STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

Enlisted Soldiers like Chester

Chester informed us that the soldiers got stinky

Enlisted soldiers like Chester fought the mud, mountains, cold and mosquitoes; did the actual work of building the Alaska Highway in 1942. The stories that pour from Chester Russell’s memory tell us what it felt like to actually do the epic job.

The Most Colorful Soldier

Speaking of Chester Russel

In the last episode, Chester remembered sleeping in a building at the Liard River camp—the only time that happened during his entire time in Canada. Interviewer Brown responded, “So you were on a year-long… camping trip.”

Chester, “That’s right. (laughs)… Do you ever imagine how stinky them dam sleeping bags was. We didn’t have no laundry up there.” (laughs)

I told you Chester’s stories offered a unique perspective.

Each sleeping bag had two liners. They would sleep in one for awhile then pull it out and sleep in the other. After a few more nights they would turn the first one inside out and sleep in it. You get the idea.

Catskinner Russell remembered the D8 Caterpillar tractor with genuine affection. “…you got up there between the radiator and the dozer blade and you crank [a] starter engine to start the diesel.”

The only problem they dealt with from the eternally reliable “Cats” came from the tracks and rollers. As they plowed through the muddy woods “mud, sticks and stumps and stuff” jammed the tracks. A crew worked alongside the dozers, digging it all out.

Chester came from rodeo, became a D8 operator by accident, and he readily confessed that he and other operators, learning on the job, sorely abused the magnificent machines.

They went through steel cables at an alarming rate. And while they knew to change the oil, they didn’t know other parts needed service too. “…there was some plates up in there that got all froze up and the tractors was burning up oil. A soldier named King turned a blow torch on the mess, “caught the tractor on fire and parts started falling out off it.”

They doused the fire, replaced the parts that fell out; figured out that they needed to remove, clean and replace those parts too.

An antique D8

Speaking of Chester Russel

The road north to the Liard River in early spring

Speaking of Chester Russel a few episodes back, I told you about his unique background. Then I told you how he stumbled into “Catskinning” (operating a bulldozer) by accident.

Private Russel at Ft. Nelson

In his interview with Earl Brown and Hank Bridgeman Chester remembered details that no book of Alaska Highway history includes. And speaking of Chester’s experience paints a picture of life on the project.

In early spring, on the way to Fort Simpson, Chester and his friend Cecil Elliston encountered a trapper going the other way, heading for Dawson Creek. Learning that the trapper planned to return in a couple of months, Cecil gave him $20 and asked him to bring back a case of whiskey.

The trapper returned with the whiskey as promised, but Cecil had landed in the makeshift Army hospital at Ft. Nelson. Chester and his friends drank the whiskey without him.

Years later, when Chester organized a reunion of friends from the Highway, he all but begged Cecil to attend, planning all those years later to pay back his $20.

Cecil, still angry, refused to come.

On another occasion, not much after the Fort Simpson trip and long before the trapper arrived with Cecil’s whiskey, a ten-wheeler Studebaker truck full of fuel wound up in Ft. Nelson.

Soldiers working up near the Liard River, desperately needed fuel, and an officer commandeered Chester and a Sgt. named Grocke to drive the Studebaker truck up to them. They would drive 180 miles over the very muddy rough draft of a road unspooling behind the lead companies, and Chester hadn’t driven a truck like that before, but what the hell, Grocke probably had.

A couple of hours up the road, Chester offered Grocke a chance to drive. But Grocke, from New York City, had never driven a vehicle in his life, not even a car.

Flabbergasted, Chester negotiated the entire distance to the Liard, slipping and sliding, at ten miles an hour.

The good news? When they finally arrived at the Liard River camp, they put Chester and Gronke’s sleeping bags in a Quonset hut. That night Chester slept in a building—the only time that happened during his entire time in Canada.

Trip Adviser on the Liard River Region Today

Ursaside–I Made Up the Word

Ursaside occurs when someone commits homicide and the victim is a bear. Researcher/Team Leader Chris turned up three photos that presented a murder mystery of sorts.

And the mystery proved a tough nut to crack.

Look at the photo above. Clearly ursaside most foul. Lt. Charles Parker, far from looking guilty, appears quite proud to have perpetrated the crime; probably mailed this photo home to his family.

But wait…

Pretty clearly Lt. Tim Timberlake did the foul deed. And he looks as proud as Lt. Parker. His family probably received this photo.

Lt. Tim

But no…

Staff Sergeant Jefferson, equally proud, killed the bear. His family got a photo too.

Ok. Here’s the mystery.

Somewhere in Yukon, three bears have come to an untimely end at the hands of intrepid soldier/hunters. In one photo, Lt. Parker poses proudly next to his trophy. In another, Lt. Timberlake stands next to his. And in a third, Sgt Jefferson stands next to his.

Problem.

If you look closely, you’ll see that all three photos feature the same scrawny bear.

Clearly there has been a bear homicide, but equally clearly there are too many proud suspects.

The archives offered no answers and the mystery remained a mystery for a very long time. But then we connected with Lt. Parker’s son; travelled to meet him personally so we could compare notes on highway history.

Inevitably the bear murder mystery came up.

It turns out that Lt. Parker took the bear’s skin home. Over the years his sons used it periodically to terrify their sisters.

We consider the presence of the bearskin in the post-highway home of Lt. Parker convincing evidence that Lt. Parker did for the bear.

Mystery solved.

Guided Bear Hunting in Yukon Today

Hell Bent

Hell bent for their portion of the Alaska Highway, the lead company of Colonel Paules’ 18^th Engineers left the opulent SS Aleutian; moved off the dock directly to the depot of the White Pass and Yukon Railroad.

The 18th Comes to Skagway

They climbed into the passenger cars of the narrow gauge train, settled themselves on wooden benches, and felt the jerk of the couplings as they chugged up the middle of main street, headed for the steepest climb of any railroad on the planet.

Heads bobbing rhythmically, they didn’t feel hell bent, as the train rolled over the narrow three foot track up and over the White Pass, some men closed their eyes and tried to sleep. Tired or not, though, most of them had to have noticed the spectacular scenery along the steep climb out of Alaska into Yukon Territory.

With rotary plows clearing deep snow from the tracks ahead, the forward engine climbed 3,000 feet in the twenty miles to the Canadian Border. From the border they rumbled and rocked between high snow drifts for another ninety miles to the red painted depot in Whitehorse. Climbing stiffly off the train, into a frigid Yukon afternoon, they marched down Main Street to their bivouac at the North Star Athletic Association Hall.

The fun was just beginning for the men of Company A. Early morning on April 4th found them climbing the steep bluff to the plateau overlooking Whitehorse and the Yukon River—a hike one of them later recalled as “the toughest ten minutes of the entire movement”. At their new home, about a mile beyond the airport, they set about pitching tents in the wind and fixing pegs in frozen ground. Yukon Territory helpfully produced a blinding snowstorm.

The rest of the companies of the 18^th followed close behind Company A.

The 18th Comes to Skagway

In April 1942 the Japanese marauded through the Pacific, America needed its land route through Canada to Alaska. The Corps of Engineers intended to build it and General Hoge had taken dead aim on all three points of entry—Dawson Creek, BC; Valdez, AK; and Skagway, AK. The 18th Combat Engineering Regiment would swarm into–and through–Skagway, Alaska.

Colonel Paules would take his Regiment into Yukon—in a hurry, of course. On March 28^th he sent his advance Company A north aboard the SS Aleutian.

For once, ‘reality on the ground’ confronted the soldiers with a pleasant surprise. The Corps dealt with a severe shortage of seagoing vessels by grabbing whatever they could find; and, for Company A, they grabbed the SS Aleutian, a luxury liner.

