STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

Outsiders Inevitably Came to the Far North

Trading furs attracted traders and trappers

Outsiders inevitably made their way further and further north. Europeans found their way to every part of the world that offered anything of value to them. When Europeans decided they liked clothing made from fur, European traders went north looking for the exquisite pelts of the native animals.

Furs attracted the First White Men to the North Country

Russians made their way from Western Siberia across the Bering Sea to Alaska. Pursued furs south along what would become the Alaska Panhandle. From the lower 48 and from Canada, outsiders working for the Hudson Bay Company penetrated ever further northwest into the northernmost reaches of Canada.

Outsiders made their way over old First Nations trails to a location that offered access to furs and built a trading post. From there they made their way further and built another… The resulting string of trading posts crept ever further into the remote territory of the First Nations.

The outsiders did not come gently among the First Nations, nor did they come with respect. But the trading posts offered opportunity to the people of the First Nations. Their life and culture gradually absorbed the implements and tools that their furs could buy—everything from pots and pans to rifles.

And their patterns of migration gradually changed. Getting to the posts to trade became as important as getting to the right place for hunting and fishing. Trail systems evolved accordingly.

Europeans bought the furs, but they took little notice of their source until the 1860’s. Russia claimed Alaska and, trying to rebuild its finances in the wake of the Crimean War, Russia decided that it needed money more than it needed that remote possession. The United States, after the Civil War, wanted to join European powers in the quest for overseas empire. Secretary of State William Seward took Russia up on its offer and purchased Alaska.

Few Americans appreciated Seward’s bargain

In retrospect, at two cents an acre, Seward made a spectacular deal, but few of his countrymen saw it that way. If the purchase turned America’s attention, for a time, to the remote North, it was as “Seward’s Icebox”. Remote and alien, the country offered nothing of obvious value.

But a few people continued to make their way north, seeking opportunity where they found it.

Mushroom Ice

Mushroom ice opposed soldiers in British Columbia and Yukon. In Alaska mushroom ice defeated them. During the winter of 1942/43 commanders positioned regiments along the length of the brand new, rough draft of an Alaska Highway to keep it open for truck convoys from Dawson Creek to Fairbanks.

Rugged, Remote and Austere

The Only Possible Route

Rugged, remote, austere, breathtakingly beautiful and viciously inhospitable, the area spanned by the route of the Alcan Highway is unique in the world. Nature is a dictator, not a ‘mother’ in the North Country.

The Highway threads through a vast expanse of raw nature with virtually no population. Alaska, alone, encompasses 663,267 square miles. Moose outnumber people and probably always will.

Men had come to and lived in these regions long before the corps. And their lives and works had shaped the environment the Corps would face in 1942. Few in number they had scattered along the length of the proposed Highway; had created tiny and tenuous bits of civilization, an important part of the environment that awaited the soldiers of the Corps of Engineers.

The people American’s call Indians and Canadian’s call First Nations came first. 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. Generations of First Nations people considered themselves, like every other living organism, a guest not a conqueror.

They lived in small, very mobile family groups, moving constantly to eke subsistence from the environment. They sheltered in huts and teepees made of tanned animal hides and wood, brush or bark that could be taken down, moved and reconstructed easily. Their trails and paths curled like very slender ribbons over the mountains and through the forests.

The migratory patterns of animals and fish determined those of the First Nations. The spring salmon run found them camped near streams and rivers. At other times of the year, they settled near the paths of migrating moose and caribou.

The environment dictated the direction and timing of their constant travel. Their ephemeral trails ribboned through the wilderness. Paths over muskeg and permafrost served only in winter—the rains and thawing temperatures of spring and summer turned them into bogs of bottomless mud and muck.

Frozen lakes and streams offered easy passage in winter and the Indians used canoes to travel on them in summer. The spring thaw, though, transformed even the smallest streams into raging cataracts.

Indigenous History in Canada

The Only Possible Route

One View of the Path today. The Highway winds through the lower left of the photo

How on earth did they find the only possible route?

Canada Used the Route Before the Corps

Drive the Alaska Highway, look left or right virtually anywhere along it. You look down steep mountainsides, you look up steep mountainsides, you look out across trackless swamps, you look out into hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles of untracked wilderness. It gradually sinks in that the Army, in 1942, built 1600 miles of Highway over the only possible path from Dawson Creek, British Columbia to Big Delta, Alaska.

How on earth did they find it?

The answer is that they didn’t. Other men, over millennia of history, found it for them.

From time out of mind, those few men and women who lived in the great subarctic North had to travel through it to survive. Brutal mother nature let no one there sit still for long. The terrain and climate fought back at every turn; offered no easy routes and only a very limited number of possible ones.

