The Trail of '98

by Robert W. Service

Herein the author records many happenings that long ago Ben and Polly, Joel and David told her. And even Phronsie whispered some of it confidentially into the listening ear. "Tell about Rachel, please," she begged; and Margaret Sidney promised to write it all down some day.

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Meet the fascinating friends the Little Peppers made on their way to becoming Big Peppers!

The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, an enduring classic of children's literature, tells the inspiring story of a poor family bound together by devotion and love.

Mrs. Pepper and her children Ben, Polly, Joel, Davie, and Phronsie somehow survive difficult times in a little brown house. But after Phronsie is kidnapped by an organ grinder in the first book, their luck turns! They become the guests of young Jasper King and his dog Prince in his big house in the city!

Even as they live and love amongst the wealthy, the Peppers keep their humility and charm.

Genres: Adventure

514 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1910

About the author

This author is the the British-Canadian writer of Yukon poetry. For the British historian of modern Russia, see Robert Service.

Robert William Service was born into a Scottish family while they were living in Preston, England. He was schooled in Scotland, attending Hillhead High School in Glasgow. He moved to Canada at the age of 21 when he gave up his job working in a Glasgow bank, and traveled to Vancouver Island, British Columbia with his Buffalo Bill outfit and dreams of becoming a cowboy.

He drifted around western North America, taking and quitting a series of jobs. Hired by the Canadian Bank of Commerce, he worked in a number of its branches before being posted to the branch in Whitehorse (not Dawson) in the Yukon Territory in 1904, six years after the Klondike Gold Rush. Inspired by the vast beauty of the Yukon wilderness, Service began writing poetry about the things he saw.

Conversations with locals led him to write about things he hadn't seen, many of which hadn't actually happened, as well. He did not set foot in Dawson City until 1908, arriving in the Klondike ten years after the Gold Rush, but his renown as a writer was already established.

For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Service.

Reviews

[Ron]

Robert W. Service (1874-1958) was already a household name when his first novel was published. He’d become famous as the writer of verse about the Klondike gold rush of 1897-98. Unlike Jack London, he had not been there himself and was relying on stories told by those who had.

This hefty, 514-page novel is a compendium of those stories, woven into what reads like first-person reportage. Its central character, Athol Meldrum, is a young Scotsman, adventuring in the American West and swept up in the stampede to the Yukon. A steamer trip takes him to Skagway and we follow him on the long perilous trail to Dawson City. . .

Read my review at my blog.

[Dan]

Wildly, ludicrously melodramatic; as cloying and purple as cheap grape soda; and if you don't roll your eyes at the obstacles the romantic leads keep placing in their own path, you're made of sterner stuff than I am. But I was riveted. Even if he didn't set foot in the Yukon until the gold rush was past, Service learned about it from people who were there, and the descriptive sections read like a particularly vivid firsthand account. I kept remembering George Orwell's line "When Dickens has once described something, you see it for the rest of your life." And now, damn it, I'm going to have to read Pierre Berton's 500-page Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 to get the whole story.

[Mary]

Good story telling. Slow in some parts. The use of words are the sign of when the book was written and show the biases of that time frame. There were parts of this book that pushes the reader of the time to questions if the definition of the traditional marriage is the only way to look at relationships but this is still within the man/woman couple format.

[Nicole Whalley]

Gritty, dark, heart-wrenching, suspenseful. I was kept in suspense from start to finish, and felt utter despair and wild joy at various parts. I would struggle to read it again, knowing how it all goes now, but it will be on my shelf for the rest of my life.

Yes, there is a good amount of sentimentality. But if you read a novel written by a poet, you should know to expect that already.

[Amélie]

How terribly tragic. Such vivid love, and a wonderfully unique perspective on marriage that was beyond its time.

[Scott]

Great fictional account of the Klondike Gold Rush!

[Russell Sanders]

The Trail of Ninety-Eight: A Northland Romance is a tale of adventure and love set in the Klondike Gold Rush in Alaska. Written around the turn of the twentieth century, the story features a young Scotsman who has made his way to the US to find work with a relative. But he, instead, is lured by the gold being found in the frozen north. On the journey there, he meets a young woman, immediately falls in love with her, and spends the rest of the novel making and losing and making again a fortune while trying to win her love. The poet Robert W. Service wrote this novel, and that means everything. Not only is it a romance in the sense of a love story, but it is a romance in the sense it embodies the ideals of the Romantic poets. The beauty and glory of Alaska is lovingly evoked in Service’s flowery descriptions. And flowery it is! To enjoy this novel—and it does have a solidly entertaining adventure tale—one must put oneself in a particular frame of mind. This is not a straight-forwardly written tome; it evokes the old-time mellerdrammers where the villain will do anything to win his lady love, the hero must defend her virtue, and along the way, there is much sighing and back of the hand across the forehead. This is not to say the book is laughable. It is not. But it certainly is not like modern prose. It may very well have been extreme in its day, for the turn of the century writings I have read have never been quite so over the top. But I liked the book. It gave me a picture of Alaska, which is what I was looking for. I am soon to vacation there, and I wanted a bit of history mixed with melodrama. This book delivered. NOTE: Almost two years after posting this review, I received a comment telling me the Yukon is in Canada, not Alaska. I stand by my review of the novel, although, apparently, the novel itself didn't make the location clear, or I was blinded by my own thinking. I did some research to find that those from the US usually went through Alaska to get to the Yukon, so that may very well be why I just assumed the setting of the entire book was Alaska.

[Robert]

Great writing with fantastic descriptive but tragic ending. Sad
A Bard and Banker library list book.