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The cabins of Dawson's two literary lions are only about 100m apart on 8th Avenue, about ten-minutes' walk from Front Street. Most Canadians hold Robert Service in high esteem - depite his occasionally execrable verse - and he has a place in the pantheon of Canadian literature. Verses like The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee combine strong narrative and broad comedy to evoke the myth of the North. Born in Preston, England, in 1874, the poet wrote most of his gold-rush verse before he'd even set foot in the Yukon - he was posted by his bank employers to Whitehorse in 1904 and only made Dawson in 1908. He retired a rich man on the proceeds of his writing - he outsold Kipling and was one of the biggest-selling poets of his time - spending his last years mainly in France, where he died in 1958. His cabin (June-Sept daily 9am-noon & 1-5pm; $2; tel 993-7200) is probably cosier and better decorated than it was, but it still gives an idea of how most people must have lived once Dawson was reasonably established. During the summer people flock here to hear poetry recitals in front of the cabin from actor Charlie Davies (July & Aug daily 10am & 3pm; $6 for cabin and recital): another actor, Irish-born Tom Byrne, dressed and mannered as the "Bard of the Yukon", performs readings in summer on Front Street (3pm & 8.30pm) between Queen and Princess. Jack London's Cabin home is an unpersuasive piece of reconstruction, little more than a bleak, blank-walled and incomplete hut (logs from the original were separated and half of them used to build a cabin in Jack London Square in Oakland, California). London knew far more than Service of the real rigours of northern life, having spent time in 1897 as a ferryman on Whitehorse's Mile's Canyon before moving north to spend about a year holed up on Henderson's Creek above the Klondike River. He returned home to California penniless, but loaded with a fund of material that was to find expression in books like The Call of the Wild , White Fang and A Daughter of the Snows . Alongside the hut there's a good little museum of pictures and memorabilia, presided over by an amiable and knowledgeable curator (hut and museum June to mid-Sept daily 10am-6pm; donation; tel 993-5575). Readings of London's work are given here in summer, currently at noon and 2.30pm.
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