Track 9 Research notes

from Mills record

• favourite song of the prospectors of Northern BC and the Yukon
• later spread to other mining regions, carried by wandering sourdoughs
• modernized form sung at Northern Trappers’ Festival
• popular with silver miners in Cobalt Ontario

from Canadian Encyclopedia/ Canada’s Story in Song Book (almost identical)

• Klondike – 1897-1898
• Robert W. Service – The Ballad of the Ice-Worm Cocktail
• Service – 1874 – 1958
• published “When the Iceworms Nest Again” in Twenty Bath-Tub Ballads, 1939; probably responsible for writing it originally
• song may have existed earlier, in northern BC and the Yukon; transmitted orally, traditional verses differ from Service’s
• Wilf Carter sang a slightly different version for RCA (c. 1949)

Internet

• although ice worms are thought to be a tall tale, they actually exist;
• discovered on Muir Glacier in 1887, and Service (and residents of the North) probably knew of this discovery, using it to their advantage on unsuspecting “cheechakos” - http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF0/053.html
• Muir Glacier – Muir Inlet, part of Glacier bay, Alaska, south of the Yukon (ice worms could not survive in Dawson City) (http://www.isset.org/site_of_the_month/glacier_bay/glacierbay.script.html )
• ice worms survive in the water of glaciers, in temperate environments, must be between 0 and –10 degrees Celsius Their ideal habitat temperature is around 0 oC (32 oF). If the temperature drops below minus 7 oC (20 oF), they will die from the cold. They cannot tolerate temperatures above 4 oC (40 oF), however, and will disintegrate at room temperature in about 15 minutes
• range in size from 1-3 cm (an inch more or less)
• mythological cousins: a legend attributed to the South Tuchone people of the southern Yukon region. Their legend tells of the emergence of giant ice worms from the glaciers of the St Elias Mountains and other Pacific coastal ranges. From deep within the permafrost, the ice worm emerges when the Midnight Sun vacates the northern sky. Its mission is to terrorize humans daring to trespass within its mountain lair. Finding a human victim, the ice worm attaches leech-like to an exposed area of flesh to suck the heat from the body, leaving behind a grey-white trail of dead skin.
• myth #2: During the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s, Elmer "Stroller" White, a newspaper columnist and editor of the Whitehorse Star, had written a fanciful tale of the giant ice worms and blue snows that appeared when the temperature dropped below minus 75 oF (minus 60 oC). His alleged interview with a 100-year old native man introduced the ice worm, a creature with a head on either end of its long slippery body that swelled to 1.2 metres (four feet) in length and which

p.186-188; From: Fowke, Edith Fulton and Richard Johnston, eds. Folk Songs of Canada. Waterloo, Ontario: Waterloo Music Company Limited, 1954.

• same notes as in Canada’s Story in Song – Cobalt, The Pas, Robert W. Service
• “In 1949 some young people of The Pas, Manitoba, wrote a somewhat modernized version which was sung at a trappers’ convention there. Subsequently it was copyrighted under the names of Mona Symington, Marion Williamson, and Joyce Kolgan, and recorded by Wilf Carter for Victor”
• older version current in the north was given by Charles E. Gillham in his book Raw North, which was published in 1947
• Gillham says that an Alaskan in a Fairbanks bar told him that his father had written the song, while someone else had said it was composed by a trader on Victoria Island
• tune and words given in the book are based on the ones Gillham noted (version that Mills sings on album)