Muscle and Bone

Muscle and bone and sheer determination were, by mid-summer tearing a long Alaska Highway out of the subarctic wilderness. By July from Dawson Creek, British Columbia to Tok, Alaska, against all odds, the Highway began to emerge, and the modern epic caught the attention of the outside world.

Reporters bestowed nicknames on the project. “The Tote Road”, The Pioneer Road”, “The Truck Trail”, “The Long Trail”, “The Oil Can Highway”, “The Burma Road of North America”.

The Oil Can Highway

The epic needed bulldozers, graders, trucks, barges, and a long list of other equipment. But in the end men operated the equipment, dragged it through or dug it out of the mud, fixed it when it broke. And, above all, men swarmed all around it, taking on the wilderness with muscle and bone and hand tools.

The sun shined twenty-two hours a day during summer, and commanders made full use of all that daylight. Soldiers worked hour after endless hour. Henry Geyer remembered simply. “You worked until you dropped.”

Chester Russell put it this way. “We was working so hard that by the time you got to the night, you rolled your sleeping bag out underneath a tree or in the bushes and you crawled in it and sacked out.”

Chester Russell

Pfc Fowler remembered more detail. “…We slept on the ground with two blankets and a mattress cover.  All of our extras, clothes, toilet items and writing things were kept in the mattress cover.” Early each morning the men rolled their stuff into bedrolls and loaded them in the back of a truck. Many long hours and a few miles further along when daylight finally went away, they dug their bedrolls out of the pile, unrolled them and promptly fell asleep. They did not waste time on tents or shelters.