Word: yukon
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This is the law of the Yukon, and ever
...know what it's like in the Yukon wild when it's sixty-nine below; When the ice-worms wriggle their purple heads through the crust of the pale blue snow...
...HEMISPHERE, The Yukon Troubadour...
...Service never sought the level of Percy Bysshe Shelley, would have been as out of place on Parnassus as Shelley in a Klondike saloon. The rhymes that made Service a millionaire w'ooed none of the nine Muses. They reek of male shenanigans and sweat, roar like a Yukon avalanche, teem with rude and lusty characters: Claw-Fingered Kitty, Chewed-Ear Jenkins. Muck-Luck Mag, Blasphemous Bill Mackie. Dangerous Dan McGrew. "Rhyming has my ruin been," Robert Service once wrote, falling unconsciously into the balladeer's inversion. "With less deftness I might have produced real poetry...
Dangerous Dan. Lady Luck, who smiled on so many fortune seekers in the Yukon gold fields, smiled there too on Wullie Service. Behind his bank teller's cage one frozen night in White Horse, he knocked out a raw, rollicking ballad called The Shooting of Dan McGrew, modestly tucked it away in his shirt drawer, months later, in 1907, sent it to a Toronto publisher of church hymnals with a slender assortment of other sourdough rhymes. The story goes that the typesetters swung into a dance as they locked it in the forms...