STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

River Ice–Chester Russel

River ice, the first big problem, confronted Chester Russel and his buddies in the 35^th almost immediately as they moved through Dawson Creek and a few miles out to their real destination—Fort St. John.

Just short of Fort St. John, the Peace River loomed. Short periods of early spring warmth softened the river ice. Crossing troops encountered large cracks and the ice undulated and heaved under the weight of a heavy tractor.

The Most Colorful Soldier

Russell remembered a flatbed carrying an Osgood Shovel down the 10 percent grade to the river. The heavy trailer pushed the tow vehicle sideways and the shovel and the flatbed rolled over into the icy mud along the trail.

Troops collected sawdust and spread it over the frozen river hoping to blanket and insulate the precious ice. Planks over the sawdust kept the tracks and wheels from scattering it. Bundled in frozen parkas, faces frosted and noses blanched white, Chester and the men of the 35th waddled across like a flock of penguins.

At Fort St. John they tried to bivouac. Tent pegs didn’t work in frozen ground. The men lashed the tents to whatever presented itself. They didn’t provide much shelter anyway. And latrines proved impossible to dig. You can imagine how they dealt with that problem.

From Chester’s interview with Earl Brown and Hank Bridgeman in 2003. “Now we got to Dawson Creek and we didn’t slow down. They marched us right through Dawson Creek there, right in… took us to Fort St. John.”

They didn’t stay there long either. The trail to Ft Nelson was dissolving in front of them.

The Most Colorful Soldier

The most colorful soldier on the Alaska Highway Project, Chester Russel, came with the 35^th Engineers to Dawson Creek in March 1942.

Colonel William Hoge had come to Dawson Creek, in February. His country, suddenly at war with the Empire of Japan, its Alaska outpost in dire danger, needed a land route from the railhead at Dawson Creek to Alaska through some of the most rugged wilderness in North America and it needed it yesterday! Colonel Hoge had been ordered to make it happen.

Hoge came north knowing he would have to work out a plan on the fly, but he already knew that he would need a regiment at Fort Nelson to build north toward Yukon Territory. Local experts informed him that only ice supported the trail up to Fort Nelson, and it would disappear with the fast approaching spring thaw.

He ordered Colonel Ingalls, commander of the 35^th Engineers, to drop everything and bring his regiment up from Fort Ord, California. Chester Russel came with them.

Skookum Jim, Kate Carmack’s Brother

Skookum in Tagish means enormously strong, and the young man named Keish earned the new name Skookum Jim, hauling hundred-pound packs up the infamous trail over Chilkoot Pass.

In 1892, near Dyea at the foot of the Chilkoot trail he killed a bear with his bare hands.

Skookum packed supplies up the rugged Chilkoot with his friend Dawson Charlie and they became partners. In 1886 they packed for George Carmack and Carmack wintered in Skookum’s home; married Skookum’s sister. When she died, he married another sister, Shaaw Tiaa, who became Kate Carmack.

First Woman of the Klondike

Skookum Jim travelled, in 1896, through far northern Yukon with Kate and George and Dawson Charlie. They stopped to fish in Rabbit Creek, and one of them found a gold nugget—in later accounts each claimed credit for the find.

No matter.

The Carmacks, Skookum and Dawson Charlie had made the strike that started the Great Klondike Gold Rush.

In 1898 they travelled to Seattle to spend some of their wealth. When Carmack dumped sister Kate for another woman and took all the money with him, Skookum Jim broke off with Carmack too.

Skookum got his penniless sister and her daughter Graphie back to Carcross; built them a small house. He also helped with groceries and he paid Graphie’s tuition at the Whitehorse Mission School.

Kate and Graphie lived here while George spent Klondike Gold.

Skookum had a wife, and he built for her a larger frame home in Carcross. They lived there for just a few years. Skookum had always enjoyed his booze, and as the years passed, he enjoyed it more and more. His business judgment, never the best, deteriorated.

In 1904 he sold his claims on Rabbit Creek for $65,000. The next year, the same year that Graphie left for Seattle and never returned, Skookum’s wife left him. Then Dawson Charlie fell off the bridge in Carcross and drowned.

Skookum and Kate, Keish and Shaaw Tiaa, ended their lives in Carcross as the last remnants of their family.

Like Kate, Skookum Jim rests in the Carcross cemetery.

