A thousand pair of Army boots had tromped across a railway platform into northern Canada in March at Dawson Creek, British Columbia. The second set of a thousand pair to tromp into northern Canada warmed—sort of—the feet of the 18th Engineers at the depot in Whitehorse, Yukon.
The first troops to Dawson Creek
When FDR and his cabinet assigned the Corps of Engineers the all but impossible task of building 1800 miles of road through subarctic northern Canada and into Alaska, the Corps had just two Combat Engineering Regiments equipped and ready to go. While senior officers raced to create five more regiments, they dispatched those two immediately. The 35th left Fort Ord, California and arrived in Dawson Creek in early March.
Getting a thousand pair of boots to the platform in Whitehorse, Yukon proved a bit more complex than just putting the soldiers on a train. The 18th left Vancouver Barracks on ships in April. The ships carried them up through the North Pacific then between the glaciers up the inside passage to the tiny port of Skagway, Alaska. From Skagway the cars of the White Pass and Yukon Territory Railroad carried them through a Yukon ‘spring’ straight up into the Canadian Coastal Range through tiny Carcross and on to Whitehorse. The second regiment in place in Canada and ready to go.
The men of the 18th set up an icy bivouac at the airstrip—on a bluff overlooking the little town. Fred Rust in his history of the 18th on the Highway put it this way, “The ten toughest minutes of the entire movement were spent climbing the perpendicular hill to the base camp out of Whitehorse.”
The men of the 18th gave the people of Skagway, Carcross and Whitehorse just a tiny taste of the human and steel tsunami headed their way. And, like their colleagues far to the south in Dawson Creek, the soldiers got a hefty taste of tough Yukon reality.
