Gangplanks punctuated Leonard Cox’s time with the 340th Engineers. A gangplank in Seattle carried him onto the ship that took him up the inside passage to Skagway. He didn’t know it, but his regiment would defend America by helping build the Alaska Highway through Northern Canada.
The Army drafted Leonard out of Kokomo, Indiana shortly after Pearl Harbor, put him through basic training and then shipped him to the brand new 340th Engineering Regiment. At Skagway he and his fellows climbed off the ship and moved to tents at the airfield. Leonard stayed only a few days before the regiment dispatched his company up the mountain to Yukon and on to Whitehorse.
Leonard remembered seven cars and four engines on the train and the high railroad bridge. “That was about my highest high during the eighteen months there.”
At Whitehorse the most memorable of his gangplanks carried him to the deck of a paddlewheel boat headed up the Yukon River to Nisutlin Bay at Teslin.
The trip from Whitehorse to Teslin took seven days, and Leonard and his buddies enjoyed every minute of it. With nothing to do they loafed, admired the scenery and watched the boatmen work. Every few miles the boat would pull to the bank. Local Indians, paid by the steamship company, cut and stacked wood that the boatmen loaded up to run their boiler.
They travelled upstream—not a big deal when the quarter mile wide river presented a slow, steady current. Periodically, though, the river narrowed abruptly, sometimes to as little as 100 feet. Narrowing the Yukon to 100 feet turned it into a raging cataract, a force more powerful than the steam engine.
Heading into a narrow stretch, the boatmen pulled close to the bank. One jumped ashore, pulled a cable to a tree and secured it. On board the engine did its utmost, the paddlewheel churned, and the boatmen supplemented its power by turning a hand winch, pulling in the cable.
With the cable winched in, having gained a few feet, the boatmen anchored securely, cast another line ashore and repeated the process. The amazed soldiers watched as the boat moved, infinitely slowly, a few feet at a time, through the narrow patches.
Their seven-day trip to Teslin covered 150 miles.