Ballads of a Cheechako

Toronto: William Briggs, 1909. Good. Ballads of a Cheechako, Robert W. Service, William Briggs, Toronto, 1909, 6 x 8.25 inches, 146 pp.

Brown yapped leather wrappers; gilt stamped lettering and blind stamped maple leaf wreath to front; yapped edges moderately to heavily worn; spine moderately rubbed; gilt top edge of text block; deckled fore- and bottom edge; pages toned to edges, else interior clean; previous owner inscription to first free endpaper; overall good condition. Contains frontispiece and several black and white plate illustrations throughout, with tissue guards with lines of poetry from the book printed on them in red ink.


Ballads of a Cheechako is a collection of poems about a miner newly arrived in the Arctic during the Gold Rush era.

Robert W. Service (1874-1958) was a British-Canadian poet and writer, known as "the Bard of the Yukon". He worked as a bank clerk, but spent significant time traveling in the western United States and Canada. While in the Yukon for work, he wrote two poems, "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee", which became immediately popular. He then published a book of poems with similar Klondike Gold Rush themes, Songs of a Sourdough, which was very commercially successful. Service followed this up with another poem collection, Ballads of a Cheechako, which was equally successful. Critics often dismissed his work as "doggerel", but Service was unbothered by such a classification; he stated that "verse, not poetry, is what I was after...something the man in the street would take notice of and the sweet old lady would paste in her album; something the schoolboy would spout and the fellow in the pub would quote. Yet I never wrote to please anyone but myself; it just happened. I belonged to the simple folks whom I liked to please.