STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

Winding in and Winding Out

Winding in and winding out… Retired Sergeant Troy Hise summed up his 1942 experience in northern Canada, “The Alaska Highway winding in and winding out, fills my mind with serious doubt, as to whether the lout that planned this route, was going to hell or coming out.”

Sgt. Hise, referred to a potentially deal breaking challenge that confronted the soldiers from the very beginning of the project. Mud, muskeg and permafrost covered much of northern Canada, and the extent and depth of it took the Alaska Highway builders totally by surprise.

Link to another story “The Swamp Claimed a Dozer”

Corduroy offered the obvious solution. Road builders, before they had concrete, had used corduroy to build roads over muddy, swampy ground for a very long time. The Romans built corduroy roads. During the French and Indian War, Soldiers under General Braddock installed miles of corduroy road from Cumberland to Pittsburgh. In 2017 construction workers in Grand Haven Township, Michigan dug up several feet of corduroy road that dated back to the Civil War Era.

Even today, environmentally conscious loggers in northern Canada, concerned that concrete roads block the flow of water and nutrients through the boreal forests, install logging roads with corduroy.

The Alaska Highway builders didn’t invent Corduroy roads. But the mud, muskeg and permafrost of the vast subarctic wilderness took installing corduroy to a whole new level and made the road builders masters of the art.

They chopped trees down by hand, removed limbs, cut the resulting logs to length, dragged them to the roadbed, laid them perpendicular to the direction of travel, and covered them with fill. More often than not the logs and fill would sink into the mud. The soldiers chopped down more trees and installed another layer. When the second layer followed the first into the mud, they installed a third. And so on…

In one particularly bad stretch through Yukon’s Big Devil Swamp, soldiers installed corduroy and fill six feet deep.Reinventing Corduroy Roads

Midway —and Alaska

Midway —screaming fighters, torpedo bombers, dying sailors and pilots, changed the course of WWII in the Pacific. But the great battle in the central Pacific had moving parts far to the north on the boundary between the North Pacific and the Bering Sea—Alaska’s Aleutian Island Chain.

Even as a Japanese fleet tried to trap the Americans at Midway, another Japanese fleet attacked the American Naval Base at Dutch Harbor and Japanese soldiers invaded and occupied the islands of Kiska and Attu.

Link to another story “The Japanese Bomb Dutch Harbor”

Through 1942 and into 1943 America fought back from the air, occupying islands ever closer to Kiska and Attu, building airstrips, and then dispatching pilots into the atrocious Aleutians weather to bomb the Japanese occupiers again and again. And the ships of the United States navy not only supplied the island airfields, but also lined up in the fog along frozen beaches and bombarded Japanese defenses.

Brian Garfield in his The Thousand Mile War quotes one American B-24 pilot. “…the weirdest war ever waged… a three-sided battle among the United States, the Japanese Empire, and a force that proved more powerful than either Washington or Tokyo: the weather.”

As the Americans occupied one island after another, getting closer to their targets, they located their most important base on the island of Adak. American bombers could easily reach Kiska and Attu from Adak—with fighter support.

This airport and harbor became the center of the action.

And the harbor at Adak supported the ships and submarines of the Navy as they conducted their own assault on Attu and Kiska.

On May 11, 1943 the United States Army invaded and reclaimed Attu in one of the nastiest, most miserable battles of the war. Three months later, when they invaded Kiska, they found the Japanese had gone. On Kiska the climate and weather inflicted all the allied casualties as confused American and Canadian troops tried to coordinate along the foggy, rocky beaches and occasionally shot each other.

Garfield’s Great Book

Harriet Pullen, Queen of Skagway

Harriet Pullen, one of the ladies who joined a flood of men in their rush for Klondike gold, found her fame and fortune in Skagway, Alaska. She had no need to go on to the Klondike.

