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The Shooting of Dan McGrew -- Robert Service

       
(Poem #1126) The Shooting of Dan McGrew
 A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
 The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;
 Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
 And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou.

 When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare,
 There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.
 He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength
        of a louse,
 Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks
        for the house.
 There was none could place the stranger's face, though we searched ourselves
        for a clue;
 But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew.

 There's men that somehow just grip your eyes, and hold them hard like a spell;
 And such was he, and he looked to me like a man who had lived in hell;
 With a face most hair, and the dreary stare of a dog whose day is done,
 As he watered the green stuff in his glass, and the drops fell one by one.
 Then I got to figgering who he was, and wondering what he'd do,
 And I turned my head -- and there watching him was the lady that's
        known as Lou.

 His eyes went rubbering round the room, and he seemed in a kind of daze,
 Till at last that old piano fell in the way of his wandering gaze.
 The rag-time kid was having a drink; there was no one else on the stool,
 So the stranger stumbles across the room, and flops down there like a fool.
 In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
 Then he clutched the keys with his talon hands -- my God! but that man
        could play.

 Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,
 And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear;
 With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,
 A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;
 While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars? --
 Then you've a hunch what the music meant. . . hunger and night and the stars.

 And hunger not of the belly kind, that's banished with bacon and beans,
 But the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means;
 For a fireside far from the cares that are, four walls and a roof above;
 But oh! so cramful of cosy joy, and crowned with a woman's love --
 A woman dearer than all the world, and true as Heaven is true --
 (God! how ghastly she looks through her rouge, -- the lady that's
        known as Lou.)

 Then on a sudden the music changed, so soft that you scarce could hear;
 But you felt that your life had been looted clean of all that it once
        held dear;
 That someone had stolen the woman you loved; that her love was a devil's lie;
 That your guts were gone, and the best for you was to crawl away and die.
 'Twas the crowning cry of a heart's despair, and it thrilled you through
        and through --
 "I guess I'll make it a spread misere", said Dangerous Dan McGrew.

 The music almost died away ... then it burst like a pent-up flood;
 And it seemed to say, "Repay, repay," and my eyes were blind with blood.
 The thought came back of an ancient wrong, and it stung like a frozen lash,
 And the lust awoke to kill, to kill ... then the music stopped with a crash,
 And the stranger turned, and his eyes they burned in a most peculiar way;
 In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
 Then his lips went in in a kind of grin, and he spoke, and his voice was calm,
 And "Boys," says he, "you don't know me, and none of you care a damn;
 But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I'll bet my poke
        they're true,
 That one of you is a hound of hell. . .and that one is Dan McGrew."

 Then I ducked my head, and the lights went out, and two guns blazed
        in the dark,
 And a woman screamed, and the lights went up, and two men lay stiff and stark.
 Pitched on his head, and pumped full of lead, was Dangerous Dan McGrew,
 While the man from the creeks lay clutched to the breast of the lady that's
        known as Lou.

 These are the simple facts of the case, and I guess I ought to know.
 They say that the stranger was crazed with "hooch," and I'm not denying
        it's so.
 I'm not so wise as the lawyer guys, but strictly between us two --
 The woman that kissed him and -- pinched his poke -- was the lady that's
        known as Lou.
-- Robert Service
Note: 'Spread misere': also 'open misere', a bid in some whist derivatives
  involving the bidding player playing for no tricks (misere) and placing
  his cards face up on the table (spread).

As I mentioned a couple of poems ago, frontiers tend to produce some highly
vivid and colourful stories and narrative poems, and Service's tales of the
Yukon are surely among the best of the breed. An often overlooked
'character' in these tales is the land itself - Kipling's India, Paterson's
Australia, Twain's Mississippi all have an unmistakable presence that
permeates the tales and moulds and shapes their characters. Service, perhaps
more so than any of them, makes this explicit in his poems:

  Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,
  And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear;
  With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,
  A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;
  While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars?
--
  Then you've a hunch what the music meant. . . hunger and night and the stars.

and it is this, more than anything else, that draws me to reread them time
and again, seldom without a shiver.

Today's tale of mysterious strangers, calculating women, and sudden violence
seems perfectly natural in its setting, and Service's verse hews and shapes
it without robbing it of any of its raw intensity. Definitely an immortal
poem - perhaps even more so than the haunting "Cremation of Sam McGee".

martin

Links:

  See Poem #781 for a collection of Service-related sites - I couldn't find
  anything interesting specifically related to today's poem.

  The current theme:
    [broken link] http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/collections/58.html

60 comments: ( or Leave a comment )

foshea said...

Thank you for the recitation week.

My uncle in Ireland had a prologue to this poem. I could never find out
whether it was his own composition or whether it was Service's or had
been added by some music hall reciter. I can't recall the words but it
went something like this, in a kind of blank verse:

"Imagine a busy saloon in a seaside town somewhere in the south of
America. The bar is kept by a beautiful woman, helped by her husband,
who also plays music on the barroom piano.

