McGee, Sam McGee, probably a name familiar to you, couldn’t know he crossed paths, albeit a half century ahead of them in time, with the soldiers of the 18th Engineering Regiment. The soldiers, building Alaska Highway through Yukon, certainly didn’t know they’d crossed paths with him.
Sam McGee, the real Sam McGee, not the one in Robert Service’s imagination, followed the lure of gold to Skagway and up the Chilkoot Pass, but in Yukon Territory he stopped in Whitehorse. He would prospect there instead of going on to the Klondike.
Good choice.
His War Eagle copper mine made him a wealthy man—and a leading citizen of Whitehorse. When Robert Service filched Sam’s name and wrote a poem about cremating him, Sam didn’t even know it. Sam moved south with his family before the poem made him famous.
Robert Service, Poet of the Gold Rush
In Yukon Territory the real Sam McGee turned to building roads. He built a wagon road from Whitehorse to Carcross. He built a road from Conrad to Carcross. He built a road to War Eagle. And he built a section of the road from Whitehorse to Kluane.
On that section between Whitehorse and Kluane, Sam’s road had to bridge the Aishihik River, and his bridge over the Aishihik served travelers for decades.
When Sam McGee died in 1940, nobody cremated him. He lies in a cemetery in Beiseker, Alberta. But two years postmortem, his bridge connected him to the soldiers of the 18th Engineering regiment.
The men of the 18th built road as far as the Aishihik—the soldiers called it Canyon Creek—and the river presented a problem. Sam McGee’s timber bridge would no way hold up under trucks and D8 Bulldozers. To replace the old bridge the soldiers had…
Timbers.
The engineers got creative, and the design they came up with became famous within the Corps of Engineers for its ingenuity.
Notice the angled timbers driven into the opposite banks.
The soldiers of the 18th certainly knew of Sam McGee—the cremated one. They didn’t know they rebuilt Sam McGee’s bridge.