THE PLAYWRIGHTS.

Both Jack London (“To Build a Fire”) and Robert Service (“The Cremation of Sam McGee” and “The Spell of the Yukon”) combined lives of outdoor adventure with significant literary achievement.  Both found themselves in the Yukon, Canada’s northwestern frontier, at roughly the same time: during the Klondike gold rush of the late 1890s and early 1900s.  And both mined their experiences in this remote territory for material to be used in their writing.

THE SETTING.

Jack London’s story and Robert W. Service’s poems are all set in the Yukon during the Klondike gold rush of the late 1890s and early 1900s.  As the Encyclopedia Britannica tells us, the Yukon is, 

a territory of northwestern Canada, an area of rugged mountains and high plateaus. It is bounded by the U.S. state of Alaska to the west, the Northwest Territories to the east, and British Columbia to the south, and it extends northward above the Arctic Circle to the Beaufort Sea. It has an area of 186,661  square miles (483,450 square kilometres). The capital of the territory is Whitehorse.

The mineral wealth of the Yukon Territory has long been known, but the combination of an Arctic climate with remoteness from markets has minimized the economic exploitation of such resources and the development of modern settlement. Instead, the territory remains among the few frontiers on the North American continent, a sparsely populated and largely unspoiled wilderness.
Most notable here are two geographic facts: the immense size of the Yukon and its Arctic climate.  At more than 186 thousand square miles, it is considerably larger than California; and its winters are extraordinarily severe, with temperatures plunging to less than 60 degrees below zero.  At the time of the gold rush, the population of this vast area ranged from a high of about 27 thousand to a low of fewer than 8 thousand inhabitants.  In other words, people were scarce in the Yukon, especially outside the few settled areas.  A lone man in distress in this wilderness was unlikely to find help.

The Klondike gold rush was named for the Klondike River, along whose banks most of the major gold strikes were found.  Again according to Britannica, “The Klondike became famous in 1896 with the discovery of gold in Bonanza Creek and other small tributaries. As a result thousands of prospectors swarmed into the valley. Several years later, with the exhaustion of the most readily accessible placer deposits, the population decreased drastically. . . . The surrounding territory bears the river's name, which is of uncertain origin.”

The gold rush itself had a strong impact on the popular imagination of the time far beyond the boundaries of the Yukon or the first-hand experiences of prospectors.  Tens of thousands of hopeful miners, most of them from the United States, ventured into the forbidding Arctic territory.  Says Britannica, “The Klondike was, in fact, the most publicized of all the great rushes. It was the last of the great placer rushes and excited a world weary of economic hard times with stories of the long climb up the Chilkoot Pass and of red-coated Northwest Mounted Police keeping law and order on the gold-rush frontier.”  

These images persisted long after the rush itself petered out.  We encounter them in Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 masterpiece, The Gold Rush, then again in the 1940s radio series, Sgt. Preston of the Yukon, which became a television hit during the 1950s.  They are, in fact, as much a part of pop-culture lore as the cowboys and Indians of the wild-west, or the tough-guy detectives of urban film noir.

The contradictory nature of this setting makes it an excellent arena for dramatic conflict.  Simultaneously beautiful and dangerous, the fierce Yukon environment lures adventurers with the promise of fabulous wealth, and destroys them in its deadly cold.  As a result, it inspires both love and fear in the characters who encounter it.

OVERVIEW.

These three works present three different views of man and the Yukon.  

In To Build a Fire, we witness the destruction of a newcomer to the land who, through lack of imagination, fails to grasp what is all around him: awesome danger.  He disregards the old-timer’s advice, and foolishly travels by himself in the killing cold, with predictably grim results.

In The Cremation of Sam McGee, the Yukon is just as cold as in Jack London’s story, and Sam suffers a fate very like that of the unimaginative newcomer.  But Sam was not traveling alone.  He had a companion who could build a fire for him, and consequently, his story had a happy ending.

