STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

Send Food or Send Coffins

Send food or send coffins. Regimental Supply received that message from Company F’s commander at the beginning of January. A joke?

Probably.

But the 97^th Engineers had endured a truly horrific winter and January threatened to take horrific to a whole new level.

In November, thinking they had a brand-new land route to Alaska, Headquarters intended to use it. Commanding General O’Connor ordered the 97th to scatter all along the Highway through Alaska to keep it open and passable for the Fairbanks Freight.

Colonel Robinson dutifully distributed his soldiers along the road from the White River north to Big Delta. But the soldiers on the ground knew the highway from Whitehorse north to Big Delta wouldn’t support the Fairbanks Freight this winter. Snow plugged the road. Ice mushroomed across it. Crude, hastily built bridges collapsed. At the Robertson River, between Tok and Big Delta ice formed seven feet above a bridge already nineteen feet above the streambed.

Worse, the soldiers of the 97^th had nowhere to live. Civilian contractors had started building barracks at a few locations, but they departed for the warmth of home in November.

Company A settled at Beaver Creek in November, lived in tents while they built log cabins from scratch. The men labored through November and December during each day’s five or six hours of daylight. When the temperature got colder than forty below, they stopped, “and there were a number of those days.” While they labored, they lived in tents. The cooks prepared meals in a sled mounted cook shed—when regimental supply could send food.

At Northway Company F also started from scratch. By November 13 they had two small buildings and a root cellar.

And the 97^th struggled to get supplies. Knowing that Thompson Pass would soon close for the winter, soldiers and civilians had raced to get as much material as possible out from Valdez. In November the pass closed. If something they needed hadn’t made it to Slana by then, it wouldn’t come out from Valdez until spring.

On December 12 Captain Walter Parsons, Company F commander, messaged headquarters, “We have only three days rations… How about sending us something to eat…” On December 15 he followed up, “We will be out of rations tomorrow.” On December 30^th he messaged, “We had chili con carne for Christmas, how was yours?

And finally—send food or send coffins.

Two Bulldozers

The Alaska Highway was really completed at this bridge over the White River

Two bulldozers parked nose to nose. Two operators reached across between them to shake hands. Their picture went out on the news wires, and the army’s publicity machine launched.

Link to another story “The Press and Beaver Creek”

Two bulldozers and the photo be damned, a significant piece of the road still did not exist. The increasingly miserable soldiers of the 18^th and the 97^th struggled to finish it while staff officers at desks next to roaring stoves in Whitehorse busily planned a grand opening ceremony.

Fred Rust of the 18^th remembered those last weeks on the road for every soldier in both regiments.

The increasing bitterness of the weather was effecting us more every hour… Swift-moving Yukon streams resisted freezing and the undersides of trucks that crossed them soon became ice coated… ice would lock the wheels of a truck or car with wet brakes that stood still for a few seconds (not minutes, but seconds), and any attempt to move forward would snap an axle.” Sometimes the… brakes could be smashed free with a sledge, sometimes gallon cans of burning gas or diesel had to be set under them.

Gravel froze in solid masses in the beds of trucks and men were stationed at the end of the haul to beat it out with picks and sledgehammers…

Vehicles frequently sputtered and stopped dead on the road when water froze in the gas lines. The copper lines had to be disconnected and blown out by mouth… A mouthful of sub-zero gasoline is not exactly tasty…

Trucks used to snake logs through the woods when cats were not available emerged without bumpers, fenders, mufflers, or running boards.

Trucks with bent frames and beds and distorted springs moved crabwise up the road. Some trucks broke in half, were left beside the road as derelicts.

Men suffered but held up better than equipment…

The soldiers had barely made it to the White River when the staff officers had their opening ceremony at Soldiers Summit on November 20. The dignitaries heard speeches, awarded awards, listened to a band playing “God Save the King” and “The Star Spangled Banner”.

In September two young soldiers had piloted a Dodge half-ton weapons carrier from Dawson Creek to Whitehorse—the first vehicle to make the trip. Now their Dodge led a convoy of trucks past Soldiers Summit, headed for Big Delta and Fairbanks. Their convoy didn’t include two bulldozers, but it probably should have.

First truck from Dawson City to Fairbanks

By the time the convoy reached the mess beyond the Donjek River, the dignitaries were enjoying a feast of moose steak.

