The Shooting Of Dan McGrew

The Shooting of Dan McGrew is a novelization by Marvin Dana (1867-1926) of the famous Robert W. Service poem of the same title, first published in Service’s collection Songs of a Sourdough in 1907. The Service poem became one of the most popular American narrative poems of the early twentieth century and inspired multiple film, stage, and prose adaptations across the following decades.

The original poem is set in the Malamute saloon in the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush. A stranger arrives, plays the piano with such emotional power that the assembled miners are moved to recognition, and then guns down the local tough Dan McGrew in a dramatic confrontation. The poem combines vivid Yukon atmospheric description with sharp narrative drive in the ballad form that Service had perfected for his Yukon material.

Dana’s prose adaptation expands the poem into novel length while preserving the basic plot elements. The novelization was published in connection with one of the early film adaptations of the poem and reached a sizable American popular audience during the period when both Service’s Yukon poetry and early American silent films were at their peak commercial success.