“I only had seven dollars to my name. I didn’t know a soul in Alaska. I had no place to go. So I stood on the beach in the rain, while tented Skagway of 1897 shouted, cursed, and surged about me.”

Link to another story “Fascinating Skagway”

Captain William Moore needed a cook and Harriet could cook. He hired her. She made and sold apple pies on the side, turned that into a surprisingly successful enterprise, so much so that she brought horses up from Washington and began hauling freight over the infamous White Pass, “The Dead Horse Trail.”

Harriet had three children and her businesses earned enough to provide for her family. More important, when the White Pass and Yukon Railroad bypassed and closed the freight lines, Harriet had enough money put by to purchase a large home from Captain Moore and convert it to a luxurious hotel. Tourists flowed into town during the summer making Harriet’s hotel a success and making her a legend— “Ma Pullen.”

She bought a farm in nearby Dyea and from there she brought fresh vegetables and milk and cream to the hotel kitchen. And her apple pies remained a staple on the menu.

And the after-dinner entertainment? You guessed it—Ma Pullen plumbing her memory for stories of the famous Gold Rush days.

Harriet, in 1909 visited her mother near Port Angeles, Washington. Headed home in January she boarded the Gertrude which left port in a raging snowstorm. The ship nailed some very large rocks and stuck fast. Boarding a lifeboat, Harriet made it to shore but a huge wave upended the boat as she stepped ashore, upending it and sending her deep into the water. She swam to the surface where a small whaling vessel pulled her aboard.

Harriett ran the Pullen house when the soldiers of the United States Army poured through Skagway on their way to build the Alaska Highway. Many of them remembered her and her hotel with affection.

Harriet died in 1947.

Making Mistakes in Louisiana

Making mistakes in Louisiana instead of in Europe in the face of a real enemy made a lot of sense to Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall. His Texas-Louisiana Maneuvers in 1941 dispatched nineteen divisions, over 400,000 troops, to engage in mock conflict over 3,400 square miles of Southern Louisiana turf. Marshall fervently hoped that the exercise would reveal any weaknesses in organization, tactics, equipment, and personnel.

Expensive and dangerous, the exercise cost twenty-one million dollars and the Army knew that, making mistakes, they would suffer deaths and casualties.

Link to another story “Training the 93rd at Livingston”

The segregated 93^rd Engineers moved into a pasture near Kinder Louisiana and covered it with two-man pup tents. They built ‘turnouts’, large wide spaces to allow tanks and artillery to maneuver. They reinforced or rebuilt bridges to accommodate the weight of war machinery. While everybody else trained, the 93^rd did what Engineering regiments do—they built.

Temporary Bridges came down when it was over

During the second week of the 93^rd’s road construction work, a hurricane hammered the coast. Rain drenched the fields and pastures and swelled the rivers. Mud stood ankle deep and chiggers and rats and venomous snakes threatened everywhere.

The Red Army initially deployed with 130,000 troops and 600 tanks from Shreveport in Northwest Louisiana. The Blue Army, 215,000 troops and three anti-tank divisions, charged up from Lake Charles in Southwest Louisiana.

Reporter Leon Kay informed readers of the Amarillo Daily News that the two armies fell on each other with tanks and artillery along a thirty-mile front. The maneuvers, he wrote, “looked like anything but games. I watched light and medium tanks crashing amid clouds of red dust through the pine woods of Louisiana with the crew manning the guns as if they actually were moving into enemy lines.” When Private James D. Robinson died under his overturned tank, he brought a gruesome realism to the exercise.

The black soldiers of the 93^rd laid logs to simulate mine fields along the flank of the 3^rd Army. They built “prisoner of war camps” and demolished bridges on the 3^rd Army’s east flank.

It was a lot more dangerous than you would have thought.

In all twenty-four soldiers died during the maneuvers–seven in motor vehicle accidents, five in airplane crashes. Seven men drowned, two died from diseases, one died when struck by lightning, one died from heart attack and one committed suicide.