The dignitaries went home, and the soldiers of the 18^th moved to winter quarters in Whitehorse.

Soldier’s Summit is part of a park today

The soldiers of the 97^th, though, scattered through frigid Alaska tasked to keep the road passable through the winter. A few of them found uninsulated, partially finished barracks, but most of them headed into an Alaska winter in tents.

The Press and Beaver Creek

The press, in the person of Harold W. Richardson of the Engineering News-Record, came to the Alaska/Canada border in the nick of time. American and Canadian newspapers had kept their readers focused on the last fifty miles of the Alaska Highway. That meant the Army’s publicity machine focused on the last fifty miles. And that made it imperative that Commander Paules find a way to close the gap, Richardson arrived just before that happened.

Paules cheated, of course.

The fifty miles ran over permafrost? No matter. With coming winter and cold weather it would remain frozen solid until spring. When it melted, somebody else could deal with it.

Link to another story “Two Bulldozers in the Same Place’

And Commander Paules dispatched no less than 12 bulldozers from the 18^th across the White River north into that fifty-mile stretch. Just knock the trees out of the way, he ordered, plow north and get a bulldozer in contact with the 97^th.

On October 25 Private Alfred Jalufka of the 18^th piloted a D-8 north through the wood’s near Beaver Creek, thirty two miles south of the international border. Private Refines Sims of the 97^th piloted one just like it going south. There in the woods they met. That should satisfy the press.

To the soldiers on the ground, of course, the event meant nothing. They knew what the press didn’t. They hadn’t completed the Alaska Highway. Two dozers had simply found a way to meet in the woods. The 12 dozers from the 18^th would head back south to help complete the road to the White River from the south. The 97^th would continue building to the White River from the north. In a few weeks the two regiments would meet and complete the Alaska Highway, not at Beaver Creek but at the White River.

. Captain Parsons wrote to his wife, Abbie on October 26. “A Mr. Richardson editor for Engineering News-Record was by here yesterday. I took him up the road to meet the 18th. He came back and stayed in my camp all night and I took him to HQ [Headquarters] in the a.m.”

After Parsons “dropped him [Richardson] at [97th] Headquarters the next morning” Richardson, who never went near Beaver Creek, posed Jalufka and Sims and their dozers, had them reach across to shake hands, and took the photo that endures as an icon in Alaska Highway history. And he filed the story his editor and the Army brass wanted.

In a murky arctic snowstorm at Beaver Creek… in the wilds of

the Yukon, the climax of building the Alcan Highway was reached at

four p.m. Sunday Oct. 25, when the advance tractor crews from east

and west came together, closing the last gap in the trail route.

After seeing trees fall away from him in weeks of swamping

out the advance cut, Corporal Refines Sims, Jr., negro, ‘catskinner’

of the crew working down from Alaska, frantically, retreated with his

diesel bulldozer as trees ahead started falling his way, not realizing

the meeting was imminent. In a few moments, the lead bulldozer of

the Yukon crew burst through the last patch of timber and brush,

piloted by Private Alfred Jalufka.

Beaver Creek Today

Kate Rockwell–Klondike Kate

Kate Rockwell found a special way to make a fortune in the Klondike. A gorgeous, red-haired chorus girl from New York, Kate heard about the Klondike in 1899, three years after the famous gold strike. She headed north, determined to become the “Belle of the Yukon”.

Link to another story “The Bride of the Klondike”

In Dawson she joined the Savoy Theatrical Company then a local promoter offered her a much more lucrative job as a dancer at the Palace Grande Theatre and at the Savory Saloon. She danced while newly rich miners tossed gold nuggets at her feet. She took a cut from every drink she sold and she averaged $750 a night.

The bartender at the Savory captivated her. A handsome Greek, Alexander Pantages, “…had the only clean-shaven face in the whole place.”

Kate loaned Pantages the money to open the Orpheum theater, and they brought vaudeville acts to Dawson. The house sold out regularly and the Orpheum made money. Pantages opened more theaters.

When the gold boom went bust, the couple pulled up stakes and took their money down to Seattle. They continued to open vaudeville theaters there and even invested in “flickers”, the new hand cranked movies.

One of the theaters hat made Pantage rich.

