to Arborg with the body of their unfortunate companion, which they lashed to a sled.
“He was brought in with dogs, see, a sled dog,” said Jakobsson, “and it took, I think, a whole week, because this was at the north end of Lake Winnipeg. And the one who brought him, he just carried him in his arms, and then so much time had passed that his face became frostbitten. You have, perhaps, never seen a man with a frostbitten face? After so many days, there are blisters, and he was completely black with dead skin [on] his whole face.”
The fisherman went on to describe how the amateur undertaker eventually had to have both of his feet amputated when gangrene set in to his dead flesh. “But after it healed,” Jakobsson said, “he walked like everybody else, worked on the Lake the whole day, and went on [moose hunts] for days at a time.”
The Interpreter’s Prediction
There are at least two more real-life cases of subarctic pallbearers which, as in The Cremation of Sam McGee, seem to involve preternatural phenomena. One of them is an anecdote illustrating the uncanny powers of clairvoyance which seem to be prevalent among the Dene peoples of Northern Canada – a story which appears in first chapter of this author’s 2019 book Mysteries of Canada: Volume I.
We owe our knowledge of this strange northern yarn to the writings of Jean W. Godsell, the wife of Hudson’s Bay Company inspector and historian Philip H. Godsell, whose article on the tale was published in the September 1954 issue of the magazine Fate. The story is set in the winter of 1922, when Jean and her husband were living at Fort Fitzgerald in northeastern Alberta.
Earlier that year, in the fall of 1921, the Godsells watched a Chipewyan Dene band disappear into the wilderness for another season of trapping. Jean wrote:
“I felt a deep compassion for the daughters of the Chief, Marie and Therese Cheesie, as they staggered and slipped down the muddy bank to their canoe. They were toting bundles and bales heavier than their own slim bodies. Motherless tots, of six and seven years respectively, they were being taken into the wilderness to help their father with the daily chores of his life as a hunter and trapper.”
One morning that winter, while she was thawing a frozen loaf of bread over her cast-iron oven, Jean was approached by the fort’s interpreter, a Chipewyan Dene man named John James Daniels. The native cryptically informed the woman that, before noon that day, they would be visited by two unfortunate Indians who had run into bad luck in the subarctic wilderness. He neglected to offer any explanation as to how he came by the troubling news.
Sure enough, shortly before the sun reached its zenith, Mrs. Godsell was approached by an RCMP constable who asked if she would like to accompany him on a hike to the shores of nearby Slave River to greet some approaching Indians he had spotted. Mystified, the woman slipped on her parka and snowshoes and accompanied the Mountie to the riverbank. There, in the distance, she saw the serpentine figure of a dog team heading towards them, mushing over the frozen river ice.
As the natives neared the fort, it became clear that something was terribly amiss. The dog team had no driver. Suddenly, to her horror, Mrs. Godsell made out two tiny fur-clad figures struggling through the snow at opposite ends of the train. One of them stumbled along behind the sled, while the other trudged ahead on snowshoes, breaking a trail for the dogs. They were Marie and Therese Cheesie, the little daughters of the Chipewyan chief, and the load strapped to the sled was their father’s frozen corpse.
Howling with grief, the local native women helped the little girls to their teepees and ministered to their blackened, frostbitten faces. Astounded, Jean looked over at John James Daniels, who shrugged his shoulders and mumbled that he had seen this exact scene in a dream the previous night.
Statement of Roderick MacFarlane
Our last and most remarkable story is the testimony of Roderick MacFarlane, a Scots-Canadian fur trader and explorer who had served the Hudson’s Bay Company at various outposts throughout northern Canada from 1852 until his retirement in 1894. Throughout his career, MacFarlane prepared several valuable collections of northern birds and bird eggs from the High Arctic, which he donated to various biologists and scientific institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution, a zoologist friend in Scotland, Dr. Robert Bell of the Canadian Geological Survey, and to the now-bygone United States National Museum in Washington, D.C. Today, he is best known for his contributions to Arctic ornithology.
In 1883, while serving as Chief Factor of the HBC’s Athabasca District at Fort Chipewyan, in what is now northeastern Alberta, MacFarlane was contacted by an Oxford academic named More Adey – perhaps the famous friend of controversial British writer Oscar Wilde. Adey wanted to learn more about a strange event he had read about in the article “A Dog and His Doings,” written by British Army officer Sir William Francis Butler, and published in the 1877 issue of the magazine Good Words.
