Equal opportunity torture. The subarctic north offered cold and mud and cliffs to anybody who challenged it. And, as the black soldiers of the Corps would learn when they came in 1942, the mosquitoes and the no see ums landed and feasted on skin, utterly indifferent to whether it was black skin or white.
Link to another story “Horse and Mosquito”
Bureaucrats argued over the route, but they wasted their breath. The only possible path had come down to the Corps from prehistory. And if the soldiers had no idea what awaited them, the people scattered along the 1500-mile path certainly had no idea what was about to descend upon them.
The land of the Midnight Sun could offer a traveler the spectacle of a golden lavender sunset in the west and a rising moon, dusted with the same hue in the east. Oversized and spectacular, the land dwarfed every living thing in it—mosquitoes, moose, grizzlies and, very occasionally, men.
Winters surrounded everything in this country with temperatures that could freeze coffee between the pot and the cup. In spring red-purple fireweed blanketed the ground and, as the top layers of permafrost melted, stately spruce trees slowly leaned. Ice and snow melted into roaring rivers that scoured mountains down into flats and spread them in great alluvial fans of gravel and dirt. Water melted into the dirt and formed mud and more mud and, like lava, slowly swallowed random logs.
Primordial trails and water routes gradually, fitfully improved from prehistoric times through the Gold Rush and on through the first 40 years of the 20th Century. Struggling to make improvements, the men of The North Country accumulated knowledge and experience the men of the Corps would learn, sometimes the hard way, to depend on.
In 1930, The Northern Alberta Railroad extended its tracks from Edmonton to Dawson Creek. From there a relatively easy 46 miles took a traveler to Fort St. John—and the mountains, over 300 miles of mountains, each bigger than the last. The rugged path from Fort St. John through Ft. Nelson to Watson Lake and the Liard River Country had changed little from the days of the primordial First Nations. For that matter, north of Watson Lake the country remained Tlingit country. The only thing resembling a town in this portion of the route was the tiny Tlingit village of Teslin between Teslin Lake and Nisutlin Bay.
On north lay the only city in Yukon. Whitehorse housed about 4,800 souls. And the railroad built to carry long gone gold rushers, the WP&YR, survived, carrying passengers and freight up from Skagway.
A small gold strike near the northern end of Kluane Lake inspired the territorial government to build a primitive road over the 150 miles from Whitehorse to Kluane in 1904.
North from Kluane, at the border between the United States and Canada, an Athabascan seasonal hunting camp had morphed into the tiny settlement of Northway. And further north lay another hunting camp, Delta. Since an existing road connected Delta to Fairbanks, the Alaska Highway would end at Delta.
Your stories really bring back great memories of my 17 years in Alaska. I can relate to those Alaska Highway airports, having flown small planes up and down the Highway a few times over the years. So many stories to tell. My late father-in-law, Gene Roselius, moved to Anchorage in 1952. I used to love listening to his stories about Alaska back in those post-WW2 years.
What a great comment. I’d love to have heard his stories. I would probably be posting them here.