In 1928, Pantages traded Kate in on a younger model—a violinist in one of Kate’s shows. After a legal and public relations battle of epic proportions, Pantages walked away with most of their money, and Kate went back to the Vaudeville Circuit.

Pantages build an empire, made himself extraordinarily rich. But he had a problem with a distinctly modern ring to it. A court convicted him in 1929 of raping a 17 year old dancer and sentenced him to 50 years in prison.

Tired at last of touring, Kate retired from the stage and bought a homestead near Bend, Oregon. A local celebrity with a slightly risqué reputation Kate spent the rest of her life there.

The Royal Order?

The Pressure Ratcheted Up a Notch

The pressure on the 97^th and the 18^th Engineers, working toward each other at the northern end of the Alaska Highway, ratcheted up on September 24. On that day, down in British Columbia, the 35^th and the 340^th Engineers met at Contact Creek and completed the Alaska Highway from Dawson Creek to Whitehorse.

LInk to another story “Climax at Contact Creek”

“Many miles of filling and grading in both directions from Contact Creek remained to be done, but the Army knew a good public relations opportunity when it saw one. On September 22, two young soldiers… loaded… a Dodge half-ton weapons carrier and left Dawson Creek with orders to get through to Whitehorse.” (Heath Twichell, Northwest Epic). It took Corporal Ottawa Gronke and Private Robert Bowe five days to cover the grueling thousand miles.

On September 27, photographers captured two grinning soldiers chatting with a Mountie in front of a dusty weapons carrier that bore a freshly painted sign, “First Truck, Dawson Creek to Whitehorse.”

The Army, and the Alaska Highway Project had caught the attention of the press. Correspondents descended on Northern Yukon Territory, observing and reporting the effort to “close the last gap in the Alcan Highway, a final effort to finish a race now watched by millions.”

Squarely in the hot seat, Colonel Earl G. Paules, commander of the northern sector needed his two regiments to meet—soon. The 97^th had reached the international border. With luck the 18^th could get graveled highway as far as the White River. But the fifty-five miles between the White and the border would run over a vast lake of permafrost.

Paules had one advantage—in October temperatures had dropped and frozen the permafrost to a solid base. Across that last fifty-five miles he would ignore the permafrost. He would build the highway on the temporarily solid base of ice. The press wouldn’t know the difference and when the permafrost melted in spring civilian contractors could deal with it.

A History of Northway

Problem with No Solution

Put gravel on the thin vegetation over the ice and pray

Problem with no solution? When the soldiers of the 18^thfound themselves trying to build road over permafrost–a lake of ice covered by a thin layer of decayed vegation—it looked like they had encountered one. But on the Alaska Highway Project in 1942 the Corps of Engineers could not allow a problem with no solution.

In August the soldiers of the 18^th figured out that, first and foremost, they could not disturb the thin layer of insulating vegetation. Since bulldozers disturbed it simply by driving over it, they resorted to clearing with hand tools. Their progress slowed to a crawl and the lead company didn’t cross the Donjek River until August 31.

Link to “Kitchen Police Discovered the Problem First”

A floating pontoon bridge got the soldiers across the river and most of the regiment floundered energetically toward the next river—the White. Working with hand tools they averaged less than a mile a day. With the undisturbed vegetation still insulating, the ice remained solid, and when the soldiers of Company E came behind spreading gravel, the road qualified as finished by Alaska Highway standards.

But the dump trucks of Company E had to bring the gravel across the Donjek River and turbulence in its main channel repeatedly took the pontoon bridge out of commission. One Company, a sixth of the regiment’s manpower, had to leave the problem with no solution and spend the whole month of September building a more permanent bridge.

In the race to be first at the international border, the white soldiers of the 18^th fell further behind the black soldiers of the 97th with every passing day through September and into October. And on October 12 the soldiers of the 97^th crossed the border. The 97th had won the race.

They paused briefly to celebrate their triumph. The soldiers of the 18th, still down in Yukon, grumbled, muttered about whose section of road had been tougher. But grumbling did not change the simple fact—the black soldiers had got there first.