The Spell of the Yukon shows us a poet who is now separated from the land.  Unlike the man in London’s story or Sam in the ballad, he is not engaged in a dramatic struggle with the emptiness and the cold.  Instead, he stands back and remembers the Yukon, savoring his feelings towards it.  In the midst of civilization’s distractions and pleasures, he realizes that the real riches of the land don’t lie in the gold he has found there, but in the beauty and peace he has left behind. ​

TO BUILD A FIRE

The Plot.

The title of Jack London’s famous story is a perfect distillation of its plot: To Build a Fire.  The infinitive form of the verb plus an object gives us a clear sense of the goal towards which the story moves relentlessly.  What the rest of the narration supplies are the remaining essentials of a dramatic action: a character who is doing the building; the obstacles to his efforts; the ensuing conflict; the final outcome.

As the story begins, we see a nameless man scanning an immense Yukon landscape: “The man flung a look back along the way he had come. . . .  It was all pure white . . . as far as his eye could see. . . . This dark hair-line was the trail—the main trail that led south five hundred miles to . . . salt water; and that led north . . . a thousand miles to Nulato, and finally to St Michael on Bering Sea, a thousand miles and half a thousand more.”  The nameless traveler is on his way to a camp on Henderson Creek, “where the boys were already.”  He anticipates the roaring fire and the hot supper they will have prepared, but he knows he has a long way to go before he gets there: six hours by foot across the frozen landscape, with the temperature somewhere south of minus 50.

He is traveling alone, except for a dog, a fact that is itself a violation of the cardinal rule laid down for him by a Yukon veteran he first met on coming into the territory, the old-timer of Sulphur Creek: “no man must travel alone in the Klondike after fifty below.”  But the traveler, we learn, is a man of limited imagination, one who doesn’t look beyond his immediate experiences to seek out implications and possibilities, and so he can’t envision himself in need of anyone’s help.

As this thoughtless trekker makes his way toward his rendezvous with “the boys,” we learn through the voice of the narrator about the innumerable hidden perils of the Yukon, above all the danger of un-frozen springs of water, hidden beneath thin layers of ice and snow.  To step into one of these springs and get soaked is to meet disaster.  The traveler’s wet boots and leggings would freeze, becoming useless as protection from the cold.  Instead, they would themselves become instruments of the deadly frost, and would soon cause severe frostbite, and eventually death.  The only response to such a soaking would be to stop and light a fire to dry off wet gear, while keeping warm.

Cautiously the man picks his way, mindful of the lurking danger of these pools, which can usually be spotted by the sunken, “candied” appearance of the snow lying above them.  But the Yukon plays by its own rules, which means that “usually” doesn’t equal “always.”  “And then it happened.  At a place where there were no signs, where the soft, unbroken snow seemed to advertise solidity beneath, the man broke through.”

Soaked halfway up to his knees, he now realizes he is in real trouble.  He must build a fire and keep warm while drying off, or his life is in jeopardy.

His first attempt goes well; he gets a roaring blaze going, and he begins to congratulate himself, while mentally scoffing at the old-timer’s advice about never traveling without a companion.  He seems to have escaped the worst, despite being alone.  Then, disaster strikes again.  He has built his fire beneath a snow-laden tree.  The activity and the heat have disturbed that snow, and all at once it cascades down on the fire, extinguishing it.

Suddenly, his predicament is much worse.  He must start from scratch to build his fire, but his hands have become numb and they are of little use in gathering twigs, or picking out and lighting a match.  He drops the matches in the snow, picks them up clumsily, struggles to strike fire, and finally scrapes the whole bunch of seventy matches on his leg, creating a flame that burns the flesh of his frozen hand.  He manages to light some bark, then some dry grass; but before he can move on to the more substantial twigs and branches, he blunders, and drops a piece of wet moss onto the still nascent flame.  The fire dies again.