A luxury liner is not what they expeccted

On April Fool’s day, Company A of the 18^th enjoyed sumptuous meals served on fine china placed on tables draped with white linen. Some of them enjoyed beer or whiskey served on a polished bar. Impressed by their accommodations, the troops were less impressed, as their ship progressed from port to port, by the tiny cities of Alaska. One of their number called Ketchikan “a ghost town”, Juneau “a ghost city” and Skagway “just a ghost.”

On April 2, snow covered mountains towered over Skagway and cold winds funneled through the narrow valley of the Skagway River. The soldiers of Company A billeted overnight in City Hall, wrapped in sleeping bags; and, early the next morning, breath steaming into the frigid air and boots stomping the snow for warmth, they walked to the train depot and boarded the WP&YT railroad for Whitehorse.

Broadway St. Skagway 1942
Signal Corps Photo

The luxurious SS Aleutian must have seemed very far away as they took their place in the passenger cars of the WP&YT. To pack in more troops, the railroad had replaced normal seating with wooden benches.

Pvt Russel and His Fellow Soldiers Didn’t Come Alone in March

The 648th Topo negotiated the same cold as the 35th Engineers — The Winter March of the 648th Topo Signal Corps Photo

Pvt Russel and the other soldiers of the 35^th didn’t come alone to the Southern Sector in early March.

Private Russel at Ft. Nelson

On March 8, Captain Alfred M. Eschbach’s Company A of the 648th Topographic Engineers fell out into an overcast spring morning at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana—to be issued arctic uniforms. That night Eschbach’s surveyors and routing specialists rocked over the rails in Pullman berths on their way to Canada. And five days out from that spring morning in southern Louisiana, the five officers and 156 men of Company A squinted into an arctic wind, staring at grimly exhausted soldiers loading supplies and equipment. The “topog engineers” felt like they had arrived at the very last fringe of civilization.

Detached to guard equipment at the railhead, Harry Spiegel and four others, of the 648^th caught a break that first night in Dawson Creek. Making their way to one of the village’s two cafes, they feasted on porterhouse steaks that draped over the edges of the plate. Harry said, “It melted in his mouth”, but the memory of that taste would have to last a long time.

Cpt. Eschbach and the remaining men didn’t wait. They loaded trucks and headed across the river to Fort St. John. Forty-six miles later, nearly frozen, the “topog” engineers labored to set up camp. Light snow fell, the temperature was 30 below, wind blew briskly and the “ground was frozen as hard as flint”.

When they found it impossible to set tent pegs, they responded like true engineers—driving a steel pike to make a hole, they placed their pegs in the holes and filled them with water that quickly froze the pegs in place. With eight tents in place, they all piled in. “Got up the [next] morning” Eschbach said, “with ice all over my sleeping bag.” (66)

“More than anything, I remember the cold,” said John Fisher of the 648th, “cold, such as I never thought existed even after winters in the Texas Panhandle and Colorado . . . Eyelashes would freeze in the cold . . . I remember lying there and actually feeling the cold come down on me.”

Half of the surveyors would work out of Fort St. John, they rented the dance hall which had a large hardwood floor about the size of a tennis court, a perfect canvas for a map grid. Cpt. Eschbach piled into trucks with the rest of his men, headed for Ft. Nelson. The travelers wrapped themselves in sleeping bags and comforters, but the temperature hovered around 40 below zero and a somber and frozen bunch of surveyors crawled out of the trucks 36 hours later at Fort Nelson. One surveyor, toes frozen, fell out for medical care. The others got themselves warmed and fed then set up camp on the bluffs north of the Muskwa River.

Private Russel at Ft. Nelson

Pvt Russel wound up a catskinner–Alaska HIghway Style

Private Russel and his fellows at Ft. Nelson not only struggled to find food to eat, they also struggled to fix the trucks and tractors that their winter road trip up from Fort St. John had all but destroyed.

Ft. Nelson, Chester Russell’s Passage

The army rushed mechanics from Union Tractor Company in from Edmonton by air to help get the heavy equipment back in shape. One of their number, Harry Garriott, found himself shocked and “staggered by the immensity and scope of the project”.

