In 1867, just after the Civil War and during the Johnson administration, Secretary of State William Seward negotiated the United States’ purchase of Alaska from Russia, for the fire-sale price of about $7 million. Denounced variously as Seward’s Icebox or Andy Johnson’s Polar Bear Farm, the image of Alaska stirred few imaginations. A few years later, during the 1890s, the United States slipped into a period of recession, bank failures, and high unemployment.

In August of 1896, four Canadian men and a woman of both native and European descent were fishing for salmon and prospecting near the mouth of Rabbit Creek, a tributary of the Yukon River, when they discovered rich placer deposits of gold. Word of the strike spread rapidly through the mining camps along the Yukon; in July of the following year the news reached the United States when a ship arrived in San Francisco carrying some very happy prospectors with bags of gold.

To say that the United States went crazy would be an understatement. Men – and many women, as well – threw over everything and headed for the Yukon with very little idea where it was or how they might get there. Most thought it was part of Alaska (a misconception that still grips a majority of Americans), and that gold lay everywhere in the sand, just waiting to be scooped up. The nation’s romantic imagination turned feverishly toward the North.

About the same time, Robert Service, a Scottish/Canadian bank teller in Whitehorse, Yukon, who’d written a few verses about the gold rush and the untamed, feral wilderness north of 60 degrees, submitted the poems for publication. They were as fantastic as the deeds of Agent 007 today, and at least as much fun. Service was modest about their chances – he enclosed a cheque for $100 to cover the costs of production – but they were an instant success in both England and the United States. Service was suddenly wealthy; he left the Yukon in 1908, and never returned. He drove an ambulance in the First World War, married a French beauty afterward, and bought a home on the coast of Brittany. During the Second World War, he and his wife, Germaine Bougeoin, left France for Hollywood and Vancouver, but returned to Brittany afterward and are buried there.

My mother, an amateur poet, gave me books of verse and poetry at almost every childhood birthday. I steeped myself in Tennyson, Whittier, and Service (Frost came later), and by the time I was in high school could recite the entire canon of Dan McGrew, Salvation Bill, Sam McGee, and Blasphemous Bill MacKie. Only recently did I realize that Service probably used Irish and Scottish names because they scan better in iambic. As a young man, I was on fire to visit the mystic lands spreading north of us; but educational, professional, and marital responsibilities interfered.

Then in 1985 I got an essentially free ride to the Last Frontier, to participate in and write an article about the Iditaski Marathon, a 200-mile trek through the bush over parts of the famous Iditarod Trail. My buddy Dudley Weider joined me, and in the predawn darkness of an Alaskan February morning, we waited in a hotel lobby for the ride to the start. A burly man in snowmobile duds and boots approached, and in tones straight from John Wayne asked us where we were from.

When we answered, “New Hampshire,” he growled, “Lower 48, eh? Well, boys, you’re in man’s country now. When that wind hits you, you’re gonna wish you was back home in bed.”

We’d have demurred: told him how much colder New Hampshire is than Anchorage, and that we’d been training at night (because we worked days) in below-zero weather for weeks. But he shambled off to his snowmobile, idling in the entry, and we dragged our toboggans out to the bus.

The Alaskan bush country, though, dispelled that bad taste of separatism. Swamps, willow thickets, and lakes spread out around us forever. Moose blocked our trail, showing no inclination to relinquish it; so we skied around them. We traveled night and day, noticing the earlier sunrise each morning, skiing at night by the light of our headlamps and the aurora. One night I stopped and, amazed at the brilliance of Venus, held my mittened hand down close to the snow. I could actually see its shadow. Heading south on the frozen Skwentna River one evening, something made us both turn around. There behind us, bathed in a brilliant mauve alpenglow, reared one of the great peaks of the Alaska Range. My eyes involuntarily teared up – and instantly froze. The temperature dropped to 26 below. We skied all night, stopping once at a warm checkpoint in a log cabin to dine on fresh, warm bismarcks (God, they were good!) and hot tea loaded with cream and sugar.

This evening, as I sit in the parlor between the hot stove and the dark windows, sipping eggnog and Screech (an execrable Jamaican rum revered in Newfoundland as a national potation), those brilliant white days and aurora-flickering nights come back to me. The Gold Rush may be over, but the fantasies that Service inspired in thousands of us remain as strong as ever: