How history can build
A Tale of Two Stories
by John Firth
[Editor’s Note: This post was originally published at https://johnfirth.ca/blog/f/a-tale-of-two-stories]
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Dennis Senger [reporter with The Whitehorse Daily Star] walked the walk a few years ago.
Mind you, it wasn’t a long walk. About 60 meters or so.
But he was curious about how much distance separated the physical markers that identified two Yukon stories that were separate, but also connected.
Not connected in Whitehorse, but on the US political stage 111 years after the first story began. Dennis’s starting point was a small sign hanging over the sidewalk in front of the Horwood’s Mall.
It identified approximately where Frederich Trump’s Arctic Hotel/restaurant/brothel had been located in 1901. The Arctic had originally been built in Bennett, BC, but when the railroad was completed to Whitehorse in 1900, he dismantled the hotel, moved the lumber to Whitehorse along with all the fixings and rebuilt on a waterfront location facing the White Pass depot and the Yukon River.
The money that Fred earned from his BC/Yukon business venture financed later real estate ventures in New York City and formed the basis of the Trump family fortune. He was also the grandfather of the current US president, Donald Trump.
That story is fairly well known to Yukoners, even though the sign itself has since been removed.
Dennis completed his walk at a one room log cabin with a frame gabled roof, tucked under one wing of MacBride Museum.
Sam – who unwittingly loaned his name to a certain poem by Robert Service – was a prospector and cabin builder who allegedly built the cabin in 1899. There is some debate about whether he actually constructed it or whether his name was appropriated in much the same way as Service did.
Originally located elsewhere in Whitehorse, it was moved to a lot across from the Old Log Church in 1954 and eventually shifted to its current location after being donated to the Yukon Historical Society.
The story that connects the two points for Dennis is lesser known.
It came up in a conversation I had with Dennis a few weeks ago. That’s when he told me about his walk. I recalled hearing the story when it happened, but it had slipped my memory until now.
In 2005, a delegation of US Senators including Lindsay Graham, Susan Collins, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain landed in Whitehorse as part of a congressional tour to study the impact of climate change in the far North.
Yukon MP Larry Bagnell was at the airport to greet them, and he delivered a brief history of Whitehorse so they might have a better understanding of where they were. Like most politicians, they appeared to be attentive and nodded in appreciation before moving on. But when Larry mentioned Robert Service, John McCain’s eyes lit up and he said, “Oh. The Cremation of Sam McGee.“
Nobody, not even his staff, knew what he was referring to but Larry, being a fan of Service, saw an opportunity.
“Sam McGee’s cabin is right downtown,” he told McCain. “I’d love to see that,” replied the senator. And, as McCain’s foreign advisor Richard Fontaine described it, “Before I knew it, he had disappeared.”
McCain jumped in Larry’s old car and the two of them drove down to the museum to look at Sam McGee’s cabin.
McCain’s fascination with Robert Service began after he was a pilot in the US Air Force flying fighter escort on a bombing raid over the North Vietnamese city of Hanoi in 1967. His plane was shot down and he was a prisoner of war (POW) until 1973. During his imprisonment, he spent two years in solitary confinement.
Photo Trevor Marc Hughes
His only means of communication with people other than his jailers was with another POW in the adjoining cell. They couldn’t talk to each other, but they could convey messages by tapping in code on the wall. Their conversations helped McCain preserve his sanity for the over seven hundred days he was denied human company.
The other prisoner had memorized “The Cremation of Sam McGee” along with many other poems in school and taught them to McCain using their code. McCain committed the poems to memory, but the Service work was his favorite. He could still tap it out 40 years later.
McCain never forgot the inhumanity of war and the right-wing US politics (i.e. the Kent State shootings and the equal rights riots) of that time and it became a part of his moderate conservative political life following the Vietnam War.
The connection between the two points for Dennis’s walk was McCain’s outspoken criticism of Frederich Trump’s grandson, Donald, whose far-right campaign for the presidency in 2015-16 sparked an acrimonious dispute between the two that was front page news internationally right up until McCain’s death in 2018.
Two men who owed so much in their success to a Yukon connection, but who were a philosophical world apart in their ideologies, separated by only sixty meters.
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John Firth was awarded the annual heritage award from the Yukon Museums and Historical Association in 2019. He wrote for the Whitehorse Daily Star for five years, alongside journalists Mary McGuire, Becky Striegler, and Dennis Senger. Firth is currently the Yukon Story Laureate and will be in attendance at the gala held this September at UBC for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes. He is an international award-winning author/storyteller who writes about the history, the people, and the places of the north. His books include The Caribou Hotel: Hauntings, hospitality, a hunter and the parrot, One Mush: Jamaica’s Dogsled Team, Yukon Sport : An Illustrated Encyclopedia, River Time: Racing the Ghosts of the Klondike Rush, Better Than A Cure: One man’s journey to free the world of Polio (with Ramesh Ferris), Yukon Quest: The 1000-mile sled dog race between Fairbanks and Whitehorse, and North Star: The Legacy of Jean-Marie Mouchet. Visit him at https://johnfirth.ca/
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster