STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

Gillam Weather and a Legendary Bush Pilot

Gillam weather took its name from pilot Charles “Harold” Gillam. His flights through the foulest weather Alaska could dish out, made him the very first legendary Alaska bush pilot. Old time pilots said that Alaska offered three kinds of weather; clear and unlimited “Pan Am” weather; ordinary weather; and Gillam weather.

Becoming a Bush Pilot

Flying in the Wrangel Mountains meant flying in violent wind on the best days; but, when a storm moved in, it blocked the mountain passes as effectively as a stone wall. A pilot had two choices; land and wait it out or turn back. Gillam found a third choice. He just bored on through.

After a stint as a deep-sea diver in the US Navy, Gillam headed north to Alaska in 1923. In Fairbanks pilots at Weeks Airfield introduced him to airplanes, and he moved, temporarily, back down to San Diego to learn to fly.

In 1930 Gillam started the first air service company in the Wrangell Mountain copper region and the Gillam legend took flight. Gillam flew freight, but he became a legend flying rescue missions.

Gillam’s first major rescue effort was the long search for this plane and its pilot, Merril

He flew Copper Center Trader John McCrary and his perforated ulcer to Doctors at Kennecott and then flew through a blinding snowstorm to Cordova to pick up McCrary’s son in case the father died.

A copper center resident fell down a cellar and punctured his stomach with a nail. Gillam flew him through foul weather to Kennecott.

And when Carl Whitham fell down a mineshaft at Nabesna, Gillam left Cordova in the middle of a snowstorm, picked Whitman up and flew him 250 miles to a hospital in Fairbanks.

Bob Reeve, a legendary bush pilot in his own right, described Gillam’s arrival in Fairbanks. “It was pitch dark and ceiling zero.” Hearing Gillam’s Zenith approach for landing, Reeve noted “that could be only one man in this world—Gillam.”

[Quoted in Alaska’s Skyboys by Katherine Johnson Ringsmuth ]

Bush Pilot Hall of Fame

Work, Damned Hard Work

Work, damned hard work, and the occasional young officer who got in the way. That’s the Alcan project that dominated Chester Russell’s memory. “We was running cats. We was doing our thing, and the other fellows doing the culverts and the bridges, and… We never looked back. We just kept going.”

Young Lieutenants Another Officer Squared Away

Interviewer Brown summed it up. “Pedal to the metal. We’ve got a road to build. Let’s get her done.”

Besides the bulldozers, Chester remembered mostly hand tools. They had the old two-man chain saws, but they didn’t have many and they didn’t work that well.

When a young officer got in the way, the soldiers could deal with that. Chester remembered a story. “I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I’m pretty positive it was.”

Soldiers working on the Liard River Bridge cut trees for pilings from the surrounding woods, and the young officer in charge rushed them out in frigid cold at the crack of dawn, while he sat in camp drinking coffee. They could have waited until later in the day when the weather warmed and easily harvested all the trees they needed.

Disgusted, the soldiers headed out one day and they notched an entire grove of trees. They just took their axes and cut deep notches at the base of the trunks. When the young officer finished his coffee and ambled out to check on their progress, he walked to the middle of the grove. The axemen “all started yelling: ‘Timber!’ (laughs)

Interviewer Brown. “You guys play hard, don’t you?”

Chester laughed again. In truth the men had the junior officers “over the barrel”. It’s hard to punish men already working on what amounted to a cold weather chain gang. “They couldn’t get us in any worse than what we was already in.”

In the end most of the officers turned out to be good, but the soldiers knew how to “course correct” the ones who didn’t measure up.

Old Stihl Chainsaws

Fish Story, Courtesy Chester’s Mom

Fish stories. You might know Chester Russel specialized in those. When Chester’s mom sent him a package, he and his buddies devoured the raisins and pretty much wasted their time with the “38-6 shooter”. But she sent fishing tackle too, and Chester made very good use of that—in British Columbia and in his memories.

Jaundice in Camp—and a Scared Bear Another Chester Memory

Beautiful Smith River offered waterfalls that Chester found spectacular. Chester “…threw that black gnat on the fly” into the swirling water at the base of one. He and two buddies wandered off to take photos of the falls and when they returned Chester found his line thoroughly snagged.

He pulled and tugged while his buddy, Jim Roberts, laughed at him. “Damn fool, you put it in there, you knew you was gonna lose it.” But Chester didn’t lose it. He had hooked a Dolly Varden trout.

“I had that sucker in there and I pull him right up to the bank, and he came off the hook.” He told “Crumpy”, the other buddy on the scene, to jump on it. “And Crumpy jumped, straddled that sucker… We caught a 31 inch Dolly Varden.

Interviewer Brown. “You could have ended up riding that fish home!”

Chester. “If he hadn’t straddled him, we could have gone home with a fish story.”

Sport Fish of British Columbia

Brown asked him how it tasted and Chester allowed that it tasted good, then his memory branched off. “They was all good.” He offered his theory that fresh fish had helped cure the yellow jaundice.

“We was down… getting pretty skinny about that time. We were a sick bunch of guys that day.”

Jaundice in Camp—and a Scared Bear

The Jaundice made some of them extremely sick

Jaundice, or Serum Hepatitis, whatever you called it Chester and his buddies in the 35^th got sick on top of everything else. Interviewer Brown, “Of course, you guys were fighting in the bush, but a whole bunch of you come down with Yellow Jaundice.” Chester, “When we had the yellow jaundice, that was caused from vaccinations…”

The fate of Private Major Banks–Hepatitis in another regiment.

At Fort Ord, the Army had hurriedly vaccinated everybody in the regiment to protect them from Yellow Fever. Somebody must have thought that disease prevalent in British Columbia. Or somebody just blindly followed a procedure. Either way they used contaminated vaccine and in May the soldiers of the 35^th began coming down with serum hepatitis.

As the number of cases mushroomed, the Army hurriedly constructed Ft. St. John hospital from two prefabricated frame buildings and brought a medical platoon from the 58^th medical battalion down from Whitehorse to staff it. Doctors planned to evacuate sick men to the new facility by air. But the Army had far too few airplanes and pilots. After the first 100 evacuees, only the most gravely ill went out to Fort St. John. The rest, as many as 500 men, suffered yellow jaundice, severe weakness and debilitating nausea—in their tents.

“We just had to sweat it out… You was just as sick on the tractors as you was sitting around.”

As often happened, Chester’s memory lurched. “The only thing we did while we was sick, we did chase a bear up the tree, with the rope on him.”

A bear like Chester’s. We don’t have the original

A buddy crawled up into an adjacent tree and snapped a photo, then the bear escaped. It jumped down and took off down through the camp. Scrambled right through one of the tents.

Brown, “…there was two guys in the tent?”

“There was two of them in there laying on the cot.”

More on the hepatitis and the Army in 1942

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Hunger

Hunger permeates Chester Russel’s memory of his first weeks on the Alcan Project. The stuff of legend, his regiment’s race against the spring thaw got them to Ft Nelson in the nick of time—just before the winter trail disappeared from under their rolling dozers and trucks. That meant, as Chester remembered, “no supply line.”

Awards, Celebrations and Giving a Damn–Chester’s Memories

In Ft. Nelson, at the end of the incredible journey, Lt. Col Twitchell, assistant commander of the regiment, wrote home, “Now we are safely encamped on top of a hill…overlooking the [Muskwa] river, in a clearing carved out of the woods… We have 80 tons of fresh meat in an icehouse…a field bakery…powdered milk and eggs…dehydrated potatoes…We are going to live the life of Riley until our supplies run out some time this summer.”

Private Russel’s memory tells us how that senior officer’s expectation worked out. No one thought to put ice in the icehouse and the spring thaw rotted the fresh meat. With no supply line, they couldn’t replace it.

Looking to live off the land, Chester wrote to his mother. “I need my bean shooter, and I want some fishing hooks and some line.”

Mom sent him a package and amazingly it got to him. Mom sent Sun Maid raisins which he and his friends devoured on the spot. More important she sent fishing gear, a “38-6 shooter… and 100 rounds of ammunition.”