One evening, a whaling ship docks at the port and the crew with their
burly captain spend the evening drinking at the bar. The ship leaves
with first tide the next morning; the beautiful woman who kept the bar
also disappears.

What follows is a sequel

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up ..."

Anyone help with this?

Incidentally, talking about this uncle. He had a lifelong stammer, but
once he started on a recitation, he went through it without a sign of
stammering.

Frank O'Shea

KassieB said...

My grandfather was one of the hopefuls at the Yukon gold rush. Although I was
only about nine years old when he died, I remember quite well his tales of
his life there. He could recite many of Robert Service's poems. Once, after
reciting The Shooting of Dan McGrew, he told me that incidents of sudden
violence weren't all that rare during the time he spent in the Yukon. "There
were a lot of strange people up there," he said. "If the lights went out,
everyone hit the floor."

By the time I was ten years old, I could recite most of The Cremation of Sam
McGee. Yet that poem seemed rather tame to me compared to the story of the
funeral of one of my grandfather's fellow miners. It seems that the gentleman
died and his body froze solid in the Yukon cold. My grandfather and his
buddies, while digging the grave and passing around the whiskey bottle,
decided that lining the grave with pine boughs would be a nice gesture. In
their zeal, they filled almost the entire grave with branches. When they
lowered the frozen body of their friend into his grave, there wasn't quite
enough room for it. With a little discussion and a lot more whiskey, they
arrived at the obvious solution: They took turns jumping up and down on the
frozen corpse in an attempt to fine tune the fit. I remember, after hearing
my grandfather tell this story, asking him, "Did it work?" My serious,
hard-working, non-drinking grandfather answered, "Who knows?" and burst out
laughing.

Kathy

Fiona Thomson said...

Just wanted to say that this was perfect timing as BBC Radio 4 dedicated a
half hour programme to Robert Service and this poem on Sunday!
Fiona

Gwbjeb1954 said...

My Father was a great admirer of Robert Service's poems and I gave him the
book of poems on his retirement date, 1968. Dad memorized this poem as one of
his favorites and used to recite it to us, his family of three boys, and
anyone else that wanted to listen. As we grew older, Dad became the "Patriarch"
of an annual fishing trip to Flaming Gorge Reservoir by himself, his three
sons, three cousins and three family friends. The highlight of the trip was,
after a few drinks, Dad would recite this poem do the delight of us and
anyone else in the motel area that heard it. I will say that he would recite it
with meaning--wit, seriousness, and matter-of-factly, where needed. Dad died
in 1984 at the age of 85 but our memories of his rendition remain firmly fixed
in our memories.
There was a parody written to this poem that was quite bawdy, risque,
however you want to put it. Suffice it to say it was meant for men's ears only
(my mother knew of it, of course) so it also fit in well with a bunch of
guys acting like children again! Dad also knew this by heart and followed the
Service poem with the parody. We don't know for sure but we believe Dad wrote
the parody himself as he was good at writing the poetry for us kids for
school and a poem to each of us three sons covering the main events of our lives.
We all cherish these poems!
After our fishing trip last May (2003) when one of our friends recited
from memory another poem of Robert Service, The Cremation of Sam McGee, I
returned to home in California and thought I would do something of the same this
year. Within a week I had written a poem that more or less ended the saga of
Dan McGrew and the parody. This was done mostly at night and then putting
it on the computer either at night or the next morning. Everything seemed to
flow without much effort and I know it is not of the quality of Service's or
my Dad's effort but I think it will bring a chuckle to the "gang" while at
Flaming Gorge. Sadly, two of my cousins have died in recent years but I have
added a comment on them in my poem.
To me, Robert Service's poems bring to life the good times of the
century when things were perhaps more hard, but less stressful and fast paced than
life is today. I believe our younger generation can learn a lot from these
poems.
Thanks for
'listening',
Gordon Brown

P.S. I just read the comments by Frank O'Shea. The parody of which I spoke
begins exactly as he said: " A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in one
of the Malumute Halls while the man at the music box stealthily scratched his
- - - - -". Contact with Mr. O'Shea might help to solve our mystery of who
wrote the parody and I could send him a copy. It is barnyard humor but good!

ceisenhart said...

I learned Sam McGee back in scout camp in 1955 or so--one of the
coujnselors recited it, and my buddy and became sold, so we went home
and memorized. I also know Dan McGrew, by the bye. I've since recited
one or the other of them about 30 times over the years, most recently on
a cruise ship passenger talent night on the way to Alaska--brought down
the house. As a retired English teacher, I have to admit that RWS's
poetry is not tecnically meritorious, but it sure tells a great story
and keeps the audience on tenterhooks. Those who like this sort of
literature should read 'The Highwayman' (which I also can recite if you
wish LOL. Interesting site--just found it while surfing.

