Thousands Worked Incredibly Hard Thousands of men worked incredibly hard in cold and then heat and in incessant rain to build the Alaska Highway. They powered over mountains, through and across streams, through deep woods with bulldozers, trucks, saws, axes… They got injured. A lot. They lived in close quarters, especially when the weather turned …
Category Archives: Alaska Highway
Correction and Apology to a true hero, Bad Whiskey Red
I try hard to make my stories interesting and I also try very hard to make them accurate. Occasionally I make a mistake and in a recent post I made one I deeply regret. On January 23 I posted a story about “Castner’s Cutthroats” a special force organized to do battle in the Aleutians. Among …
Continue reading “Correction and Apology to a true hero, Bad Whiskey Red”
Menace of Mentasta
Menace confronted the soldiers building the Alaska Highway at every turn. But the black soldiers of the 97th had to conquer the most fearful menace of them all—Mentasta Pass. At the turn of the century the Army had built a pack trail from Valdez to Eagle. Alaskans found the trail dangerous, impossible to maintain and …
Suddenly Climbing
Suddenly climbing into Keystone Canyon, a truck driver found himself working his clutch, hurriedly shifting down through the gears to the lowest one. Driving from the Port of Valdez toward the interior of Alaska he had just covered about 15 miles of rough, muddy, but misleadingly flat road. Now as his truck struggled up into …
Error in Wyatt Earp Post
Back in October I posted a story about Wyatt Earp in Alaska. Tonite I received a comment from Henrik Nielsen who explained to me that the photo of Earp’s saloon I posted was not, in fact, his saloon. I try hard to get it right, but sometimes I fail. I apologize and I thank Henrik …
Emerging Alaska Highway
Emerging Alaska Highway, in June, had finally started rewarding the strenuous efforts of thousands of soldiers and civilians working through subarctic wilderness from Alaska south to Dawson Creek. Now came word of the Japanese in the Aleutians. None of them knew what to make of that. For some, of course, the Japanese assault justified their …
Mild-mannered Hero
Mild-mannered hero, Staff Sergeant Charles Davis, turned up in a story in the Pittsburgh Courier in early 1944. The reporter actually described him as a “slight and mild-mannered” black soldier and then went on to relate not one, but two incredible stories about mild mannered Sergeant Davis. Link to another story “Rough Draft of …
Big Devil Swamp Ate a Dozer
Big Devil Swamp swallowed a Company B bulldozer whole in June 1942 and immortalized the Company’s commander, Captain Pollock. Commanding General Hoge had assigned the Black soldiers of the 93rd Engineers to create a path from Carcross to the Teslin River. The white soldiers of the 340th Engineers would use it to get to their …
Motor Pool
Motor Pool–the soldiers of the 93rd Engineers needed one desperately. And locating one and getting heavy equipment to it presented a problem. In May 1942 the black soldiers of the 93rd Engineers plunged through Yukon’s forbidding wilderness working with a couple of borrowed bulldozers and hand tools. But Ships carrying their heavy equipment steamed out …
Cairns along the Highway
Cairns near Nisutlin Bay mark the final resting places for two men who came to the Highway and never left. Link to another story “Bonner and Bess and the Memorial Cairns” James Miller, who drove a tractor trailer truck up and down the Alaska Highway back when it was still dirt and gravel commented on …