The maneuvers done and the maneuverer’s departed, the black men of the 93rd remained in the field to clean up. They rebuilt fences, graded tank rutted fields back smooth, and rebuilt small bridges that hadn’t survived the battle.

Do You See It?

Sticking together and taking care of each other.

“Do you see it?” An exasperated black soldier dropped his pants. A few residents of Skagway, checking the credibility of some white officer, had asked if black soldiers had tails.

White residents of Skagway didn’t know quite what to make of the Army’s segregationist policy. They reacted to the black soldiers with curiosity—cautious curiosity.

Link to another story on Skagway

Racism following the black soldiers of the 93^rd Engineers to Yukon raised its ugly head long before they reached Canada. Recalling his trip on the Rock Island, Anthony Mouton remembered a one hour stop in a small Arkansas town. White soldiers climbed down from their trains, and a patriotic white woman moved along the tracks, passing out doughnuts. Officers on Mouton’s train hurriedly ordered the men to stay aboard—out of sight and without doughnuts.

In April of 1942, barely out of his teens, Eddie Waters found himself on a train going God knows where, passing through the Dakotas. On a train ahead of the one carrying Company B, officers ordered all the shades lowered so people along the tracks couldn’t see into the cars. B Company, though, hadn’t got the word. When Private Waters innocently raised a shade, a young white officer rushed over, slapped him, and shouted, “You will not pull shades up. We don’t want them to see you.”

Sgt. Albert France, a black non-commissioned officer in A Company recalled bitterly, “One thing I remember quite well is that segregation existed even though we were a part of the United States Army”. Pretty sure Sgt. France would have considered, “do you see it?” a great answer.

Sgt. John Bollin of F Company was 22 when he landed in Skagway. He had known the segregation in Louisiana and at Camp Livingston. “We didn’t exist before the war and we don’t exist now in a war.” It was the same in Skagway.

PBS on Racism in the WWII Army

Six year old Carl Mulvihill lived in Skagway in 1942. Black troops quartered across the alley from his house hurt his feelings, ignored his waves and smiles. He learned later that the army had forbidden black soldiers to talk or visit with any temporary white neighbors.

Like Dirt in Front of a Dozer Blade

Like dirt in front of a dozer blade, the problems that plagued the Alaska Highway Project piled high in May and the hell-bent advance into the wilderness threatened to dissolve in chaos and confusion. Three entry points, Skagway, Valdez and Dawson Creek, swarmed with confused troops trying desperately to get organized.

Getting equipment to the North Country posed the first problem—especially in the Northern Sector.

In 1942 a road building engineering regiment came equipped with an enormous quantity of heavy equipment and other vehicles to support it.

The few troops the regiments managed to put to work attacked the road with axes, shovels, picks and wheelbarrows. Their heavy equipment jammed the docks in Seattle and the jam got worse by the day—like dirt in front of a dozer blade.

In Seattle General Hoge found E.W. Elliott, a private contractor who had managed to assemble a flotilla of freighters, tugs, barges, scows and several pleasure yachts. By hook or by crook, Elliott began to move Hoge’s equipment.

The second problem, getting the equipment and the men who would use it off Elliott’s vessels and through a seemingly endless wilderness to the work site—emerged as in its most virulent form in Yukon Territory.

Link to Another Story “Segregation came to Skagway in 1942.”

Equipment and supplies arriving in Skagway quickly overwhelmed the tiny harbor. Worse, the harbor’s twenty-foot tides made the process of unloading the vessels complicated. Barges had to time their arrival for high tide. As the water level fell, Port battalion troops hurried their crawler cranes in to unload them before the tide came back up. Behind the crawler cranes, trucks sped back and forth, moving the cargo to higher ground.

Worse, material safely above the water line in Skagway still had a long way to go to reach the highway and its builders. In April WP&YR trains crossed the pass ten to fifteen times a day—a huge increase from anything the tiny railroad had ever experienced before. In May that number increased to thirty-four daily trains.

