A century ago this year, Sam McGee became the most celebrated corpse in poetry. By Randy Freeman
But the inspiration behind Robert Service's 1907 ballad about a cremated cadaver was a real live man, whose final resting place – far from the "marge of Lake Labarge" – is still shrouded in secrecy. Up Here’s historian, Randy Freeman, hit the road to find the true resting place of Sam McGee, and to unravel the mystery of his life and death.
It’s a May morning at the public campground in Beiseker, in the middle-of-nowhere Alberta, and already the air is summer-hot and dry as dirt. The campground is empty except for a couple of trailers and a 10-foot-tall statue of a grinning skunk. I’m looking for JD, who mows the campground’s lawn. I’ve been told she doubles as the local librarian – just the person to help me with my mystery. But there’s no JD in sight – only the campground manager, lounging in a sturdy lawn chair with a cold drink perched on his belly. I approach, explaining myself. Suspicious, he rocks back in his chair and sizes me up. Then he chuckles. “Did ya know,” he says, “that JD stands for juvenile delinquent?”
My mission, I’d already come to realize, would not be simple. For much of that day I’d been driving up and down the dusty prairie roads east of town, looking for the tiny country cemetery rumoured to hold the bones of Sam McGee. Yep, that Sam McGee – the flesh-and-blood Yukoner immortalized in Robert Service’s famous poem, The Cremation of Sam McGee. But when I tell my story to the campground manager, his glare hardens. “Watch out for the ol’ ladies,” he says. My face contorts in puzzlement. “They say there’s a gang of ‘em out there that guard the cemetery. They don’t want people snoopin’ around, turning Sam’s grave into some kind of tourist attraction!” Grinning, he adds, “If they see ya, they’ll tell ya to piss off!”
As a historian I’ve been collecting and retelling stories about Canada’s North for two decades. Years ago I’d stumbled on some intriguing details about the real Sam McGee – and he wasn’t from Tennessee, “where the cotton blooms and blows.” Nor was he stuffed in a boiler fire on the “marge of Lake Labarge” only to be warmed back to life. He was a regular guy who died a regular death, and attained irregular fame for little more than his name.
Sam McGee was born William Samuel McGee on a farm outside Lindsay, Ontario in 1868. Robert Service’s poem begins halfway true, when he states that McGee “left his home in the south to roam ’round the pole.” Though the real McGee headed first to San Francisco, news of the gold rush soon lured him northward. He was among the initial wave of prospectors to flock to the Klondike in 1898. Perhaps seeking to project a rugged frontier image, he shortened his name to Sam, claiming William was for sissies.
While Service’s fictional McGee was under the spell of gold, the real McGee was hardly as enchanted; he only dabbled in prospecting. He was a road builder. Over his years in the Yukon he toiled on highways around Whitehorse and Carcross, taking the occasional stint as a sawmill or roadhouse operator.
Sometime in 1904 McGee entered his name in the bank register at the Whitehorse Bank of Commerce. And that’s when fate – ever the trickster – reached down its hand. A 30-year-old teller at the bank, Robert Service, happened upon the name and was enthralled. In Service’s spare time he’d been dabbling in poetry, and his latest ballad needed a protagonist – someone whose name rhymed with “Tennessee.” He approached McGee, who saw no harm in it. After all, it was just a silly poem, right? Neither the poet nor his muse could foresee that The Cremation of Sam McGee would become perhaps Canada’s most popular poem. It was a development McGee would come to loathe.
Published in 1907 in Service’s first book, Songs of a Sourdough (also called The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses), the macabre poem about chilly, ill-fated Sam McGee became an immediate hit and circulated widely through the English-speaking world. Service, almost overnight, became a literary superstar. McGee was not so lucky. He was transformed into something of a laughingstock, enduring ceaseless cremation jokes. Rumour has it that, sometime before Service quit the Yukon for the bright lights of Paris, a rueful McGee sought revenge, inviting the poet on an unforgettable canoe ride down treacherous Miles Canyon. Bouncing in the frothy whitewater of that famously rapid-laden stretch of the Yukon River, McGee apparently yelled: “You cremated me once and now I’m going to drown you!” The threat was only half in jest, and it’s said Service never set foot in a canoe again.
In 1909, McGee left the Yukon – and his unwelcome notoriety – for British Columbia, then Edmonton, and then later Montana, where he spent a few years building some of the roads into Yellowstone National Park. He and his wife eventually retired to their daughter’s farm northeast of Calgary, just a few kilometres east of Beiseker. Then, in the 1930s, McGee returned briefly to the Yukon to do a little prospecting along the upper Liard River. His luck finding gold was no better than it had been three decades earlier. He returned home empty-handed but for a small urn he jokingly claimed contained his own ashes. Apparently shops in Whitehorse were selling these to unsuspecting tourists. Also to his surprise, McGee found that his old Whitehorse house was still standing. It had been converted into a café. The sign out front invited guests to “Have a cup of tea with the ghost of Sam McGee.”
Even after Sam McGee died in 1940 – at home from a heart attack – notoriety continued to swirl around this legendary nobody. For years Beiseker residents claimed Robert Service had attended McGee’s funeral. It was said the old poet showed up at the wrong church and finally made it to the cemetery just in time to see McGee -- whom he’d “cremated” years before -- laid to rest.
It sounded like well-honed lore to me – as had much of what I’d “discovered” about Sam McGee. Digging up amusing half-truths about this Yukon legend had been easy enough; anyone with Internet access could have done it. But as I was learning on this 30-degree spring morning in rural Alberta, digging up the man himself is another task altogether.