Chester confessed that he never shot anything with the “shooter” except a goose, and that by accident.

They got one of the night cooks to cook the goose. The cook put it in the oven, got busy, forgot all about it.

“It was nothing but charcoal.”

Finally, in July, a couple of friends took the shooter up a mountain to the snow line and killed a couple of sheep. “And that was the first fresh meat we’ve had since the meat spoiled.”

Hunting Sheep in BC is very different today

Awards, Celebrations and Giving a Damn

The main project over, they kept working, trying to give a damn

Awards or commendations—interviewer Brown asked Chester whether he and the other soldiers received any. “You gotta be kidding. That war with them Japs over there, and with the Germans coming up.” Nobody paid any attention to roadbuilders in Canada. “We were the peons playing in the mud.”

Bit and Brace Brain Surgery–More from Chester’s Memory

Chester vaguely remembered hearing about a “whoopsidoo” at Soldiers Summit. A few weeks before that event, Chester’s 35^th, working north and the soldiers of the 340^th, working south, met at Contact Creek—completed the road all the way from Dawson Creek to Whitehorse. The interviewers asked about Contact Creek.

“I never saw no bands, or nothing…”

Interviewer Brown asked Chester to describe what happened there. Chester responded, “We met…. That was about the size of it. We were just tickled to death. We were gonna get to go home.”

Wrong.

Big shot officers in Whitehorse, Edmonton and Washington had endless ideas for projects to follow up on the Alaska Highway. Chester and the soldiers of the 35^th, spending the frigid winter in British Columbia and Northwest Territories, doing the actual work and having no idea why they did it, found it more and more difficult to give a damn.

They built a very long winter trail from Dawson Creek north to Fort Simpson then returned to the Liard River Camp. Chester scored a furlough, and he hitched a ride with a civilian trucker to the train station at Dawson Creek.

In bitter cold, the trucker produced a fifth of whiskey and poured it into his gas tank, Chester asked him, “How come you to do that?”

“That’s to keep the water from plugging up the carburetor.”

A couple of weeks later, on the way back north, finding it ever more difficult to “give a damn”, Chester got drunk in Edmonton. He didn’t make it back to the regiment quite as soon as the regiment expected him to. Eventually he made it to Dawson Creek and hitched a ride up to the Liard River Camp, but another big shot with an idea had moved his company on to work on a pipeline road up to Norman Wells, so he kept hitching.

The road to Norman Wells just a few years later

When he finally caught up, someone pointed him at an enclosed “wanagen sled”. “Why don’t you go down there and get one of them bunks and take a nap?”

Sounded like a great idea.

Chester stayed in the wanagen for a week before his company commander spotted him emerging for a call of nature and “things got a little rough.”

More on the Canol Project and the Road to Norman Wells

Bit and Brace Brain Surgery

Not a place where a doctor would choose to do brain surgery

Bit and Brace brain surgery came to Chester Russel’s memory when interviewers Brown and Bridgeman asked him about danger on the Highway. When Pvt. Moore walked too near a working dozer, a falling limb crashed into his head. “So this Dr. Stotts”, Chester remembered, “he finally got up there where we had him on… he was up in the brush…”

Major Problem–Chester Russell

Stotts peeled back Moore’s right eyelid, and “… the thing was… like it was… the man was dead. Then he opened his left eye and it was clear.” Moore, Stotts explained, had a blood clot on the left side of his head.

Dr. Stotts had no choice and a lot of guts. If they didn’t relieve the pressure quickly Moore would die. He called for a brace and bit and there on the ground he “took and… drilled three holes” in Moore’s head in a triangle.

Interviewer Brown, “In the guys skull?”

Chester, “In his skull.”

It worked. The crude holes relieved the pressure. And they moved Moore back down the road to the hospital in Fort St. John. He did well for a time, then, when fluid started collecting in his lungs, Dr. Stotts stepped up again.

An officer suggested that a field air compressor, one of the big ones on wheels, might solve the problem. They wrestled one to the side of Moore’s cot, Stotts rigged it and “it did the job.”