The story described the weird adventure of a Hudson’s Bay Company clerk stationed at “the most remote post” in Canada – “a young Scotchman [from the Isle of] Lewis,” whom Adey suspected was a fictional character based on MacFarlane. In the story, the clerk promised to honour the dying wish of his master, the fort’s factor, to be buried on the shores of Great Slave Lake. When the old man finally gave up the ghost, the clerk dutifully carted the factor’s body through the northern wilderness. In the climax of this floridly-written tale, the factor’s ghost manifests in in order to prevent a wolverine from feeding on his corpse.
By way of reply, MacFarlane sent Adey a long and disturbing letter in which he acknowledged that Butler’s story was indeed loosely based on his own experience, the true account of which he proceeded to relate. This remarkable piece of correspondence was subsequently forgotten, disappearing into some desk drawer or filing cabinet.
Nearly two decades after the trader’s death in 1920, MacFarlane’s strange missive made its way into the hands of Ontario-based politician W.A. Preston, a conservationist who may have obtained the document through his interest in the life of the late frontier ornithologist. Preston sent the letter to fellow naturalist Edward Alexander Preble, who submitted it for publication in the September 1939 issue of the Hudson Bay Company’s Canadian history magazine The Beaver.
“On the fifteenth day of March, 1853,” MacFarlane wrote in his letter to More Adey, “Augustus Richard Peers, a fur trader and post manager in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company, departed this life at Fort McPherson, Peel’s River, in the Mackenzie River District, Arctic America. Although he had occasionally complained of ill health, his death after a few days’ sickness at the comparatively early age of thirty-three years, was entirely unexpected. He was of Anglo-Irish origin, an able officer, much esteemed by his friends and popular among the Indians.”
MacFarlane went on to explain how Peers had often told his friends and family that he abhorred the thought of his bones being laid to perpetual rest in the forlorn graveyards of Forts Norman or McPherson, two remote northerly outposts which he had managed during his 11-year career, far preferring an everlasting domicile in the comparatively civilized cemetery at the more southerly Fort Simpson in the event that he perished during his service in the North Country. Peers was believed to have consummated this wish in ink. However, since his last will and testament could not be found in the wake of his death, the body of the young trader was interred in the permafrost outside Fort McPherson.
Peers perished six months before MacFarlane – then a relatively fresh recruit with a year’s experience in the HBC – was first transferred to the North Country. Although MacFarlane never met the man, he did make the acquaintance of his window and infant children.
Six years later, in 1859, Peers’ widow reached out to MacFarlane with a request that her late husband’s remains finally be transferred from Fort McPherson to the cemetery at Fort Simpson in accordance with the dead man’s wishes. MacFarlane, who managed the trading post at Fort Good Hope at the time, agreed to personally make the gruelling 500-mile journey up the frozen Mackenzie River to Fort Simpson with Peers’ body provided that Charles Gaudet, the factor of the more northerly Fort McPherson, transport the corpse to his own post.
“Fort McPherson is situated about one degree north of the Arctic Circle,” MacFarlane wrote. “The soil in its neighborhood is marshy, and frost is ever present at a shallow depth beneath the surface. On being exhumed by Mr. Gaudet, the body was found in much the same condition it had assumed shortly after its burial. It was then removed from the original coffin, and placed in a new and unnecessarily large coffin which, secured by a moose skin wrapper and lines on a Hudson’s Bay dog sled or train, made it an extremely awkward and difficult load for men and dogs to haul and conduct over the rugged masses of tossed-up ice which annually occur at intervals along the mighty Mackenzie River, especially in the higher and more rapid portion of its course towards the northern ocean.”
Gaudet delivered Peers’ corpse to Fort Good Hope on March 1st, 1860. That same day, MacFarlane fixed the coffin to one of his fort’s dog teams, which was to be handled by an Iroquois engage named Michel Thomas. Another dog team, conducted by an unnamed voyageur from Fort Good Hope, was prepared for the purpose of hauling the company’s bedding, equipment, and provisions. MacFarlane himself would range ahead of the dog teams on snowshoe, breaking a trail for the sleds.