In his book Northwest Epic, Heath Twichell summed it up this way. The white 18^th Engineers’ “…record-setting pace over the 150 miles from Whitehorse to Kluane Lake during June and early July had established them as the highway’s undisputed road-building champs.” But now “…the highway’s mileage champs had been beaten in a fair race by the ‘practically useless’ [quoting Commanding General Hoge] black soldiers of the 97th Engineers.”

The Richest Woman in the Klondike

The Dawson Belinda Conquered at its peak

The Richest woman in the Klondike? Magazine and newspaper writers created the legend of Belinda Mulrooney because they loved to write about her. Belinda explained that nothing much happened in Dawson to write about and they needed copy.

Link to another story “The Bride of the Klondike”

When Belinda, as a child, immigrated from Ireland. She brought with her intelligence, imagination, and a thoroughly entrepreneurial attitude. Barely an adult in 1893 she opened a sandwich stand at the Columbia Exposition in Chicago, and when the Exposition ended she took her profits to San Francisco and opened an ice cream parlor.

The ice cream parlor burned down, and Belinda found herself a job as a stewardess on a ship that hauled passengers between California and Alaska. Belinda followed news of a gold strike to Juneau in 1896. Worked in a clothing store there, still looking for the opportunity she found on the Klondike.

Belinda brought supplies of silk underwear, bolts of cotton cloth and hot water bottles up to Skagway, hauled them over the Chilkoot Pass and floated them down the Yukon to Dawson. She sold her stock and used the profit to open a roadhouse, the Grand Forks Hotel and Restaurant. In addition to normal profits she ran sweepings from her floors through a sluice and made as much as $100 a day from gold dust that fell from miners’ clothes.

Belinda sold the Grand Forks and built the luxurious Fair View Hotel in Dawson, but then, at the turn of the century, the richest woman on the Klondike caught the attention of a self-styled French aristocrat. The “Count” may have been an aristocrat… Or he may have been a barber from Montreal.

Either way, they married in 1900; separated in 1903. In 1904 when French authorities arrested the “Count” for fraud and embezzlement. Belinda, no longer the richest woman on the Klondike, divorced him.

Down but not out, Belinda moved to Fairbanks and opened the Dome City Bank. And she had not lost her touch. She made another fortune.

Belinda ultimately moved back to Washington, and she died in Seattle, aged 95, in 1967.

KP’s (Kitchen Police) Discovered the Problem First

Nobody took pictures of the humble KP’s. But they took photos of the trucks.

KP’s, soldiers on what the army called Kitchen police duty, discovered the catastrophe looming ahead of the 18^th Engineers first. KP’s had to dig garbage pits, and, as the regiment moved north past the Big Duke River and on toward the Donjek River, they found themselves digging in a vastly different kind of ground. They would dig through a few inches of soil and hit pure, solid ice.

To the north of the 18^th, the officers and men of the 97th Engineers worked south through Alaska in September, expecting to meet the soldiers of the 18^th and complete the Alaska Highway at the international border. They hoped to be out of Alaska for Christmas. But the Kitchen police discovery down in Yukon changed everything.

A link to another story “Path to the Border”

The undisputed mileage champions of the seven regiments on the Alaska Highway project, the 18^th Engineers worked north through Yukon toward the border in September. They crossed the Big Duke River and built on toward the Donjek River, and the character of the woods around them changed. Fred Rust of the 18^th said it looked like a “burnt over swamp.”

The woods hadn’t been burnt over. They looked stunted and scraggly because they grew out of permafrost. Their roots encountered the same problem as the KP’s. The had a few inches of rotted vegetation and then solid ice. In effect they grew from a vast underground lake, solid, looking like normal dirt, only because it remained frozen solid.

All the way up from Whitehorse, the soldiers of Company A had led the 18^th, clearing a path. The other companies followed to turn the path into a road. The permafrost rendered Company A’s path useless. Clearing a path exposed the ice to sunlight and it promptly melted.

Fred Rust remembered, “Trucks simply took off through the woods on either side of Company A’s useless path… The ground was so soft that one truck could not follow in another’s tracks without bogging down. Sometimes you would see a D-8 hauling a “train” of three or four trucks, dragging them through the gumbo.

In time the soldiers of the 18^th devised a permafrost strategy. But the new strategy slowed their progress to a crawl.

