Visit Dawson City today and you can see the cabin once lived in by Robert W. Service, the Canadian poet who wroteThe Cremation of Sam McGee .

Service was born on this day in 1874 far from Canada and the Yukon he made famous the world over. The son of a banker, Service was the oldest of ten children and moved with his family to their native Glasgow, Scotland before he was a teenager.

Following in his father’s footsteps, he became a banker before wanderlust overtook him and he traveled to Vancouver Island in British Columbia eventually making his way northward to the Yukon where he settled in Whitehorse before arriving in Dawson City in 1908.