STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

Rafting the Little Tok

Starting at the Little Tok River, the young black soldiers of the 97^th Engineers raced north, ever deeper into Alaska, in early August. They would start constructing their portion of the Alaska Highway on the north bank of the Tanana River. But they had to build their own road to get there.

Tanana River Starting Line

Every morsel they ate, every drop of fuel they burned had to come hundreds of miles out to them from the dock at Valdez. A civilian contractor had moved in behind them to bring supplies out from Valdez to Slana. But the soldiers moved further away from Slana every day, and between them and Slana lay the continental divide and the streams and rivers of the Yukon River System.

Heath Twichell in his Northwest Epic described one creative response. They built rough sleds on runners of logs, and their dozers dragged the sleds carrying supplies and fuel as they moved through the Tanana Valley. Of course, they had to replenish the fuel and supplies on the sleds. To do that they used the Little Tok River to its mouth on the Tok River. “Enough supplies for several additional weeks came floating down the Little Tok behind them, to be caught by a log boom after bobbing and bumping along over rapids and sandbars for 15 miles: fuel in half-filled drums; rations, spare parts, and miscellaneous items in lightly-loaded pontoons.”

Photo is from a different regiment, but this is the kind of sled

The civilians working all around them described the process. “At one point in coming down the Tok Valley, one 97th crew had floated pontoons of supplies, rations, and half-filled gas and diesel fuel barrels down the Little Tok River fifteen miles to where they were caught in a log boom.”

Captain Walter Parsons who commanded Company F, described the process on the ground in a letter to his wife, Abbie. “We are having plenty hell. Most of our supplies are behind and the… companies out in front… are just getting by—packing our food in… We sent food down the river in boats but could not get the boats back up stream. Most of our fuel we get by half emptying full drums into empty drums and dumping both into the river. After 30 or 40 drums we send men walking down each side of the river to keep the drums on the way.”

The Area Today

Permafrost

Permafrost proves conclusively, if we actually needed more proof, that in the Far North, Mother Nature fights back with endless creativity. The mileage champions of the Alaska Highway Project, the 18th Engineering Regiment, faced and bested every challenge. Then they passed the Big Duke River, and Mother introduced them to permafrost—muskeg on steroids.

Slims River Bridge–more on the 18th

Heavily wooded terrain, “creased by many small ridges” gave way to a “scene of desolation”. Fred Rust remembered that “dead trees stood together like thousands of scarecrows.” They knew nothing of permafrost, but that would change.

The first ominous sign that they faced a major problem came from the kitchen police (KP’s). Sent to dig a garbage pit, the KP’s “searched far and wide for a spot… no matter where they went, they found frozen ground. One man on KP here for a week still complains that he had to dig 21 garbage pits.”

Out on the road, permafrost changed everything. Company A, as it had all the way up from Whitehorse, cleared a path out front. The other companies would use the path to follow, upgrading the path to road as they went.

Not in permafrost.

The thin surface of dirt and rotted vegetation rested on ice. Clear the surface and the ice melted to water. “Equipment bogged down everywhere.” A company trying to move up to a new section of road ran into “a nightmare of stuck trucks and broken axles… one truck could not follow another’s tracks without bogging down… Sometimes you would see D-8 hauling a train of three or four trucks, dragging them through the gumbo.”

Corduroy, the answer to muskeg, didn’t work. Dragging logs to lay across the roadbed took too long. The ice melted faster than they could bring the logs.

Eventually they learned to never expose the ice to warm temperatures, to leave the dirt and vegetable matter undisturbed, to lay the corduroy on top of it and then spread a thick layer of gravel on the corduroy.

Graveling Permafrost at the Donjek River.

But even then, “companies coming behind had to gravel and otherwise rework the ‘road’ of forward units. A good deal of this was less road than a sort of corduroy causeway in a Lake of mud.”

People who drive the Highway today still drive over permafrost between the Big Duke River and the Alaska border. Driving a motor home over undulating pavement, listening to the furniture behind your seat break loose and slide across the floor, you know mother nature won the battle.

A Piece of the Permafrost section greets a traveler today.

Permafrost Today

Tanana River Starting Line

After they crossed the Tanana civilian contractors would bridge it.

On the north bank of the Tanana River, near present day Tok, Alaska the black soldiers of the 97^th Engineering Regiment would finally reach the starting gate. The white soldiers of the 18^th Engineering Regiment raced north through Yukon Territory toward the Alaska border. From the north bank of the Tanana the 97th would race south to meet them.

Cresting the Continental Divide

A google satellite photo of the canyon extending away from Mentasta Lake toward the pass

Moving west from the Gulf of Alaska into the interior means cresting a rugged range of mountains that separate two great drainage systems. One system drains from their crest back to the Gulf. The other drains north through the Yukon River System to the Bering Sea. The generals who routed the Alaska Highway through Alaska blithely dispatched the 97th to crest the Continental Divide through the notch through the towering mountains known as Mentasta Pass.