The people of the First Nations had found those routes and established trails through the wilderness. Late in the game, when a few white men came looking for furs and later for gold, they learned routes from the natives and used the ones that served their purposes.

The Corps came in 1942 to serve the purposes of the larger outside world; carved a very long path, breathtaking in its scale. But the surveyors and bulldozers of the Corps gouged their road along paths trod for centuries by the moccasins of the First Nations, and the boots of the traders and the prospectors who had gone before.

Ghosts at Morley Bay

This was the Morley Bay facility in 1942

Ghosts would surround us at Morley Bay, but first we had to find them. In late summer 1942 the 93^rd Engineering Regiment maintained a motor pool and a supply dump at Morley Bay, Yukon. On a lazy afternoon in 2013 we had come to find it—and the ghosts of the hundreds of men who worked there.

The 340th Gets Started–from Morley Bay

In 1942 the regiment strung out across hundreds of miles of Yukon Territory, Bulldozers plowing through trees and mud burned through thousands of gallons of fuel. Deuce and a Half trucks carried the fuel in 55-gallon drums, and they burned more fuel doing that.

The bulldozers in rough service broke—a lot. The trucks travelling endlessly over the rough road broke—a lot. The mechanics had to go to the vehicles, not the other way around.

This was the deadline, the vehicle graveyard

The soldiers working in, on and around the vehicles required food and other supplies.

The scattered regiment centered, roughly, on Morley Bay. The rough pioneer road they had built connected the line companies to Morely Bay. Lake Teslin connected Morley Bay back over miles of river and rough road to the port of entry at Skagway/Carcross.

Deuce and a half trucks, wreckers, jeeps and repair vehicles moved constantly to and away from Morely Bay, up and down the primitive highway.

On today’s Alaska Highway you crest a mountain, ready to start down a long, steep slope to the Nisutlin Bay Bridge and the village of Teslin. If you know to, you look left through the woods, but you don’t see Morley Bay—too far away. You certainly see no sign of the facility or the hundreds of men who labored along its shore.

With old maps and photos and an eye on the odometer, we re-crossed the big bridge and climbed back up the steep grade. Just beyond the crest a driveway offered on the right. We turned and it led us to the shore of the Bay and two houses, surrounded by woods., quiet and empty in the dappled sunlight.

With an old photo in hand we lined up a mountain in the background with the outline of the Bay and maneuvered to the spot where the photographer had stood. We got close. Standing there we could just make out a path of smaller trees where the 1942 road had cut through the woods.

Woods. Two houses down near the water. Soldiers’ ghosts were everywhere.

A Present Day Map

Irony and History

The ultimate irony along the Canol today

No irony accompanied the fact that in early 1942, the Aleutians offered the marauding Japanese a back door to America. America’s leaders decided she needed a road to Alaska to defend it, and some of them realized the road wouldn’t do a lot of good if convoys had to dedicate the bulk of their hauling capacity to hauling their own fuel. Even as they moved to create the highway, they initiated another stupendous project to provide that fuel.

The War Demanded the Alaska Highway

And no irony accompanied their plan to build a pipeline and road from Norman Wells in remote Northwest Territories over two ranges of towering mountains to an intersection with the Alaska Highway. From there the pipeline would follow the Highway north to Whitehorse. There they would build a refinery.

In many ways working on the Canol proved tougher than the Highway

A land route to Alaska, a pipeline and a refinery in Northern Canada to fuel convoys along that route? All but impossible. But America had to have it. Thousands of men, soldiers and civilians struggled heroically to make it happen, and the last thing anybody worried about was cost.

In 1943 Northwest Service Command in Whitehorse turned its attention to the pipeline and the refinery. Most of the regiments of the Corps moved on to other things, but some soldiers remained behind to work with civilians on the Canol Project.

Captain Walter Parsons left the 97th in Alaska to work on the Canol Project

And oil flowed through the pipeline in April of 1944.

But history always returns to irony.

Even as the Japanese attacked Dutch Harbor and invaded Attu and Kiska, justifying leaders’ concerns about defending the Aleutians, the American Navy won a pivotal victory at Midway. It took a while for anybody to realize it, but Midway brought Japanese ‘marauding’ to a screeching halt.

The need to get Lend-Lease aircraft from Montana to Alaska and on to the embattled Soviet Union, gave the Alaska Highway a whole new importance. But the Canol Project? Not so much.

Thousands of men, soldiers and civilians struggled heroically to make Canol happen. Nothing can diminish their achievement. But by early 1944, back in Washington, the Truman Commission was very much worried about cost and the massive cost overruns on Canol got their attention.

In the end the Army abandoned the pipeline, sold off the refinery in pieces.