Another take on Skookum Jim and his sister

Last Heroic Flight

The patient was on the wrong side of this

The last heroic flight for Alcan bush pilot Les Cook came in November 1942.

On the north bank of the White River, an enlisted surveyor of the 29th Topo unit suffered abdominal pain. A doctor diagnosed appendicitis. The soldier needed surgery right away.

Dropping It In–Les Cook

His buddies strapped him to a litter and carried him to the south bank of the river, teetering on planks connecting gaps in the incomplete bridge. They loaded him into an ambulance; and it slewed and bounced down the Highway, still under construction, to the Donjek River base camp.

Donjek Bridge–base camp is in background

Doctors at the base camp contacted Whitehorse headquarters and asked for an evacuation plane as early as possible the next morning. But a violent winter storm brewed between Whitehorse and the Donjek—winds came up overnight and visibility in the swirling snow dropped to almost zero.

The plane didn’t show up.

The patient couldn’t wait. His doctors asked could someone fly two surgeons and their instruments to the Donjek.

Enter Les Cook.

Two surgeons volunteered and Les headed north. Virtually blind he guided his wind buffeted plane through the valleys and over the mountains. A line of trucks lit the small landing strip at the Donjek. Doctors and corpsmen on site had converted part of a hanger to an operating room.

The soldier lived. And, like many of Cook’s exploits, the story of this one raced the length of the highway.

One month later another Les Cook story raced the length of the road, devastating the troops, especially those of the 93^rd and 340^th who thought of him as their own. Les had finally pushed his luck and skill too far; crashed his plane onto a Whitehorse street. He didn’t walk away.

Epic Achievement

An Epic achievement, the construction of the Alaska Highway exemplifies a truth about the violent upheaval of World War II. Challenge requires response, and epic challenge requires epic response. The war, the most horrific event in recorded history, presented epic challenges to virtually every person alive. It brought death and destruction, but it also inspired heroism.

Paths Through the North Country

The drama of the Alcan in 1942 arose from the interaction of individuals—thousands of them. Before the war every single one of them lived their lives in worlds they perceived as normal and immutable. The war challenged them all, changed their lives profoundly and forever. And they rose to the challenge to create the stupendous Alaska-Canada Highway–together.

Few of the thousands of young soldiers who the Army, in a desperate hurry, dispatched north from the United States had planned to become soldiers; even fewer planned to help gouge a road out of a subarctic wilderness they barely knew existed. And few of the thousands of civilian contractors who came with them knew any more about that wilderness.

. In 1942 the war wrenched them all into a totally new world, threw them together, changed their lives forever, mixed them like ingredients in a cocktail shaker and poured them out onto a primordial path through British Columbia, Yukon and Alaska.

The people who lived along that path also lived in a world they perceived as normal and immutable; had no idea what the war had in store for them.

The road builders poured first into the Peace River Valley, a relatively accessible and prosperous farming community centered on Dawson Creek and Fort St. John.

North of Fort St. John the road builders would claw through all but impenetrable wilderness, but tiny communities of First Nations and a few hardy European and American imports occupied that wilderness.

Some 800 miles north of Dawson Creek, on the other side of the Continental Divide a few hundred people lived in the small city of Whitehorse.

The soldiers and civilians who poured through those tiny communities needed and depended on the men and women who lived in them. And the lives of those people, like the lives of the road builders, changed profoundly and forever.

In 1941 all these ordinary people were living their lives in worlds they perceived as normal and immutable. The war changed all that; challenged them profoundly. And together ordinary people accomplished a feat some have compared to the construction of the Panama Canal–the Alaska-Canada Highway.

Milepost on the Construction of the Alcan

First Woman of the Klondike

The first woman of the Klondike struck gold in the Klondike, but still lived the saddest life on record.

Born Shaaw Tiaa, native Tagish, she married a Tlingit man and bore him a daughter. A flu epidemic killed them both. When Shaaw Tiaa’s sister passed away she married the widower, a white man named George Carmack, and became Kate Carmack.

God Had Seeded the North Country with Gold

In 1896 Kate and George, travelling with Kate’s brother, Skookum Jim, through the most remote part of Northern Canada, stopped to fish in Rabbit Creek. They found gold in the creek bed—lots of gold.

George filed a claim. Skookum Jim filed an adjacent claim. And they set in getting filthy rich. News of their good fortune sparked the Great Klondike Gold Rush.

