A Box of Rough Planks

A box of rough planks, lined with Army blankets, carried Clyde Hudson home from Yukon Territory in 1943. He had come north, along with thousands of other civilians, because, at the end of 1942, the Alaska Highway, at best a rough draft, needed a lot of improving. When, in the spring of 1943, the baton passed from the soldiers of the Corps of Engineers to civilian contractors, the trials and danger of a hostile wilderness passed with it.

Civilians on the Alaska Highway Project

Among many other problems, that very first winter left the Highway’s timber bridges in bad shape. When bridge contractor Bates and Rogers came north with a contract to replace them, they brought Clyde and Bodie Bodine with them. Clyde went out on the road and Bodie moved into a barracks in Whitehorse.

The company assigned Bodie a pickup and work that took him from bridge to bridge up and down the Highway. Since Bates and Rogers built bridges that summer from the Liard River in British Columbia all the way to the White River near the Alaska border, Bodie and his pickup saw a lot of Highway.

Bodie brought home good memories from his time in Yukon—except for his memory of the fate of Clyde Hudson.

Clyde operated heavy equipment of all kinds, and he moved, with his equipment, up and down the Highway. One day Clyde loaded an oversize crane on a lowboy trailer, climbed into the tractor with the driver and headed out toward the next bridge. As they struggled up a hill, the driver tried to downshift and suddenly he had a problem.

The transmission jammed and, try as he might, the driver couldn’t get the truck back in gear. As they rapidly slowed, Clyde and the driver realized that very soon they would stop; and, when they did, the truck wouldn’t just sit there. It would roll, out of control, back down the hill.

As the desperate driver worked the clutch and jammed at the stubbornly grinding shift lever, Clyde threw his door open and jumped out to throw blocks behind the tractor wheels. But when Clyde piled through the door, his foot caught and he sprawled flat on the ground, directly behind a tire already rolling backwards. The tire rolled over him, and he died instantly.

Bodie got the sad news from a phone call to Whitehorse. They would bring Clyde’s mangled corpse to the warehouse there. Bodie needed to get carpenters to construct a box out of rough lumber, and he needed to line the box with army blankets.

They built the box and Clyde got delivered to it quickly, but he lay in the box in the warehouse for three days. It took that long to get him on a WP&YT boxcar down to Skagway and then out on a ship through the Lynn Canal, the first leg of his long, sad trip home to Illinois.

A Civilian Camp on the Highway 1943