A few days later, Chester even got back to visit Moore, found him sitting up and doing fine.

Then some “big shots” flew in, raising hell and threatening to court martial Dr. Stotts for making the bit and brace operation. Determined to fly Moore back to civilization, they paid no attention to Stotts’ objection that a high-altitude plane flight would kill the man.

Pvt. Moore died “about three hours out of Seattle.”

Major Problem

Major problem number one, confronting Chester Russell and his fellows in the 35^th, as they tried to build road away from Ft. Nelson? Their leaders ordered them to build road but couldn’t tell them where to build it.

Young Lieutenants in Chester’s Memory

General Hoge had tasked the 35^th to build Highway north over the Canadian Rockies. In a desperate hurry, Colonel Ingalls pointed his men in a northwesterly direction and ordered them to start. While they did that, he flew endlessly over the wilderness trying to figure out exactly where they should go.

How did that work out for the enlisted men doing the work on the ground? Once again, an invaluable resource, Chester Russel’s memory, gives us a glimpse.

The catskinners started building. Stopped and withdrew. Started in another direction. Stopped again. Chester remembered, “…we went out in there and turned around and come back, we started over again.” Interviewer Brown, “This isn’t gonna do her. We’ll try it again.”

Chester, “Yep.”

Major problem number 2? No matter which route they followed, they had bodies of water to cross from the git go. And they had to cross them with bulldozers.

Almost immediately out of Ft. Nelson, they confronted the Kledo River. And they had to cross branch after branch of the Liard River System. Chester’s memory went straight to the Liard.

To take the bulldozers across they had six old pontoons with underpowered outboard motors. Initially they put a man on each barge, intending to drive the tractors to him. “…when we put the first tractor on, we had the dozer on it, and we about sunk it.”

They backed onto the shore and removed the blades so the dozers would weigh less. Considered…

In the end, they tied the six barges together, clamped them tight, laid planking to make them, effectively, one big barge. To avoid tipping the awkward vessel, they carefully drove the six dozers on side by side at the same time.

Interviewer Brown summed it up. “You drive the caterpillars over top of the planking and try to get all six of these [old barges] to get you, in unison, from one side of the river to the other side without sinking the show.”

Chester. “That’s right.” And the bound together rafts carried more than the dozers. They carried the catskinners and “…a lot of life jackets and stuff.”

In the end the Kledo acquired a pontoon bridge

Young Lieutenants

For some officers building five miles a day means staying out of the way

Young lieutenants often need, in addition to formal Army training, serious training from their enlisted subordinates. Chester Russell’s memory yielded a story for interviewers Brown and Bridgeman that describes how that training happens.

Enlisted Soldiers like Chester

Earl Brown asked how many miles a day they built; did they have a quota? No quota, but a lot of pressure to crank out miles, pressure that every soldier on the road felt to his core. The exchange sparked Chester’s memory, and he recalled the education of the young lieutenant.

The young officer, new to Company B, made the mistake of getting in the way of a catskinner named Derdorf.

Apparently, the young man thought Catskinner Derdorf needed a lot of detailed management. “…this guy was telling him where to go and how to go and lower blade, raise the blade, and all that monkey business.”

Picture a young lieutenant trying to supervise this

Chester pulled up alongside Derdorf’s dozer. “Derdorf, what’s the matter? …My God, we got these small trees here, we should be going like heck.”

Derdorf shook his head in disgust, “That damned officer up in front of me he won’t get out of our road.”

Chester had a solution. “Why don’t you start on and I’ll go along with you. I’ll shift into higher gear and we’ll run him down the brush.”

They ran him down the brush, a long, long way down the brush. When they finally stopped, they climbed off their dozers to find the young officer just standing there, hands on his knees, panting.

“He’d had it. He couldn’t turn around to tell us to stop because if he did, he’d run into a tree, and if he’d run into tree, he knew we were going to run over him.”

With a straight face, Derdorf told the young officer, “Sir, I think you are off the trail.”

The enlisted men had work to do, officers learned to let them do it

Letters from a real WWII Lieutenant