For two years George worked their mine, piling up enormous wealth. Strangely Kate lived pretty much as she always had—keeping house, taking care of their infant daughter. She even sewed and sold moccasins and took in laundry.

Finally, in 1898, George and Kate ventured out to Seattle to spend their riches; planned to buy a yacht and sail off to Paris. The Tagish girl, though, had trouble adapting to Seattle. And George adapted all too well; found himself a replacement wife.

When he left her, Kate filed for divorce, but George claimed they’d never been legally married. Kate couldn’t prove otherwise. George stayed in Seattle with the money. Kate and their daughter, Graphie, returned to Carcross where Kate eked out a living as best she could.

When Graphie turned 16, she travelled to Seattle to visit her father. The visit turned into a new life. Graphie married and settled in Seattle. Her devastated mother never saw her again.

Kate never got any part of George’s riches. She lived on a small government pension until an influenza epidemic swept through Carcross in 1920 and ended what must be one of the saddest life stories on record.

Shaaw Tiaa/Kate Carmack rests today in the Carcross Cemetery.

Much of the information for this story comes from the National Park Service website NPS Website Story

ALSIB (Alaska Siberia) Route

ALSIB, the Alaska Siberia Route, offered a brutal passage for pilots taking airplanes from factories in Montana to the Russian Front in Europe. But in 1943, with millions of German soldiers retreating on the Russian Front, the entire Allied war effort hinged on the Soviets.

If the Soviets needed warplanes, their allies would damned well see that they got them.

Heavy Trucks on a Road

The pilots, American and Soviet, who flew the ALSIB did battle with a vicious enemy—the weather. The planes flew through thick fog and sleet and freezing rain coated their wings with ice. Too much ice, too much extra weight, could send a plane plummeting from the sky. The planes flew into williwaws—hundred mile an hour winds that literally flapped a B-17’s wings.

Even when they made it some of the planes needed fixing

An unknown writer on the website airforcelodge.com/history tells this story. “One American pilot—flying blind and guessing his way back to shore in fog… spotted a duck flying ahead of him in the mist, ‘I knew that duck wouldn’t fly into a cliff,’ he said later, ‘so I just got behind it and flew formation on it until we got in.’”

American pilots found flying over this country by instrument difficult, and the brand-new Alaska Highway gave them their most important navigation aid—fly low and follow the road.

The American side of the ALSIB took eighty pilot’s lives. Across the Bering Strait, Siberia killed one hundred nine soviet pilots.

A website called airspacemag.com tells the story of Lt. Walter T. Kent. In October 1943 a Yukon snowstorm disoriented the young pilot who flew right into the ground. In 1965 a Royal Canadian Air Force Helicopter discovered the wreckage in 1965. “Researchers discovered a high school ring inscribed with his name.

A Hard Good Life

A hard life can be a good life. Many of us today have lost touch with that fact. The Mennonites who came to Manitoba, Canada at the turn of the century came for better lives. They didn’t expect easy ones. Three generations on, in 1921, one austere, deeply religious, family welcomed baby Linda to the branch living in Alberta; welcomed her to a unique hard good life.

Many years later that baby, Linda Penner, wrote a memoir to document her life in Alberta. And many years after that, Linda’s grandson, Ivan Penner responded to a story I posted about the memoir of an incredibly tough Canadian, Olive A. Frederickson. Ivan told me about his grandmother and about her memoir. Turns out Northern Canada had more than one incredibly tough lady.

Olive A. Frederickson

From her childhood Linda remembered chores. Mom dispatched the smallest children in her very large brood to match wits with the farm’s chickens. A hen’s goal is to keep her eggs so she can sit on them and produce chicks. The child’s goal is to find the eggs and take them to the kitchen where mom turns them into food.

The chickens have a problem. Proud of the eggs they produce, they strut and cackle, leading the child right to the nest. And small children inherit this job in the first place because they can wriggle into tight spots to retrieve the prizes.

In June, harvesting brome grass hay, required the talents of bigger kids—and adults. Two horses dragged a mower through the field laying the grass down. People wielded hand rakes to pull it into rows. When it dried, the horses dragged a “hayrack” down the rows while people pitched the hay aboard, arranging it and piling it as high and tight as possible. Back in the yard they pitched the hay to the ground and piled it in stacks, arranged just so to shed water.