The original trail over Mentasta–Abercrombie’s

The Pass lies just four miles east of Mentasta Lake, at a much higher elevation. Cresting there would be a trick.

Going east from the lake shore, a deep canyon penetrates the mountains. It ends abruptly at a towering wall just south of the Pass. Fifty years earlier Abercrombie had carved a pack trail out of the north wall of the canyon, angling up and then along the cliffside to emerge at the higher elevation of the pass. Unfortunately, his trail, long gone, still showed on the generals’ maps and, therefore, lived in their imagination.

The mountains that bounded the canyon had formed under glaciers. Part of a terminal moraine, the north wall of the canyon consisted of debris accumulated over thousands of years as the glacier moved, abrading and grinding the rock beneath it. The front edge of the ice slowly pushed the debris along and, when it melted, dumped it in a monster heap. Cresting would be easy, getting to the notch was another matter.

Closeup satellite photo of the crumbling cliffside

The glaciers had left a canyon whose walls consisted, not of solid rock, but of deep, down-pointing folds of finely ground rock. Men carve a trail or a road out of a cliff wall by creating a ledge. The glacial debris didn’t lend itself to ledges. Ledges tend to disappear under debris sliding down from above. And, more important, the outer edges of ledges, the ones suspended in thin air out over the depth of the canyon, tend to crumble and fall away.

Heath Twichell described the challenge that faced the catskinners of the 97th.

“While working on the precipitous terminal moraine…the lead bulldozers repeatedly slipped off the narrow trail and ‘threw a track.’” Reinstalling a tread back onto its drive sprocket, relatively routine on flat ground, became something very different in Mentasta Pass. “…doing it on a 23-ton machine that was teetering on the edge of a crumbling slope of glacial debris called for great skill and calm nerves. Eventually the 97th’s inexperienced operators became masters at such on-the-spot repairs…”

Mentasta Pass Today

White Civilians Meet Black Soldiers in Alaska

Civilian Crews worked right behind the soldiers of the 97th

White civilians, contractors, came up behind the black soldiers of the 97^th at the end of July. They set up tents at what they called the What Fir Camp, found black soldiers working all around them. The next morning Bubbles Smith ventured out with a group of his fellow white civilians. A black soldier stopped to talk. Bubbles ventured that he rather liked Alaska. The soldier rolled his eyes. “I’ve been here 94 days, 3hrs and 10 minutes”. Bubbles took that to mean the soldier felt he’d been there quite long enough.

Circus Tent at Gulkana–More on Civilians

The black soldiers teased one another and sang while they worked. And some of them teased the white men. Max Smith wrote to his wife about passing a group of black soldiers in the woods. One of the soldiers noticed Max’s double bitted axe. “Man o man, two blades, that man cut coming and going, boys. One blade is enough for me.”

Don Garlock remembered “a pretty good-natured bunch who seemed to like to stop and visit.”

Continuing problems with getting groceries to the civilians meant they lived, day after day, on corned beef. One black soldier grinned, “What you boys eating, some more of that corned beef?”

And the black soldiers helped with the corned beef problem.

Don wrote, “Yesterday when we were working some soldiers gave us 6… cans of chili. We fixed 3 cans of it out on the job and didn’t even bother to drive into camp for dinner. There were only 12 of us and we ate until we were nearly sick. Tasted better than anything we’ve had for weeks.”

Data on Tanana today–in case you want to move

The Scottish Lady

The lady, The Scottish Lady, began her life a graceful clipper ship, ended it a barge in the Gulf of Alaska. With her graceful female figurehead out front, the proud Lady plied the seven seas for decades. Dismasted in a typhoon out of Manilla in 1871, she recovered (with help from shipyards, of course) and sailed on. The age of sail moved into the age of steam. Dismasted again off the east coast of the United States in 1899, the Lady fell from grace.

A proud clipper like the Scottish Lady in her youth.

The Alaska Packer’s Association bought her and put her to work between Alaska and San Francisco, carrying fish from Alaska canneries. When a lady starts downhill, things move fast.

In 1926 a cement company put her to work hauling their products, converted her to a barge. Then came a reprieve, of sorts. Still another new owner put the Lady back to work as a ship, hauling lumber to South Africa.

Pearl Harbor day found her at the end of a towline, heading for an outfitting dock in Seattle. In drydock workers refitted her as a four-mast schooner, replaced her masts with solid sticks of Douglas Fir. New sails would come and she would be ready for launch by May 1.

Then the civilian contractors trying to get equipment to Alaska for their work on the Highway found her. The government stepped in and relegated the proud old girl to the end of a towline. Again. She wouldn’t need the new sails. And she didn’t need the graceful lady poised on her bow. Workers removed the figurehead.

Circus Tent at Gulkana

A circus tent housed Iowa civilians in Gulkana Alaska in July 1942. They came in droves to help build the Alaska Highway through Alaska. Filled the big circus tent to bursting.

