An Epic achievement, the construction of the Alaska Highway exemplifies a truth about the violent upheaval of World War II. Challenge requires response, and epic challenge requires epic response. The war, the most horrific event in recorded history, presented epic challenges to virtually every person alive. It brought death and destruction, but it also inspired heroism.
Paths Through the North Country
The drama of the Alcan in 1942 arose from the interaction of individuals—thousands of them. Before the war every single one of them lived their lives in worlds they perceived as normal and immutable. The war challenged them all, changed their lives profoundly and forever. And they rose to the challenge to create the stupendous Alaska-Canada Highway–together.
Few of the thousands of young soldiers who the Army, in a desperate hurry, dispatched north from the United States had planned to become soldiers; even fewer planned to help gouge a road out of a subarctic wilderness they barely knew existed. And few of the thousands of civilian contractors who came with them knew any more about that wilderness.
. In 1942 the war wrenched them all into a totally new world, threw them together, changed their lives forever, mixed them like ingredients in a cocktail shaker and poured them out onto a primordial path through British Columbia, Yukon and Alaska.
The people who lived along that path also lived in a world they perceived as normal and immutable; had no idea what the war had in store for them.
The road builders poured first into the Peace River Valley, a relatively accessible and prosperous farming community centered on Dawson Creek and Fort St. John.
North of Fort St. John the road builders would claw through all but impenetrable wilderness, but tiny communities of First Nations and a few hardy European and American imports occupied that wilderness.
Some 800 miles north of Dawson Creek, on the other side of the Continental Divide a few hundred people lived in the small city of Whitehorse.
The soldiers and civilians who poured through those tiny communities needed and depended on the men and women who lived in them. And the lives of those people, like the lives of the road builders, changed profoundly and forever.
In 1941 all these ordinary people were living their lives in worlds they perceived as normal and immutable. The war changed all that; challenged them profoundly. And together ordinary people accomplished a feat some have compared to the construction of the Panama Canal–the Alaska-Canada Highway.
