The Cremation of Sam McGee

The death of Sam McGee offers a cautionary tale about the effects of greed. As the speaker, Cap, recounts, “The land of gold seemed to hold [Sam] like a spell” (Line 11). Despite the hardships of prospecting in the frigid wastes of the Yukon and never actually striking a lode, and despite his rapidly deteriorating health, Sam McGee has gold fever. He refuses to give up the longshot dream of finding easy riches. Raised in balmy faraway Tennessee, “where the cotton blooms and grows” (Line 9), Sam complains endlessly about the conditions in the Klondike where, as Cap points out, if “our eyes we’d close, then the lashes froze till someone couldn’t see” (Line 15). Sam acknowledges as much, as the speaker recalls Sam saying “[h]e’d sooner live in hell” (12).

Sam, however, refuses to abandon his dream of wealth. The 1890’s Klondike Gold Rush was itself sparked by sensationalized media accounts that promised troves of gold (See: Background). Sam and Cap, both still poor, both still hungry for wealth, struggle now just to survive, the dream of wealth becoming more and more ironic. In this, and given that the poem is set on and around Christmas Day, Service affirms a lesson that echoes Christ’s many familiar parables that decried the accumulation of wealth as toxic and those who pursue it as fools.