Planes to Alaska

Civilian contractors’ headquarters at Gulkana, Alaska

At the end of June, civilian workers began piling into planes for the trip north. Forest fires raged north of Edmonton and the planes flew through heavy smoke. Max Smith wrote, “I am writing this letter from a plane 15,000 feet in the air going 165 to 185 miles per hour somewhere over the northwest Canadian Wilderness… the smoke was so bad we couldn’t see the ground…”

The civilians’ work would center around Gulkana, Alaska, a few miles north of Alaska’s version of civilization. Lytle and Green leased a “two-story, peeled log structure”, the roadhouse called the Gulkana Lodge, and made it their Headquarters.

Iowa Expeditionary Force

The “Iowa Expeditionary Force” came to Alaska with the 97^th Engineering Regiment. Forced by the shortage of troops to send the segregated 97th to build the Alaska Highway through Alaska, two reluctant generals planned to surround them with white civilian contractors. They found an Iowa management contractor, Lytle and Green; and Lytle and Green went back to Iowa and assembled subcontractors into the “Iowa Expeditionary Force.”

Historic Routes in Alaska

Over the next two weeks the Expeditionary Force loaded bulldozers, scoop shovels, graders and trucks, chained them down on railroad cars and shipped them north, some to the Port of Seattle, some to the Port of Prince Rupert, British Columbia. But at Seattle and Prince Rupert the equipment piled up behind a serious bottleneck. Equipment bound for Valdez had to negotiate the Gulf of Alaska and contractors struggled to find vessels to carry it. On June 7, fifty carloads of equipment waited in the yards at Prince Rupert.

Each sub-contractor employed a core of skilled and experienced men—catskinners, carpenters, mechanics, crane operators, foremen and superintendents. But to do the job in Alaska they needed more men than just these and they scrambled to recruit laborers “…from Cumberland to Independence, from Cedar Rapids to Hawarden and a dozen other Iowa communities.” Generous contracts let civilian contractors offer very high wages and they had little problem recruiting laborers. One officer in Valdez noted that “Truckers are getting $25 to $30 a ton for a 200-mile haul and drivers are getting from $400 to $700 a month…” And it wasn’t just truck drivers. “Café workers make more than Army officers.”

Privates in the 97th worked for twenty-one dollars a month.

Endless Trains of Equipment from Iowa Headed for Alaska

In June the Expeditionary Force’s flood of civilian workers made their way north. Most travelled by rail to Edmonton, Alberta and then flew north to Big Delta, Fairbanks and Nabesna. The workers assembled in Iowa towns, said tearful goodbyes and boarded trains.

Don Garlock wrote of a special train to St. Paul, Minnesota and supper in a reserved dining room at Union Depot. North from St. Paul into Saskatchewan the railroad provided sleeper cars. Not everything went perfectly for the civilian travelers. Garlock recorded, “The result was catastrophic as there were only 113 berths for 191 men, so we slept two to a berth. Of course, there was little sleeping done. In fact, I dozed with the tingling of silver in my ears—poker game in the next berth.”

Army barracks housed the men at Edmonton. Max Smith “…had a bath last night and the first good sleep since I left home…” Max had breakfast at the Salvation Army Canteen, “Ham and eggs with toast, coffee, and pie for 40 cents.”

One Civilian Contractor’s Memories

War Machine Makes it Real

The Japanese War Machine Made It Real to the men building the Alaska Highway

The war machine, the Japanese advance across the Pacific inspired the Alaska Highway Project. But the soldiers and civilians who went north to build the Highway, left the rolling catastrophe behind, struggled to keep up with news of the war. If few understood the complex geography of the Pacific, in early 1942 everybody understood that the Japanese, marauding through that geography, attacked wherever and whenever they pleased.

The Japanese Bomb Dutch Harbor

Port of Prince Rupert, British Columbia in 1942

In May 1942 Japan dispatched two fleets to the Aleutians, a carrier fleet to bomb and destroy the Dutch Harbor complex, and a troop transport fleet to invade and occupy Kiska and Attu. The Japanese war machine, in other words, did exactly what the Canadian and American Governments had feared it might do.

In Alaska, indeed along the whole length of the Highway, soldiers heard the news; wondered if the Japanese would come their way next. Milton Duesenberg, a civilian contractor, left Iowa on June 4. Travelling north through Prince Rupert, British Columbia, he encountered black outs, air alarms, patrol boats all along the coast. June 9, “Prince Rupert had an air alarm today. I was ordered off the streets by MP’s. The planes were identified as friendly.” Milton took ship north on June 10. On June 12, between Ketchikan and Skagway, they passed a “…US patrol boat and they trained the cannon on us but didn’t shoot thank heavens.”

Boats like these patrolled the Gulf of Alaska

Milton’s brother, Warren, in Fairbanks on July 8, noted in his diary, “War conditions much worse than people think. Army has complete control of all shipping. Eight bombers landed in here today. Planes are bringing back wounded from Dutch Harbor.”

Sears construction, assigned to build a second dock at Valdez, worked under the watchful eye of Army “lookouts in jeeps on the mountains behind Valdez. The jeeps were equipped with red lights which could be flashed on and off to warn the civilians to douse their lights and turn off the machinery.”