The three-man team set out on their daunting enterprise. After seven days of hard marching through deep snow and rugged ice, the company reached Fort Norman, an HBC outpost which lay on the Mackenzie River roughly halfway between Fort McPherson and Fort Simpson. There, the unnamed voyageur was replaced by a man named Michel Iroquois – presumably another driver of Iroquois extraction. The team also welcomed a fourth member – a seasoned French-Canadian voyageur named Nicol Taylor, who volunteered to help conduct Peers’ remains to their final resting place out of respect for the late trader, under whom he had once worked. At Taylor’s suggestion, the party abandoned the cumbersome casket and bound Peers’ body directly to the sled, cognizant that it would be impossible to drag the unwieldy coffin over the mounds of ice they would be sure to encounter upriver.
MacFarlane proceeded to describe the average day of travelling in order to place into context the strange events he would shortly relate. “We got under way by four o’clock in the morning,” the trader wrote, “dined at some convenient spot about noon, and after an hour’s rest, resumed our march until sunset, when we laid up for the night, generally in a pine bluff on the top of or close to the immediate bank of the river. Clearing away the snow to the ground for a space of about ten feet square, cutting and carrying pine brush for carpeting the camp and collecting firewood for cooking and warming up purposes, usually occupied us for about an hour. Another hour would see supper over and the dogs fed, and by the end of the next sixty or more minutes, most of the party would be sound asleep. Except on two occasions to be presently mentioned, the train carrying the body of the deceased was invariably hauled up and placed for the night in the immediate rear of our encampment, and except also on the first of the said occasions, our dogs never exhibited any desire to get at same, nor did they seem in the slightest degree affected by its presence in our midst.”
At sunset on March 15th, 1860, the seventh anniversary of Peers’ death, the company was obliged to make camp near a butte called the Roche qui trampe a l’eau, or the “Rock that Floats in the Water,” near present-day Wrigley, Northwest Territories. “The banks were high, rocky and steep,” MacFarlane wrote, “and we had to leave both trains on the ice; we experienced much difficulty in scrambling up the bank with our axes, snowshoes, bedding and provisions for supper and breakfast. The dogs were unharnessed and remained below, while the weather was calm and comparatively fine and mild. The bank rose about thirty feet to the summit where, on a shelfing flat some thirty feet beyond, we selected a position for the night. All hands then set about making the camp, cutting and carrying the requisite supply of pine brush and firewood.”
MacFarlane explained how, after working for about ten or twelve minutes, the dogs below began to bark. The travellers assumed that natives must be approaching their camping spot, but noted that the dogs were not barking as loudly and fiercely as they typically did when approached by Indians and their canine companions. While speculating with Taylor as to whom the incoming natives might be, MacFarlane and his companions distinctly heard the word “Marche!” uttered by a man at the foot of the bank, that French word being the command to which sled dogs throughout Northern Canada were universally trained to start pulling. MacFarlane recalled that the word was “enunciated in a clearer manner than [he] had ever before known an Indian do so,” natives typically pronouncing the word as “mush”.
“We all left off work in order to see who the stranger was,” MacFarlane wrote, “but as no one appeared in sight, Michel Thomas and myself proceeded to the aforesaid summit, where, to our astonishment, no man was visible, while the dogs were seen surrounding the body train at a distance of several feet, and still apparently excited at something. We had to call to them repeatedly before they gave up barking, but after a few minutes they desisted and somehow managed to ascend the bank to our encampment, where they remained perfectly quiet for the night, and thereafter continued as indifferent as before in respect to the deceased’s body.”
Three days later, MacFarlane and company encamped on a large island in the river, atop a twelve-foot bank. Although they managed to haul the baggage train up the cutbank, they judged that the sled carrying Peers’ body would be too heavy to pull up, and reluctantly left it on the ice below.
While the company worked to clear a campsite in a thicket on the island, Taylor told MacFarlane that he thought he had heard a man shout something twice from the direction of the sled on the river, and asked him whether he had heard the same sounds. Although MacFarlane, who had tied down the ear flaps of his cap to keep out the cold, hadn’t heard a thing, the two Iroquois remarked that they had also heard the calls. The four men proceeded to the riverbank, but could find no signs of anyone. In order to protect Peers’ body from suffering indignities at the hands of their unseen visitor, they decided to haul up the “body train,” as MacFarlane called the hearse, by brute force.