Cleveland W. Gibson said...

I loved the poem. It gripped me when I first read it. Just recently I
went to a friend's place and an old man who'd said nothing all evening
came out with the poem. We listened and enjoyed the dramatic way he told
it. And the old man knew every word.Every expression.
Cleveland W. Gibson
writer

Sietse Brouwer said...

Service's description of the cold clear night is strikingly similar to
Banjo Paterson's in "The Man from Snowy River".

Paterson's:
And down by Kosciusko, where the pine-clad ridges raise
Their torn and rugged battlements on high,
Where the air is clear as crystal, and the white stars fairly blaze
At midnight in the cold and frosty sky,

Compare that to the way Service uses clear light and mountains to
evoke loneliness:
Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,
And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear;
With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,
A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck
called gold;
While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept
in bars? --
Then you've a hunch what the music meant. . . hunger and night and
the stars.

I suppose the link between clear skies and cold nights is common to
all non-tropical climates.

Regards,

Sietse
Sietse Brouwer

MarvinPeixoto said...

I once had a copy of the McGrew parody, Which I think was circulated among
the then all-male student body in the College of Law at the Jesuit-run
University of Santa Clara, circa 1954. Most of us were veterans of either WW II or
Korea, and such verse was quite popular among ourselves.

I can only remember these fifty years later the segment ". . .And out of
the night, which was black as a bitch, and in to the din and the smoke . . .,
et seq.". As a retired lawyer, amateur American literature buff, and
sometimes bar-room poet, I consider the part I elide above to be one of the most
poetic descriptive passages in all of English poetry. It includes the line
"His face was red as a baboon's ass while the passion within him burned., , ,"
Than which no finer simile exists, in my opinion, in English literature.

There was also a bawdy version of "Sam Mc Gee" but not up to the quality of
"McGrew".

As I remember, we first got into this after using a first-year property law
casebook by Professors Cassner and Leach of the Harvard College of Law, which
recounted "The Ballad of the Ladies of the Chorus of the Wut-tut-tut
Review"and one about a cow named Rose of Alberlone (sp.?). The good Professor's
selections were almost as witty, but of much more delicate language.

If you have access to a copy of "McGrew" I would be extremely grateful,
and my postal address would be available, if you prefer. I can assure you of
my discretion in further promulgation of the material.

Thank you very much.

Marvin Peixoto, ESQ.

Blubird1926 said...

Hi
Any chance of getting a copy of the Mc Grew parady?
Dick Jensen
Corvallis Or.

LEndress99 said...

I HAD A BUDDY IN THE U.S. AIR FORCE MANY YEARS AGO WHO COULD RECITE THIS
WHOLE POEM BY HEART...BUT AT THE END HE RECITED..."AND THERE ON THE FLOOR WITH HIS
ASS-HOLE ALL TORE LAY DANGEROUS DAN MCGREW"

Robert Miller said...

I wonder how I would go about getting a copy of the parody on The shooting of Dangerous Dan McGrew. I do not know that much about the working of a computer, but would love to have a copy. I would be willing to buy it. Thanks for any help.

Bob Miller

George said...

The bawdy version was frequently recited to us by an army friend in the
early fifties. He had enlisted in the horse cavalry in the late thirties and
knew lots of bawdy stuff.

George

Cleveland W. Gibson said...

I half remember seeing Service read out his poem 'The shooting of Dan
McGrew' and always wondered if it might turn up somewhere for us all to
see. Has anybody ever done a dramatic version of this same poem? I
wondered...
Best wishes
Cleveland W. Gibson

Liam Smith said...

I think you'll have to edit the text of the poem if that was, indeed,
Service reciting.

Don Bryan said...

Does anybody know what the "green stuff" was and "watering" it means?

Don Bryan

Anonymous said...

I got here via research into San Francisco beat poet Jack Micheline, whom I always connected to Service because of his (Micheline's) bar room recitations. I wrote a parody of Jack's work to only now realize I couldn't have found a way to praise him more highly.

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Pete said...

RE: 'green stuff". I never worried about it before. I wonder if he might he be referring to absinthe? Watering it probably only means diluting it. I haven't done any searching here...just thinking.

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Mark, ex Navy Corpsman Stationed at Oakland Ca. said...

I'm surprised to find no explanation of the "Green Stuff" question. It's Absinth, an herbal drug that was added to alcoholic drinks to give an extra kick.
It's a common weed in the Bay area of California near where I was stationed at the Naval Hospital. Also called "Anis" The aroma fills the air in the hills of Oakland CA.
The drug was added to booze in a particular ritual way that added a rush of its strong aroma to the experience of drinking it. Service was calling up it's reputation for making an alcoholic drink extra powerful in it's tendancy to promote violence in the drinker, and the chemical reaction that is produced in its preparation., which involves a special perferated spoon holding a sugar cube.

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