Carcross had seen trainloads of soldiers pass through and on to Whitehorse. Now, to little Millie Jones’ delight, the black soldiers of the 93rd Engineering Regiment stopped and climbed down in Carcross. Lt. Price’s platoon came first, brought up the Regimental Chaplain, Lt. Finis Hugo Austin, and set up a post office.
Within six days the rest of the soldiers arrived and the 93rd fully occupied the little town. Regimental Commander, Colonel Johnson, put his men in camp a mile outside the village near the Northern Airways airstrip at the base of Caribou and Nares Mountains.
Geoffrey Sheldon, a Tlingit living in Carcross, remembered, “The war broke out and then the army comes in and starts building the highway… Quite a thing to see, the time, when the first army was coming through Carcross. You know that airport in Carcross? There were tents all over there, army tents and hundreds of people [soldiers].”
The 93rd ‘s canvas city, featured long rows of sixteen-foot pyramidal tents—enough room between the rows for a jeep to pass. Enlisted men bunked five to a tent, officers two. Leonard Larkins’ memory casts doubt on those numbers.
Similar tents, equipped with makeshift tables, chairs, boxes of files and typewriters, housed offices such as the Motor Pool, Payroll and the Commander.
A field hospital and dispensary sprouted among the tents at the airfield. From there, as the companies moved out into the Yukon wilds, doctors and aid men would travel up and down the line inspecting camps and holding sick calls, dentists would travel with them, pulling and filling teeth.
Company B’s first platoon relieved the 29th Topographic Engineers from guard duty on the Swivel Bridge at Carcross narrows. One NCO and five privates, wearing parkas and huddling next to a roaring fire on the beach, guarded the bridge. On a visit catholic Bishop Coudert introduced himself to one of them.
Said the Bishop, “What do you think of the Yukon?”
“Yukon? Yukon have it!”