Spiritual Guidance on the Alaska Highway

Spiritual guidance, Chaplain Brown’s specialty; difficult to deliver on the Alcan. Thousands of the Chaplain’s “parishioners” scattered along the length of the Highway, scattered over a lot of the most difficult miles on the planet. And they brought every kind of spiritual need to the Chaplain. His routine included marriage requests/investigations, problems, complaints, morale, hardship transfers…

One Lonely Man

Chaplain Austin of the 93rd didn’t get a truck.

At Camp Haines 103 one day the chaplain wished aloud that he had a good way to transport himself and his equipment up and down the Highway. The men promptly appropriated a Dodge 4 X 4 and converted it into a mobile chapel by building a pitched-roof replica into the bed of the truck.

He stopped at Cathedral Bluffs one day for lunch and there the men installed a steeple on his chapel. Later, at Canyon Creek, still other men cleaned the truck and then painted the new steeple.

The soldiers of the 388^th Ordinance Company topped the rolling chapel off by coating the steeple with a second layer of paint and then painting crosses on the doors of the truck.

Chaplain Brown travelled as many as 2,000 miles a month up and down the Highway. And no one travelled it with more style, or in a classier vehicle, than he did.

Emma Did it Her Way

This is how her Kansas newspaper pictured the Emma who headed for the Yukon.

Emma Kelly lived in Topeka, wrote for a Chicago newspaper, thirsted, as they say, for adventure. In 1897 word came south from the Klondike that men had struck gold, and young Emma decided to head north to Dawson City. She arranged financing, acquired a list of newspapers that would print stories she sent back, and on September 10, 1897 she left Topeka.

Another Lady in the Gold Rush

Emma rode trains to Seattle, a steamship up to Juneau, another steamship up the Lynn Canal to Dyea; arrived way too late in the year. To get into Canada she needed a ton of supplies at the top of Chilkoot Pass and experienced packers wanted no part of helping her so late in the year. Undaunted, Emma hired 10 deckhands from the steamship and bullied them up the pass through a blizzard. “If a little old girl can keep climbing, surely you can.”

At Lake Lindeman she found a party heading up the Yukon. Taking a young girl along didn’t thrill them, but her money did. At the Whitehorse Rapids, they insisted she get out and walk. But Emma did things her way. She found the frigid rapids so much fun that at the end she headed back on foot to do it again. On the way up she slipped on the ice, fell fifteen feet down the cliffside and knocked herself out cold.

No matter. She rode the rapids again, this time wielding an oar. “The wild waves rocked and rolled our boat and occasionally broke over us. The spray rose so thick and high we could not see the shore, the very air seeming a sea of misty spray. It was simply glorious.”

They travelled the Yukon, sleeping in the snow along the river at night. In late September the river could freeze over and lock them in just any day. The men wanted to stop, winter and go on in the spring. Emma would have none of it.

They arrived in Dawson City on November 1 and the next day the river froze solid. No matter. Emma bought a few bottles of whiskey and, while the crew celebrated on the snow covered riverbank, Emma pulled out her guitar and serenaded them.

Dyea Alaska Today

Millie’s First White Men Were Black

Millie’s Best Memory of the 93rd was their music.

Millie Jones, born in Whitehorse, grew up in Carcross, Yukon Territory—about as remote a place as the world had to offer. People in Carcross ordered their groceries in bulk–had staples shipped to Skagway and then up to them by the White Pass and Yukon Territory railroad. Clothes came from the Sears catalogue. Millie shared the Carcross school with about 13 fellow students.

Twenty-something Mary, the Legend Continues

Twenty-something Mary moved to Alaska and never looked back. That doesn’t mean everything went smoothly.

Legendary Alaskan, Mary Hanson

In the early 1930’s Mary got pregnant; had a miscarriage; took herself to Nenana for medical treatment. Not by any means the Mayo clinic, whatever medical facilities Nenana had to offer did the trick. Twenty-something Mary lived to fight another day.

But, if life in Alaska suited her, life with her husband apparently didn’t. In Nenana Mary took the opportunity to get a divorce.

Mary had been helping neighbors tend their sled dogs, had accumulated dogs of her own. Now she and her team moved to Fairbanks where Mary took a job as a waitress and met chef Bert Hansen. Bert and Mary tied the knot in 1935.

In 1936 Mary became the first woman to race the men in what is now the North American Dog Sled Classic. She raced in 1936, 1937 and 1938. She placed third in at least one of those races.

In 1939 Bert and Mary filed on 149 acres on the Richardson Highway near Big Delta and opened Bert and Mary Hansen’s Roadhouse—a permanent fixture at Big Delta offering food, a bed, accommodations for dogs, horses or whatever.

In those days the Richardson Highway closed for the winter. So in the winter of 1940 a very pregnant Mary mushed on her dogsled to the doctor who delivered her daughter.