Vehicles with flat tires and no spares sat anywhere. Many had broken axles. The mechanics did a quick triage then sacrificed the totally unserviceable vehicles to cannibalize parts for the rest. And the relative warmth of spring that had melted the trail from Fort St. John alternated with brutal cold, forcing them to leave motors running lest the cold thicken the oil and freeze cooling systems. Antifreeze that spring in Fort Nelson was a rare and precious substance.

Private Russel worked on the Highway as a bulldozer operator—a catskinner. The equipment shortage led him to that job by accident.

The Muskwa was the first obstacle out of Ft Nelson

He explained in his interview with Brown and Bridgeman that his commander, an officer named Lueber, asked him to pick three other men and go back to Dawson Creek. The regiment had four D8 Caterpillar Tractors there and he wanted Chester and the men to somehow get them to Ft. Nelson.

“I was not no catskinner coming… up here… I’d never seen no D8. I was a cowboy.” He explained his love for rodeo. “I was pretty proud of myself… But I was no good, don’t misunderstand me. I was just an apprentice.”

Chester told them about his friend, Slim Pickens, “who was actually Lou Slinley.” Lou had “done all right, but he still said he’d rather be home and milking cows.

The D8’s got to Ft. Nelson, and Chester Russel had turned into a catskinner.

Muskwa River Today

Obsession Genesis, Next Step

Sent: Tuesday, July 16, 2013 3:51 PM

Subject: Next Edition

So last night I wrote out a new edition and sent it… And it promptly disappeared into cyberspace. As soon as that occurred, the message turned into the most profound and eloquent piece of writing I’ve ever done–or ever read, for that matter.

Sorry you missed it.

My Introduction to the North Country–Part 1

The atmosphere of the highway is quite striking. There are tourists here in plenty, of course. We’re all dragging campers and stopping to photograph everything in sight.

But this road is about work at least as much as tourism. The highway is lined with dehydration stations and compressor stations and fracking operations. Heavy trucks, often carrying even heavier equipment, roar by constantly in both directions.

At every campground there is a ‘permanent’ section for workers–campers surrounded by muddy pickups and resounding in the evening to the sound of country western music. And at intervals we’ve passed ‘dormitory’ camps that appear to be totally dedicated to the men and women who come for the summer construction season.

The breathtakingly beautiful Alkan Highway also has an aura of sweat and diesel fumes.

When I found myself thinking about my father in law–dead these twelve years now–most of the day yesterday, the banks of the Sikanni Chief River seemed a reasonable place to think thoughts like that. The quiet riverbank surrounded by partially wooded cliffs, birds soaring high overhead… You all know the routine.

Most of you didn’t know Tim, but I’m sure those of you who did would agree that an appropriate brief description would be something like “sweet old man”. What better place to remember a sweet old man than the bank of the Sikanni Chief.

But that wasn’t what had me thinking about him. None of that had any relevance at all.

It was the mud and the diesel fumes. The atmosphere on the highway brought those pictures Chris is posting to life. This has always been a place people come to wrestle with nature. And the building of the Pioneer Road was the ultimate bout.

Tim came here as a young man to sweat and freeze and muscle equipment through the mud and the muskeg. Then he left and never returned. He had a wife and kids and a career. And then he was a sweet old man.

See. You thought I’d changed the subject, didn’t you.

But life is, ultimately, about work. It’s typically raw and physical when we’re young and more and more removed from that as we age. But work is still the justification for getting up in the morning.

The tricky part is how we define ‘work’. It’s all too easy to confuse it with ‘job’ or ‘career’. Do that and when you leave job and career behind? Well, hell. Let’s see how that works out for you.

If any of you are expecting a definition here, then you don’t know me very well. Sorry.

I’ll be working on that and keeping you posted.

Another bloggers take on Sikanni Chief

Ft. Nelson, Chester Russell’s Passage

Ft. Nelson, General Hoge’s goal for Chester’s 35^th lay another 230 miles north of Fort St. John on a trail resting on ice—ice rapidly turning to water.