The Juggernaut

The Juggernaut, the Corps of Engineers proposed drive into Northern Canada would not “drive” easily. But the ‘very highest authority’ had ordered the Corps to build a highway to Alaska and do it immediately, and the Corps leaped into action. The Corps existed to build things fast under difficult circumstances. They could drive the juggernaut.

In Washington, asked for a plan, General Sturdevant submitted one in two days, knowing as he did so, that it was at best an outline of a plan, and even as he wrote it, he set the machinery of the Corps in motion.

LInk to another story on “Colonel Hoge”

He had already made his most important choice—Colonel (soon to be General) William Hoge would command the effort on the ground. The two men met on 12 February 1942 to consider their urgent task—turning Sturdevant’s outline into a real plan. Both Army Engineers, they understood one thing that a civilian engineer would have considered absurd—they did not have the luxury of time to complete the plan before they started to implement it.

Just a week after that meeting, Colonel Hoge’s boots hit the ground in

Edmonton, and twenty-four hours later in Dawson Creek, British Columbia, he shook hands with Homer Keith, the Canadian assigned to ‘liase’ with him.

Climbing into Keith’s car, Hoge and his contingent headed north over the frozen winter road to Fort Nelson. Hoge got his first look at the challenge his troops would face.

Keith led Hoge to Knox McCusker who educated the American. McCusker warned Hoge that the winter trail he had just travelled—from Fort St. John to Fort Nelson, would disappear in the March thaw—a huge potential problem.

In a 1968 interview, Hoge remembered the trip with Keith.

“I also ran into Knox McCusker… One of the things [I] hadn’t realized was the winter road would become useless in the summertime as it traversed frozen muskeg… I ordered an engineering regiment moved into Fort Nelson over the winter road before the spring breakup…”

Hoge directed Colonel Ingalls, commander of the 35th Engineers, who travelled with him, to return to his regiment at Fort Ord, California, to move them immediately to Dawson Creek by rail and push them on north to Fort Nelson before the thaw.

If Hoge hadn’t yet figured out what the regiment needed to do, he knew where they would have to do it. Hoge and the thousands he summoned to the North Country, plunged on into March—and into the wilderness—putting boots on the ground and making it up as they went along.

Deep Forest and Rugged Mountains

Deep forest and rugged mountains, 175 miles to the Sikanni Chief River and then 150 more miles on to Fort Nelson, confronted a traveler going north from Dawson Creek at the turn of the century. He travelled a path that had changed little from that used by the primordial First Nations.

The forty-six miles from Dawson Creek to Fort St. John presented only minor problems—at least by north country standards. But north from Fort St. John a traveler entered a whole different world–the deep forest.

Link to another story “Equal Opportunity Torture”

During 1919 and 1920 a white trapper named Glen Minaker and Joe Apsassin, a Cree from the Blueberry Reserve, blazed a primitive pack trail through flash flood torrents, knee deep muskeg, and vicious mosquitoes from Fort St. John to Fort Nelson. In winter, when snow rendered their trail a dog team road, men hauled freight to Fort Nelson over a “brushed-out winter road.” And then a colorful immigrant named E.J. Spinney introduced bulldozers to the road building equation in British Columbia.

Grant McConachie, the entrepreneurial bush pilot, struggling with transporting fuel to his scattered airstrips, turned to Spinney. Farmers in the Peace River Valley had discovered caterpillar tractors for land clearing, and winter idled them exactly when Spinney needed them.

In February of 1941 Spinney’s “tractor train” followed by truckloads of aviation fuel ground over the trail to Fort Nelson.

Further north in the mountainous Liard River country Frank Watson had created another small settlement, Watson Lake. Fourteen-year-old Frank and his father came north with the gold rush but they wound up at the Lake in Liard country instead of the Klondike. In 1900 Watson senior returned to California and son Frank married an Indian girl and built a cabin on the lake.

