Deep forest and rugged mountains, 175 miles to the Sikanni Chief River and then 150 more miles on to Fort Nelson, confronted a traveler going north from Dawson Creek at the turn of the century. He travelled a path that had changed little from that used by the primordial First Nations.
The forty-six miles from Dawson Creek to Fort St. John presented only minor problems—at least by north country standards. But north from Fort St. John a traveler entered a whole different world–the deep forest.
Link to another story “Equal Opportunity Torture”
During 1919 and 1920 a white trapper named Glen Minaker and Joe Apsassin, a Cree from the Blueberry Reserve, blazed a primitive pack trail through flash flood torrents, knee deep muskeg, and vicious mosquitoes from Fort St. John to Fort Nelson. In winter, when snow rendered their trail a dog team road, men hauled freight to Fort Nelson over a “brushed-out winter road.” And then a colorful immigrant named E.J. Spinney introduced bulldozers to the road building equation in British Columbia.
Grant McConachie, the entrepreneurial bush pilot, struggling with transporting fuel to his scattered airstrips, turned to Spinney. Farmers in the Peace River Valley had discovered caterpillar tractors for land clearing, and winter idled them exactly when Spinney needed them.
In February of 1941 Spinney’s “tractor train” followed by truckloads of aviation fuel ground over the trail to Fort Nelson.
Further north in the mountainous Liard River country Frank Watson had created another small settlement, Watson Lake. Fourteen-year-old Frank and his father came north with the gold rush but they wound up at the Lake in Liard country instead of the Klondike. In 1900 Watson senior returned to California and son Frank married an Indian girl and built a cabin on the lake.
In the early thirties one Knox McCusker teamed up with Glen Minaker to guide “…wealthy American hunting parties and exploratory parties of all kinds, north and west of Fort St. John.” In 1931 when McCusker guided Mrs. Mary Henry into the wilderness north of Fort Nelson, he laid out a route to Liard Hot Springs at Watson’s doorstep.
Through the 1930’s as men thought more and more about a land route to Alaska, McCusker thought he might know the way to go; and, with Minaker he plotted a possible course for such a highway over the Continental Divide to Watson Lake. When General Buckner, ordered to build the Alaska Highway, turned up at Dawson Creek in early 1942 McCusker showed him the first big part of the way.