The men of the 97th had expected to complete their road when they met the men of the 18th at the international border. As permafrost slowed the 18th, that expectation went away. On September 28 Captain Parsons wrote to his wife Abbie, “We should meet the 18th in about two weeks. Looks like we’ll beat them to the border and in their own end of the field.”

What’s happening to permafrost today

Completely Crazy

This truck is a bit newer, but negotiating the snowy highway doesn’t change

Completely crazy, Keith Ingram called the “masters of the air” from my story two days ago. And then he moved on to another group of completely crazy guys, a group he clearly belonged to, truckers on the Alaska Highway.

A link to another story “Albert Herda’s Idea”

“In the ‘60’s on the highway,” he reported, “you needed about 5 gallons of kerosene to 90 gallons of diesel just so it didn’t gel off and kill the engine and sometimes it did anyway.”

Keith carried a 30 pound propane tank with a torch on about 45’ of hose. “I would stovepipe the transmissions and rear ends if I was stopped for more than about 4 hours.” When it got “really cold the engine wouldn’t even keep the oil from thickening so that your 10 weight oil became about 50.

And tires. “You started rolling gently until your tires warmed up cause a hard bump on frozen tires could break the bead.”

Keith closed with, “Fun times not…” I translated, “completely crazy.”

“Highway truckers are a special breed”, I responded, and Keith came back with this. “It’s a much different job now. Easier in a lot of ways, but not nearly as much fun.” He explained. “In those days we were kind of like a big bunch of brothers who drank with, fought with and helped each other and everybody else that needed it.”

I responded this time by sharing that I had wanted very much to post a story about Alaska Highway truckers today and speculated that I might need to take it back a few years.

“There were,” Keith responded, “some great characters and stories. And he proceeded to share one.

“Rusty Manuel trucked and drove up there starting in the ‘50’s. He drove a bus for Coachways for a while. The southern turn around was in Dawson Creek and the bus terminal was just a short walk to the Alaskan Hotel.”

On one trip, “Rusty had some buddies in Dawson so they had a few drinks: about a hundred. Closing time in the bars was supposed to be 11:00 or 12:00 pm but nobody much cared so these valiant dudes kept drinking until about 4:00 am.”

Rusty’s bus was scheduled out of Dawson Creek at 8:30 AM. “Rusty’s friends helped him to his vehicle.” Then they “laid him out at the back… where the seat ran all the way across.” Not easily done “because Rusty was 6’ tall and weighed over 300 pounds.

Rusty slept through the morning and into the afternoon. “When he woke up… the bus was rolling down the highway, passengers and all.” Back in Dawson Creek one of the guys had “just organized the baggage and started driving. He had dropped passengers at Wonowon and was right on schedule.”

Keith concluded, “Just another day on the highway.”

Explore North on Bus Transport on the Highway

True Masters of the Air

One of the very early planes in the far north

True masters of the air, bush pilots, flew in the subarctic north, and to do that they needed unique skills.

Link to another story “Gillam Weather and a Legendary Bush Pilot”

First, bush pilots needed to be true masters of the ground as well as the air. Suffering mechanical problems, needing to ground his plane, a bush pilot had few options. Usually he found a remote lake. And he rarely enjoyed the luxury of communicating with anyone to share his problem or ask for help.

What a bush pilot’s world looked like when all was good

Once he got the plane on the ground—or on the water—he had to repair it by himself with whatever tools happened to be on hand. Bush pilots needed to be true masters of aircraft mechanics. If he couldn’t repair the plane, he had to navigate out of the rugged wilderness on the ground and survive the experience.

A bush pilot’s trials didn’t end with having to be his own mechanic and having to operate on his own in the wilderness.

This fur trader used the profits from his business to finance his air service

On the ground gigantic mosquitoes and black flies offered a special north country torment. In winter, of course, they went away. But then he had to deal with the bitter cold. An airplane engine, running, keeps its oil warm and fluid. Shut it down in seriously frigid weather and the engine oil congeals to unusable sludge.

The pilot could quickly drain the oil before it congealed. But then, before he could restart and fly away, he had to somehow warm the oil and return it to the engine.

Creative bush pilots devised alternatives to draining the oil; they used devices like a plumber’s fire pot—a pressurized gasoline stove—to keep the oil liquid in the engine. The fiery explosions caused by this practice could be dramatic.

Bush Pilots are Still Flying