Hay fed the animals. Potatoes fed the people.

Dad dug the potatoes out of the ground, everybody else crawled behind him on hands and knees picking them out of the dirt, putting them in buckets and dumping the buckets in the wagon. “By evening our knees were bloated and sore and our fingernails so packed with dirt that they were pulling away from the skin and we were tired and hungry… At home we shoveled them into a chute leading into our dirt cellar.”

Linda wrote a fascinating memoir and we aren’t done with it.

Stay tuned.

Linda at the end of her life

Heavy Trucks on a Road

Heavy trucks on a road could carry enough men and weapons across Canada to Alaska to defend North America from a Japanese assault. But in 1939 no such road existed, and airplanes could at least carry some material. Between 1939 and 1941, desperate Canadians built a string of airfields across British Columbia and Yukon Territory.

In 1942 Americans, awakened to the danger by Pearl Harbor, desperately needing to move heavy trucks, stormed north to build the road for them—the Alaska-Canada Highway—connecting the string of airfields.

But through 1942 and 1943, even as Americans and Canadians labored feverishly to build and then upgrade the Alaska Highway, events elsewhere changed everything.

Cooperation built the Alcan

After the battle at Midway, Japan lost the initiative; would no longer maraud across the Pacific attacking wherever and whenever they liked. Driven from Kiska and Attu in 1943, they no longer threatened North America through the Aleutians. Alaska no longer desperately needed heavy trucks.

At the same time, millions of Soviet soldiers battled millions of German soldiers along a massive front that spanned the entire Soviet Union. The Soviets desperately needed warplanes. And the rest of the Allies desperately needed the Soviets to win.

Factories in the United States could churn out warplanes at a furious pace, but Hitler’s armies controlled the world between those factories and Soviet Air Force. The planes would have to use the back door to get to the Soviets. They would have to fly over the top of the world.

American pilots flew warplanes north to Vancouver and then from airfield to airfield along the NWSR to Alaska. In Alaska Soviet pilots took over to fly them across Siberia to the German front.

When the airports acquired more sophisticated control towers…

Through 1943 and 1944 the Northwest Staging Route grew busier and more important with every passing day. The airfields no longer existed to support the Alaska Highway. The Alaska Highway existed to support the airfields.

Maintenance was hard year around–hardest in winter

Through the rest of the war years Canadians and Americans worked desperately hard to expand and improve the NWSR. By 1945 Fort St. John, Fort Nelson, Watson Lake, Whitehorse and Fairbanks had primary airports. Emergency landing strips scattered at 100-mile intervals between them.

Cooperation built the Alcan

These guys were in it way before their southern neighbors.

Cooperation between soldiers and civilians and between the citizens of two countries made the colossal project, the Alaska-Canada Highway, happen.

Canada entered WWII when Great Britain did, two years before Pearl Harbor pulled the United States in. Mackenzie King and Canada’s other leaders recognized the Japanese threat to North America long before leaders in the States got beyond vaguely worrying about it.

Canada couldn’t build a Highway north to Alaska. Battles all over the world absorbed her young men and her treasure. But Canada could and did build a string of airfields north from Edmonton so the allies could at least fly men, weapons and supplies north to where the Japanese would most likely attack—Alaska.

Actually the war took young Canadian women too.

Well before Pearl Harbor, Canadians attacked the wilderness to put airfields in place at Fort St. John, Fort Nelson, Whitehorse and elsewhere to give pilots flying north from Edmonton places to stop and refuel on their trip north. They called it the Northwest Staging Route (NWSR).

This is what building an airstrip looked like.

After Pearl Harbor when leaders in the states panicked and dispatched the Corps of Engineers north to build an emergency highway from the railhead at Dawson Creek to Fairbanks Alaska, the Canadians took the highly unusual step of giving the Engineers unrestricted access to Canadian territory.

And Canadian citizens put up with the arrogance the Yankee soldiers brought to the job.

Canada kept right on improving the NWSR, using the new highway for somewhat easier access to the airfields. And in 1943 Canadian contractors joined American contractors in the effort to turn the pioneer road into a road.’

When the Japanese made everyone’s fear real, attacked Kiska and Attu, Canadian soldiers fought alongside American soldiers in some of the most horrific battles of the war to get those islands back.

Video from the Provincial Archives of Canada