Now panic begins.  He thinks of killing the dog, slitting open its carcass, and warming himself in its innards until help arrives.  But his hands are totally paralyzed, useless for any such task.  At that point, “A certain fear of death, dull and oppressive, came to him.”  In abject fear, he begins to run, blindly hoping that he might make his way to camp and safety.  But he falls repeatedly.  “He was losing his battle with the frost. . . .  It was his last panic. . . . [H]e sat up and entertained in his mind the conception of meeting death with dignity.”

And just before dropping off into the final sleep, he thinks his last thought: “You were right, old hoss; you were right,” the man mumbled to the old-timer of Sulphur Creek.

Characters and Themes.

The story involves three characters: two of them, the man and the dog, participate in the action; the third, the narrator, stands outside events, disclosing his nature by his tone of voice and emotional attitude.

The Man. As we saw above, the man is said to be “without imagination.”  This the narrator further defines as being “alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.” In other words, he cannot readily see beyond the moment.  This is a particular handicap because this man is a “newcomer in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his first winter.”  Without imagination, he can’t project himself into what he has never experienced, and so he has no way of grasping the depth of danger posed by the Yukon cold.  He had no capacity to “meditate on his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man’s frailty in general. . . .”

And even when he has stepped in the pool, he fails to appreciate the fact that his whole existence is a matter of walking on thin ice.  With his fire roaring (although under the snowy tree) he congratulates himself: “he had had the accident; he was alone; and he had saved himself.  Those old-timers were rather womanish. . . .  All a man had to do was to keep his head, and he was all right.  Any man who was a man could travel alone.”

The Greeks had a word for this kind of unseemly self-confidence, this pride in one’s own sufficiency: hubris was the term they used, and they applied it to those tragic heroes who ignored their vulnerability to the wrath of the gods.

The Man, like many literary figures who have gone down to destruction, fails to appreciate  the dark enormity around him.  In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche writes about the “veil of Maya,” a shroud of illusion surrounding each of us, hiding from us the terrible nature of human reality: that we are all destined for suffering, sorrow, and death.  Something like this “veil of Maya” shields the chechaquo, the freshman in the wilderness who has no inkling of the terrors that lie in wait with every step he takes.  The old-timer’s warning, it turns out, is the voice of a terrible wisdom that the man understands only at the moment of death.

It’s also significant that the old timer warns against facing the wilderness alone.  The arrogance of the man’s reckless self-reliance is something the narrator wants us to notice, perhaps because so many of the prospectors who headed north were solitary figures hoping to begin a new life that would be gloriously independent of all the old ties they left behind them.  “Rugged individualism” was the name of a peculiarly American attitude that was especially strong at the time London was writing.  As a socialist—a proponent of common solutions to life’s problems—London most likely would have wanted to demonstrate the danger and the shallowness of this go-it-alone approach to life.

The Dog.  Animal companions are familiar figures in literature and popular culture.  From Androcles and the Lion to Lassie and Rin Tin Tin, animals have provided an often uncanny kind of friendship and assistance to their human friends.  Uncanny, because the animals generally seem far more knowing than the humans; these creatures are privileged in their understanding of nature, privy to insights that their rational, human companions lack.

This is certainly the case in To Build a Fire.  In this story we learn that the dog has a far superior intuitive grasp of the dangers of their situation: “This man did not know cold . . . But the dog knew; all its ancestry knew, and it inherited the knowledge.”

The dog thus plays the role of a mutely disapproving observer of the man’s follies, measuring his human recklessness by the standard of its own deep, canine grasp of nature.  But its relationship to the man has been completely servile: “The one was the toil-slave of the other, and the only caresses it had ever received were the caresses of the whiplash and of harsh and menacing throat-sounds.”  Reluctant to provoke the man’s harshness, the dog remains mute, making “no effort to communicate its apprehension to the man.”

Late in the story when the man decides to kill the dog, the animal senses the threat thanks to its fine-tuned awareness.  And in the end, it is the dog who survives, protected by its natural instincts and its physical advantages from the fatal arctic cold.  

