Going about their business the 130 citizens of Teslin Post heard strange noises in the woods, noises that grew louder, and then soldiers and trucks and bulldozers poured and roared down along the river out of the woods. Little Dolly Porter hid in panic from the massive machines pitching trees in every direction through her world.
Teslin consisted of a Trading Post, an RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) post manned by two mounties, a radio repeater station built to guide airplanes north to Whitehorse and some scattered dwellings …. The sudden appearance of thousands of soldiers bulldozing at and around the citizens through the woods transformed their world. Tom (Bosum) Smith remembered that the rumbling power of the dozers disturbed and upset the adults in his village—made going about their business impossible.
Villagers recoiled from “hordes of men, overturned trees, mud strips and massive machinery churning through town and down to Nisutlin Bay. A few curious Teslin people walked the road, even tried to hitch rides, but the soldiers had strict orders not to mingle. The army, though, couldn’t keep citizens from gathering in their boats along the lake to keep an eye on progress.
The engineers pressed local river boats into service, hiring paddle and steamboats to carry gear from Johnsons Crossing and Timber Point to Morley Bay. Sternwheelers and barges steamed constantly up Teslin Lake delivering equipment, and some villagers in small boats or canoes, traveled down Teslin Lake, to monitor the action.
Captain Boyd, commander of Company C, remembered the Scot named McGregor who ran the trading post and the two officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who lived at the “Mountie Station”. McGregor welcomed the soldiers to his store, but the RCMP Sergeant instructed Boyd to keep his black soldiers out of the settlement altogether.
Boyd complied and instructed his Non-Commissioned officers to keep the Indians away from their bivouac. But he, “was sure there was some commingling of the soldiers and the Indian bellies.”