The 35^th moved over the trail in an endless stream of men, trucks, dozers and other equipment—for three weeks in March while the trail behind them effectively disappeared.

The Most Colorful Soldier

Out at the head of the line, Lt. Miletich’s exhausted, hungry and, above all, cold advance party stumbled into Fort Nelson on the afternoon of March 20^th—the first to arrive.

The rest of the regiment followed and found the experience excruciating. Upon arrival at their destination, soldiers who had made the trip in the back of cargo trucks could hardly climb out or walk. Finally, in a tent and near a fire, their “blood warmed and thinned, they would become dizzy and fell asleep.”

The soldiers of the 35^th and all the attached units pulled it off. They and their equipment made it to Ft. Nelson before the thaw. But they were far from ready to make a road. As hard as the trip had been on the men, it had been even harder on their equipment.

More important, if they hadn’t brought it with them, they wouldn’t get it any time soon.

In his interview with Earl Brown and Hank Bridgeman, Chester remembered, “After the thaw we was stuck in there…” They had brought food up in single axle trucks and Chester had driven one of them. The regiment built an icehouse and when the trucks arrived they unloaded the frozen food and stored it there. Unfortunately, “As soon as thaw came, all that melted right along with it. All the meat spoilt.”

Pancake flour didn’t spoil, and Chester remembered endless meals of pancakes. They got sugar by “taking the wrappers off of the hard candies and melting them down.”

Looks like a lot but the 35th had over a thousand men.

Mail came by plane, but the planes couldn’t land. They dropped the mail sacks. “They just dumped it out, hit the ground, and some of it we got, some of it we didn’t.

Ft. Nelson today

My Introduction to the North Country

We are three or four days out from home–and about a thousand miles.

My obsession began on the road to the Alaska Highway…

About Us

July 3, 2013

Subject: Dad’s Journey

I feel a bit presumptuous, so bear with me…

Before we left on our journey both Mike and Matt [my sons] had occasion to ask how I felt about leaving work behind and heading off into a new world of travel and adventure. Both seemed a bit skeptical that I would make the transition without, shall we say, a certain amount of angst.

A day later, Mandy [my sister] was far less circumspect–as usual. She reckons that the personality my kids have known for lo these forty odd years (sorry Kirsten [my daughter]) goes way farther back than that. She further reckons that, angst be damned, I’m probably headed for a full-fledged nervous breakdown. Worst of all, she thinks that’s funny!

Sorry, Kids. I didn’t invite her into the family–it just happened.

Mandy opined that, while it was fun to follow our travels on Chris’ web site, it would be equally fun for the five of you to follow my existential adventures in a more personal format. Remember, she thinks this is funny…

So here is my first edition.

On the phone with Chris this morning, Mike asked a couple of times how I was reacting to being without work. (I fear he thinks it’s a bit funny too.) She answered that I was doing fine. And that was true.

But an explanation might be in order…

For a confirmed work addict, keeping the mechanics, the refrigeration and especially the electronics going for Chris’ travelling road show is analogous to methadone for a heroin addict. For the moment, I haven’t stopped working at all–I just have a different, and infinitely more demanding client.

We were tourists too, couldn’t miss Wall Drug

Somewhere deep inside, though, I feel my telos starting to bloom. Last night in a ‘campground’ in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, we met a lady about our age who identified herself as a ‘full timer’. I didn’t know this breed existed, and maybe you don’t either. She was about my age, tiny, painfully skinny, clearly suffering from advanced health issues. But she has been travelling the highways in her enormous freeway yacht of a motor home since her husband died in 2003. She has no home and doesn’t want one.

I wasn’t dumb enough to ask her about driving that behemoth all by herself, towing her smaller car behind. But she answered anyway. She explained that she had to do all the driving because her dog was too short to reach the pedals.

I’m not sure what effect meeting that incredible little woman had on my spiritual state, but I know it was profound. Something along the lines of, “Holy Shit there are some cool people in this world. I wish I was one of them!

Dad/Big Brother

For your bucket list