There is an obvious irony here.  The man succumbs to the Yukon precisely because of his over-confidence in his individual, rational abilities.  Fire is the primal gift of the gods, the blessing of Prometheus, the foundation of our common life in civilization.  But the man bungles that gift.  Relying only on himself, rejecting the advice of the old-timer, going it alone, he fails to build the fire that would save him.  Meanwhile, it is the dog who survives, thanks to the inherited knowledge, the collective wisdom, of his species.  Again, we hear the voice of Jack London, socialist.

The Narrator. The story is told by a third-person, omniscient narrator.  This narrator looks down on the man, the dog, and indeed the whole of North America from a kind of heavenly vantage point, surveying everything from the Pacific Ocean to the Bering sea, fifteen hundred miles away.  From the large scale to the small the narrator sees and understands everything, but betrays no feelings about any of it.  That the man is without imagination, that he ignores the old-timer, that he steps into a pool of water, that he botches the fire, that he freezes to death: these are all facts about which the narrator expresses no direct opinion.  

Of course, the narrator chooses what facts to relate, and in what order, so that the voice telling the story is not simply a passive recorder of impressions.  And it is in the ordering and juxtaposition that we must look for the narrator’s attitude. 

For example, the narrator says this, “Fifty degrees below zero was to him [the man] just precisely fifty degrees below zero.  That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head.”  There is no direct expression of opinion here; no explicit judgment.  The narrator leaves it to us to draw our own conclusions.  But, we must observe, the narrator loads the judgmental dice.  The narrator surely assumes that the reader has at least an inkling of the meaning of fifty below, which means we’re smarter than “the man.”  And with any such inkling, the narrator suggests, any sane person would behave with more caution than “the man.”

So the narrator’s character is that of an ironic, god-like observer of human frailty and foolishness.  A god who, tacitly, takes us into his confidence.  “You and I know,” the narrative voice is saying, though indirectly, “that this newcomer to the wilderness is an ass.  Even his dog is smarter than he is.  It’s sad, but that’s what you get for ignoring the old-timer and the experience of the community, and relying only on yourself.”

THE CREMATION OF SAM McGHEE

Human beings, it seems, have always been telling far-fetched stories about remote and unknown places.  From The Odyssey to Star Wars, people have imagined distant worlds peopled by bizarre creatures, and filled with fantastic events. 

We are all familiar with such stories about our own American frontier, which at one time was a place almost as distant from most people’s experiences as outer space is today.  We have all heard of Paul Bunyan and his ox; or of Johnny Appleseed; or of John Henry, the steel-driving man.  We call such home-grown myths “tall-tales”—probably because they feature characters and incidents that are larger, or “taller,” than life.   “Tall-tales” also share another common trait that sets them apart from the heroic myths of antiquity: they usually involve a problem that has a comical solution.

So it is with the Cremation of Sam McGee, a tall-tale invented by an Anglo-Canadian poet in 1907 about events in what was then the inconceivably far-off wilderness of the Yukon.  

This poem is also known as The Ballad of Sam McGee, a title that refers to its poetic genre.  A ballad is a kind of narrative verse that features emphatic rhythms and a clear and sonorous rhyme-scheme.  This is certainly true of Service’s poem.  In the first four lines we find six rhymes, and a striking rhythmic pattern combining anapestic and iambic feet:

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

An anapest is a poetic foot consisting of three syllables: two unstressed followed by one stressed.  The first three words in the first line are an anapest, with the stress on the word “strange.”  An iamb is a poetic foot consisting of two syllables: the first unstressed, the second stressed.  The fourth and fifth words of the first line are an iamb, with the stress on “done.”  Each of the words in boldface above is stressed, and the words in capitals rhyme according to the following scheme: a,a; b; c,c; b.  Reading these lines aloud, it’s nearly impossible not to fall into a strongly rhythmical, almost incantatory cadence, a tempo that provides an energetic forward thrust to the story.  And as we enjoy this narrative heart-beat, we can understand why our oldest stories, like The Iliad and The Odyssey, were also propelled by such powerful, song-like language.

