The poet describes how Sam froze to death on the trail above Dawson and how, before he died, he made his partner promise to “cremate his last remains.” This was done, between here and White Horse, on the “marge of Lake Lebarge.” There the frozen corpse was stuffed into the furnace of the derelict steamer Alice May and a great fire built. Sam McGee’s partner describes “how the heavens scowled and the huskies howled, and the winds began to blow,” and how, “though he was sick with dread, he bravely said: I’ll just take a peep inside.’” He then opens the furnace door:
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.”
Yukon Territory is said to have thirty-eight million acres of land that can be utilized for crops or grazing. Above the Arctic Circle red-top grass, which is used as hay, grows almost as high as a man.
Land on the upper Yukon will yield six or seven tons of potatoes an acre. Sometimes prices are so high that one crop from this seventeen-acre field has brought in ten thousand dollars.