Moldy Hay, the only bedding available proved better than nothing to the soldiers of the 341st Engineers. Actually, no one slept much, and their lives wouldn’t get easier anytime soon. They had slept on the train on their first night in Dawson Creek. The next day with the temperature below zero they constructed the camp with moldy hay beds in a stubble field about two miles from the town.
The 341st had been together less than two months. But with the 35th Engineering Regiment in Fort Nelson, sick and running out of food, General O’Conner needed a supply road to them—yesterday! The Corps had brought the 341st to Canada to provide that road, and, for better or for worse, the under equipped and inexperienced regiment had to make road.
The Regiment, less Company A, hurriedly moved to the foot of Charlie Lake, just outside of Fort St. John, and put their small allotment of D-4 dozers and trucks out on the road—counting on, on the job training to bring their operators and drivers up to speed. In a letter to his wife, Regimental Commander Col. Lane noted that ribbon clerks and office workers from Brooklyn and Jersey City didn’t bring a lot of useful background to the job of operating heavy equipment.
When a captain ordered trucks and tractors backed into a clearing, and one of the drivers just sat there, the captain vociferously expressed his displeasure. The driver’s response? “I’m sorry sir, but I never drove a tractor before. I don’t know how to back up.”
Lacking heavy equipment, Lane planned to put his men in the woods with hand tools, cutting a wide swath and burning the downed trees and brush on top of the right of way. He hoped the fires and exposure to sunlight would dry and harden the ground.
Like his colleagues in Yukon Territory, he quickly learned a North Country lesson. Removing the insulating vegetation and then applying heat, turned what had appeared to be ‘ground’ into a sea of bottomless mud. In the end, the 341st would lay corduroy over that first ten miles of mud and muskeg, creating what would forever be known as “Muskeg Flats”.