The story related in this driving tempo is vivid and fantastic:  Sam McGee, a native of Tennessee, “where the cotton blooms,” has for reasons unknown to the narrator, decided to roam “’round the Pole.”  But as a son of the south, he has never been able to tolerate the fearsome arctic cold.  

Eventually he feels so worn down by the hostile climate that he is certain he will die.  He makes a last request to the narrator: “I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you’ll cremate my last remains.”  Sure enough, Sam expires on the trail, and the narrator, being a man of honor, feels bound to fulfill his request.  So he loads the corpse onto his sleigh and mushes day and night through the wilderness, singing to poor dead Sam who, “hearkened with a grin.”  Finally he comes to “the marge of Lake Lebarge” where he finds the wreckage of a derelict steam boat, complete with furnace and coal.  At last he has the means to carry out his friend’s wish.  He immediately builds a roaring fire, and in the coals he “burrowed a hole . . . and . . . stuffed in Sam McGee.”  

Not wanting to hear the corpse sizzle, the narrator leaves the scene until he is sure Sam is burned to ashes.  “Sick with dread,” he returns to the fire, opens the furnace door, and peeps inside:

And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: “Please close that door.
It’s fine in here, but I greatly fear you’ll let in the cold and storm--
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm.”

And so, in an instant, a grisly story of arctic cold, death, and cremation is transformed into a tall-tale, a comic reversal in which death is vanquished by a good, hot fire.

THE SPELL
​OF THE YUKON

Unlike The Cremation of Sam McGee, this is not a narrative poem.  It does not tell a story; rather it conveys the poet’s feelings and attitudes.  We call such poems “lyric.”

The feelings and attitudes in this poem concern the Yukon.  The poet begins by telling us that he has “scrabbled and mucked” and “hurled [his] youth into a grave” in the quest for Yukon gold.  And, as he lets us know in the first stanza, that quest was successful.  He has made his fortune and left the Yukon behind.  But having become rich, he has also grown dissatisfied: “And somehow the gold isn’t all.”

He discovers that he misses the Yukon, the “cussedest land that I know.”  He recalls how, on first coming to the territory, “You hate it like hell for a season,” but eventually “It twists you from foe to a friend.”  

Then comes a sequence of four stanzas in which the poet recalls and celebrates the majesty and beauty of the landscape.  Two of these are devoted to the contrasting virtues of Summer, with its “sunshiny woods all athrill,” and winter with its “woods where the weird shadows slant.”  Having catalogued these beauties, he declares, “I want to go back—and I will.”

He will return from the place he inhabits now, a world where, “They’re making my money diminish,” where he has grown “sick of the taste of champagne.”  In other words, he wants to flee the distractions and false values of civilization—purchased with the gold for which he scrabbled so hard—and go back to the authentic riches of the wilderness: “it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting. . . . It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.”

This is a familiar theme in lyric poetry: the sense that civilization is a tissue of shallow and heartless distractions, that true fulfillment is to be found in the simple but genuine beauty of nature.

This poem stands in stark contrast to The Cremation of Sam McGee.  The latter is jocular and comical, presenting the Yukon as a kind of vaudeville stage where “There are strange things done in the midnight sun.”  We don’t feel as if the landscape that contains Sam McGee is a place where a hungry soul can meet with “the stillness that fills” one with peace.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION.

​To Build a Fire

1. Why doesn’t the man in Jack London’s story have a name?

2. Do you think the narrator expresses sympathy for the man?

3. Why?  Why not?

4. Why does the narrator mention the old-timer’s advice several times?

5. A complication is a point in a story where the action takes a new direction—where, as we say, “the plot thickens.”  Where are the complications in this story?

6. Why does the dog survive?


​The Cremation of Sam McGee

1. Why does the poem have such strong rhythm and so many rhymes?

2. Why is this a tall-tale?

3. What makes this poem comic?


​The Spell of the Yukon

1. What is a “spell?”

2. Where is the poet as he is writing the poem?

3. In the next-to-last stanza, the poet says that the Yukon is “hell.”  Why, then, does he want to go back?