Gateways… The Alaska Highway that General Hoge and the Corps proposed to build in 1942 would traverse some of the most remote mountains and forests on earth. And if men traverse the North Country on primordial paths, they access those paths through equally primordial gateways.
Of the seven regiments that Hoge launched into the North Country, the 18th and the 35th Combat Engineering Regiments had been around for a long time, stood ready to go. In March he sent the 35th to flood the gateway through the rail depot at Dawson Creek, across the Peace River and on over a rapidly melting winter road to Fort Nelson, BC.
Link to another story “Ft Nelson, BC”
In April, Hoge aimed his other experienced regiment, the 18th at Yukon Territory—and the gateway that begins at the tiny port of Skagway, Alaska. The port of Skagway lies at the end of the Inside Passage, a coastal route that weaves through the islands on the Pacific Coast from Puget Sound at Olympia, Washington north between Vancouver Island and the mainland of British Columbia into the Alaska Panhandle. There one branch heads north to Skagway, a tiny bit of flat land between the Passage and the towering mountains of Yukon Territory.
The Gold Rush had left the narrow-gauge White Pass and Yukon Territory Railroad, and when Colonel Earl G. Paules brought his 18th Engineers up from Vancouver Barracks in Seattle to Skagway, they rode to Whitehorse on the WP&YR.
Fresh out of white regiments, in April Hoge also dispatched the segregated 97th Engineers to the gateway at Valdez, Alaska—the toughest gateway of all. He would make up for their assumed incompetence by surrounding them with civilian contractors, but in April contractors remained in Iowa negotiating contracts. When the 97th arrived, snow completely blocked the route out of Valdez. So much for a gateway.
An endless stream of Yukon bound regiments, attached units and PRA civilians would ultimately pour through Dawson Creek or ride the WP&YT over the White Pass out of Skagway. And after some delay civilian contractors would flood into and through Valdez.