Early the next morning, the travellers lowered their two sleds down the embankment up which they had hauled them. To their astonishment, they found the tracks of a wolverine, a notoriously gluttonous northern scavenger, in the very spot where the body train had stood, the creature evidently having visited the area in the night. “To those who know the power of this destructive animal,” MacFarlane wrote, “I need not say that he would have played havoc with the aforesaid remains.”
The travellers continued on their journey and arrived at Fort Simpson on March 21st without any further excitement. Two days later, the body of Augustus Peers was given a proper Christian burial in the adjoining cemetery.
“Shortly after my arrival,” MacFarlane wrote, “Mr. Taylor and I recounted everything to Chief Trader Bernard R. Ross… the district manager, who had been an intimate friend and countryman of Mr. Peers. Mr. Ross was a good mimic and had an excellent memory. He was asked to utter the word marche in the voice of the deceased, and while I at once recognized the tone as similar to that heard by us at our encampment on the fifteenth of March, Mr. Taylor had no doubt whatever on the subject.”
That very night, MacFarlane was put up in Ross’s bedroom, and settled into a makeshift bed separated from that of the Chief Trader’s by a distance of about nine feet. After extinguishing the candles, the two factors began to discuss the strange events of the journey. As their conversation drifted to the subject of Peers’ missing will, both men were simultaneously overcome by the eerie impression that someone else had joined them in the room – a sensation so powerful and frightening that it compelled MacFarlane to hide his face in the rough weave of his woolen HBC point blanket.
“I leave it to others, if they can,” MacFarlane concluded, “to give a reasonable account or explanation of the facts I have here stated: but if it be assumed as an axiom that the spirits of some of the dead are occasionally permitted to revisit former scenes and to take more or less interest in their discarded bodies, then from what we have incidentally learned of the late Mr. Peers’ sentiments in respect to the final disposition of his remains, what other or more natural course would the spirit of such a man be expected to take with the view of preventing any unnecessary desecration of them than that apparently adopted on the nights of the fifteenth and eighteenth of March, 1860?”
The trader went on to speculate that the spirit of Augustus Peers had visited his corpse on March 15th in order to prevent the hungry sled dogs from gnawing at his remains, which he accomplished by vociferating a command which all northern canines of the domestic variety are trained to obey. He believed that the dogs, being members of a species which is supposed to be sensitive to preternatural phenomena, had been barking at Peers’ ghost.
He then proposed that Peers’ spirit had returned on March 18th to coerce MacFarlane and company into hauling his sled up onto the river island, thus saving it from the predations of a marauding wolverine.
“As to the extraordinary feeling experienced by Mr. Ross and myself at the moment when we were talking about the deceased and his supposed will,” MacFarlane wrote, “if it be possible for spirits to communicate with mortals, might this not have arisen (as I actually felt at the time) from a desire on his part to convey some information to us who evinced so deep an interested in the matter but which, from losing our presence of mind, we missed the opportunity of ascertaining.
“The foregoing facts made so indelible an impression on my mind that I firmly believe that my present account of them does not in any material point differ from what I communicated to Mr. Ross at the time, and repeatedly since to others.”
Sources
Songs of a Sourdough (1907), by Robert Service
Robert Service: Under the Spell of the Yukon (2008), by Enid Mallory
Part III of the 1900 Report of the North-West Mounted Police
Paddlewheels on the Frontier: The story of British Columbia and Yukon Sternwheel Steamers (1972), by Art Downs
Yukon River Steamboats: A Pictorial History (1982), by Stan Cohen
Ploughman of the Moon (1946), by Robert W. Service
Volume 8, Issue 3 of the Canadian Geographical Journal (March 1934)
“You Can’t Beat Kelly’s Bear Grease”, by Don Delaplante in the April 1, 1953 issue of Maclean’s magazine
Icelandic-Canadian Oral Narratives (1991), by Magnus Einarsson
“Statement of Roderick MacFarlane,” by W.A. Preston in the September 1939 issue of the magazine Beaver
“Roderick Ross MacFarlane, 1833-1920,” by Edward A. Preble in the April 1922 issue of the magazine The Auk
“Voyageur’s Country: The Story of the Quetico-Superior Country: A Contribution from the Wilson Ornithological Club Conservation Committee,” in the March 1953 issue of the magazine The Wilson Bulletin
“A Dog and His Doings,” by Lieutenant-General Sir William Francis Butler, in the 1877 issue of the magazine Good Words
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