Little Tok River

Little Tok river doesn’t amount to much. But it meant a lot to the soldiers of the 97^th  Engineers in August 1942. Their assigned portion of the Alaska Highway lay on the north bank of the Tanana River, 266 miles from where they left the ship that brought them to Alaska. Over the last eighty of those miles, they had to build their own access road. They didn’t clear Mentasta Pass and the Continental Divide until August and they still needed another sixty miles of access road before they could start on the Alaska Highway.

Link to another story about the 97th “Reinstalling a Tread”

In Alaska August is extremely late summer. The army had to do something to speed the regiment up, and they fired the semi-competent commander of the 97^th. His replacement reorganized, built a fire under his officers and in August a newly energized regiment raced north.

Supplies, especially the endless drums of fuel their bulldozers and trucks guzzled, came 206 miles from the Port of Valdez, and that distance increased with every mile of road they built. The army had moved a civilian contractor in behind them to bring supplies out from Valdez, but the civilian trucks could come only to the end of completed road.  The working regiment scattered through the Tanana Valley miles beyond that point.

Heath Twichell in his Northwest Epic described the creative response. The soldiers built rough sleds loaded them with supplies and fuel, and bulldozers dragged them through the Valley. But they still needed a way to get the fuel and supplies to the sleds.

To do that they used the Little Tok River to its mouth on the Big Tok River. “Enough supplies for several additional weeks came floating down the Little Tok behind them, to be caught by a log boom after bobbing and bumping along over rapids and sandbars for 15 miles. The boom caught fuel in half-filled drums, rations, spare parts, and miscellaneous items in lightly-loaded pontoons.”

LInk to Twichell’s book on Amazon

Captain Walter Parsons, commander of Company F worked on the ground along the Little Tok, right in the middle of the operation. On August 10 in a letter to his wife, Abbie, He described the process from his point of view.

“We are having plenty hell. Most of our supplies are behind and the… companies out in front… are just getting by—packing our food in… We sent food down the river in boats but could not get the boats back up stream. Most of our fuel we get by half emptying full drums into empty drums and dumping both into the river. After 30 or 40 drums we send men walking down each side of the river to keep the drums on the way.”