Nature, a dictator, not a ‘mother’, rules the rugged, remote, austere, breathtakingly beautiful, and viciously inhospitable subarctic north. In 1942 the Corps of Engineers had no choice. A land route to Alaska, an Alaska Highway, would have to span this portion of nature’s turf.
Link to another story “The Only Possible Route”
To this day the region is a vast expanse of raw wilderness with virtually no population. Alaska, alone, encompasses 663,267 square miles. In 2013 its population was only 735,132. Prior to the war boom, its population was 73,000. Moose outnumber people and probably always will. And most of the Highway would span British Columbia and Yukon Territory, even more raw and unsettled than Alaska.
Men had come to, confronted dictator nature, and lived in these regions long before the corps. And their lives and works had shaped the environment the Corps would face in 1942. Scattered along the length of the proposed highway, their numbers were few. But the tiny and tenuous bits of civilization they had created were an important part of the environment that awaited the Corps.
The first human inhabitants of the North Country were the people American’s call Indians and Canadian’s call First Nations. They survived for thousands of years in the harsh environment by treading lightly on the land—accepting at the very core of their culture and way of life the absolute dominion of nature. For the Indians, man, like every other living organism, is a guest in the North Country, not a conqueror.
The first white men to come to the North Country were attracted by the exquisite pelts of the native animals. Russian traders made their way from Western Siberia across the Bering Sea to Sitka, Alaska and points south along the Alaska Panhandle to the periphery of British Columbia.
The North West Company sent traders into Yukon Territory. They established trading posts through British Columbia and on into Yukon Territory.
The trading posts and the traders offered opportunity to the First Nations. The implements and tools—everything from pots and pans to rifles – that their furs could purchase at the trading posts became part of their life and culture and changed both in the process.
If the trails between the posts had evolved from those established by their native forbearers’ migratory patterns, those trails, in turn, tended to change the patterns. Getting to the posts to trade became as important as getting to the right place for hunting and fishing.
All of this evolved long before the US Army even thought about building a road through the region, but when they invaded in 1942 they would follow the path handed down through history by the region’s people.
Fascinating: the last Frontier! Too cold for a Mississippi Man. 😢
Sadly there were Mississippi men there.