After my fruitless and discomfiting stop at the campground, I head to Beiseker’s hamlet office -- a restored century-old railway station. That’s where the first clue emerges -- surprisingly, on a bulletin board right by the door. Copies of a 1940 newspaper clipping tell of McGee’s death and, most importantly, that “the body was taken to Rosebud Church, a few miles out of Beiseker.”
Proud of my sleuthing, I ask Irene, the municipal clerk, about this church. Clearly I’m not the first person on McGee’s trail. She sighs and says wearily, “There’s no Rosebud Church out that way.” But when I press her, she admits McGee once lived on a farm east of town – “and yes, he’s buried out there somewhere.”
Irene then tells me where I can find the elusive JD: upstairs, as a matter of fact, where the hamlet library is housed. JD turns out to be young, petite and pleasant, and helps me search through the local history books that line the walls of her tiny archive. She’s as interested in finding McGee’s grave as I am. She tells me she’s been sending McGee-buffs to several cemeteries just outside Beiseker. These were stabs in the dark, and no one had ever returned to verify her guesses. We keep searching and eventually our book-worming turns up another clue: a former locality east of Beiseker called Levelland, home to a church and cemetery once known as Rosebud. I’m getting closer.
After some contemplation, JD says she might recall seeing the name Levelland on a small sign nailed to a fencepost along Highway 9, east of town. “Ya can’t miss it,” she assures me. Armed with my promising lead, I’m now fully encouraged. I promise her that, unlike others sent on this quest, I’d return with news of the gravesite.
But an hour later, despite JD’s assurances, I haven’t found the sign. I end up sweaty, frustrated and way down the road at a busy little gas station and café called Carbon Corner. I stick my head in the door and ask if anyone knows where Levelland is. I get at least four different answers, including from an elderly couple who claims they’d been there -- maybe 50 years ago. He says it’s south of Highway 9 back across Highway 21; his wife insists it’s this side of Highway 21 and then north. She adds: “Turn right at the farm with the red barn.” I have to laugh.
I decide my best bet is a systematic search of the area surrounding the intersection of Highways 9 and 21. I get back in my truck and navigate Alberta’s orderly grid of rural roads for another few hours, thankful for air-conditioning and the CBC. At each graveyard I spot, I pull over and wander the rows, looking for Sam McGee. It’s after a few of these fruitless, sweltering meanders that I find myself on a gravel road -- a road like all the others, except my map shows this one ends in the valley of the Rosebud River. Nearby are a white church and a graveyard. My heart pounds double-time.
I pull over, grab my camera and tripod, and clamber from the truck. In the distance I notice a plume of dust being kicked up by an oncoming vehicle. I cross the weedy roadside ditch, enter the prim graveyard and make my way down a row of granite headstones, trying to make out the names. The sun beats down, and I’m pouring with sweat. No luck, so I move to the next row. No. Next grave. No. Not this one either. I’m beginning to despair. Maybe, I think to myself, Sam McGee is fictional after all.
In the back of mind I note that the approaching dust-plume is now accompanied by the roar of an onrushing vehicle. Back to headstones: Not this one. No. No again. Then I glance at the last row. It’s so small and simple, I almost miss it: a brass plaque, level with the grass. It reads IN MEMORY OF W.S. McGEE, 1868-1940.
A light prairie breeze rustles the nearby wheat fields. I think to myself, what a pleasant, peaceful place to be buried. I’m almost euphoric – thrilled to have succeeded in my quest, but happier still to be face to face (as it were) with old Sam McGee. I feel like our bond is personal – like I knew him. I study the headstone, then drop to my knees and begin firing off snapshots. And that’s when a rickety pickup truck grinds to a stop in a dust-cloud before the graveyard.
A scowling, wiry man emerges. “Whatcha doing?” he shouts, striding briskly toward me. I glance down at my camera, then back at the grave. Recalling the campground manager’s warning about the old ladies, I look to his truck to see if he has back-up. No old ladies there. Maybe I could make a run for it.
“Found it, didn’t ya?” he says, drawing closer. I’m nervous, wondering if I’ll be decked by this tanned, field-hardened farmer. He’s nearly in my face, barking, “Whatcha goin’ to do now?”
I come clean. I’m a history writer, I tell him, and I’d been on a long search for Sam McGee’s grave. Judging by his pursed expression I know it’s the wrong answer. “A lot of people have looked, but very few have found Sam’s grave,” he says. “And we like it that way. I’m the pastor of this church and that’s my farm over there. People here don’t want tourists coming and trampling through our graveyard, turning it into some kind of shrine.”
This was getting awkward. I’d spent too much time and effort searching for this grave. I wasn’t about to keep it a secret. I offer a compromise. “How about I write about my search but don’t tell people exactly where Sam McGee is buried? I could say it’s east of Beiseker -- somewhere.”
The pastor’s expression lightens slightly. “We don’t want any maps or directions about how to get here,” he growls. Eager to escape, I give him my word and shake his calloused hand. Then I climb back in my truck and point it toward Beiseker. I have bad news for JD. Like the curious tourists combing the prairie sprawl for the final resting place of Sam McGee, she’ll just have to be kept in the dark. I have a feeling McGee would’ve preferred it that way.
Randy Freeman is a historical geographer and writer living in Yellowknife who also writes Up Here’s Looking Back column. His passion for hunting down history has often got him into trouble.