In the early thirties one Knox McCusker teamed up with Glen Minaker to guide “…wealthy American hunting parties and exploratory parties of all kinds, north and west of Fort St. John.” In 1931 when McCusker guided Mrs. Mary Henry into the wilderness north of Fort Nelson, he laid out a route to Liard Hot Springs at Watson’s doorstep.

Through the 1930’s as men thought more and more about a land route to Alaska, McCusker thought he might know the way to go; and, with Minaker he plotted a possible course for such a highway over the Continental Divide to Watson Lake. When General Buckner, ordered to build the Alaska Highway, turned up at Dawson Creek in early 1942 McCusker showed him the first big part of the way.

Watson Lake Today

The Land of the Midnight Sun

The Land of the Midnight Sun could offer a traveler the spectacle of a golden lavender sunset in the west and a rising moon, dusted with the same hue in the east. Oversized and spectacular, the land dwarfed every living thing in it—mosquitoes, moose, grizzlies and, very occasionally, men.

Winters surrounded everything in this country with temperatures that could freeze coffee between the pot and the cup. In spring red-purple fireweed blanketed the ground and, as the top layers of permafrost melted, stately spruce trees slowly leaned. Ice and snow melted into roaring rivers that scoured mountains down into flats and spread them in great alluvial fans of gravel and dirt. Water melted into the dirt and formed mud and more mud and, like lava, slowly swallowed random logs. It would soon be swallowing the bulldozers of the Corps.

The line on the map that the Corps of Engineers would turn into the rough draft of the Alaska Highway in 1942, started at Dawson Creek, British Columbia and ended at Delta, Alaska.

Link to another story “The Only Possible Route”

Important, powerful men in Canada and the United States had been analyzing and debating various routes to connect the Continental United States to its remote territory of Alaska for decades—analyzing economic impact, military effectiveness, and hundreds of other important considerations. Came the war, the Corps infuriated those men by blithely ignoring all their collective wisdom, pouring men and equipment into Dawson Creek, Skagway and Valdez before they’d even finished collecting the maps or started surveying the route.

They had no other choice. The North Country offered but one possible path and it had come down to the Corps from prehistory. Tracing that path as it existed, in those last days before the Corps descended on it, one knows that the Corps had little idea what lay in front of them. And those people scattered along that 1500-mile path, certainly had no idea what was about to descend upon them.

During the very short summers, the temperatures occasionally rose as high as 90 degrees. The mud dried into dust that truck tires would soon stir into small cyclones of grit that stuck to teeth and eyelashes. Young elk and buffalo calves with their mothers came to the rivers and lush fields to feed and drink. The rivers teemed with salmon and grayling. But the men of the Corps would find the water too cold for bathing. As they sweated in the sweltering heat, mosquitoes and no see ums would erupt from the boggy centers of disturbed muskeg to decorate pancake batter and torture skin.

Perhaps most important, the Corps would find that, unlike men, the North Country made no distinctions between those who challenged it. The mosquitoes and the no see ums landed and feasted on skin, utterly indifferent to whether it was black skin or white. They offered equal opportunity torture.

Turner Timberlake and Our Obsession with the Alcan

Turner “Tim” Timberlake passed away in 2001, devastating his daughter (and my wife) Chris. We missed having him in our lives. Chris came to realize how little she really knew about his life. Daughters know fathers as larger than life figures. The man behind the father? Not so much.

Link to another story about Tim “Dear Pop”

A few years later when Chris’s mother passed, we found among her effects boxes of photos and a collection of old letters from Tim. What a profound revelation! We had known that Tim helped build the famous Alaska highway during World War II, but mostly we knew a couple of funny stories—that was it. He had written the letters in the boxes while he was there in Yukon—a young man writing letters to his girl back home. And the father Chris knew hadn’t written these letters. These letters had come from a passionate young man, full of piss, vinegar and himself—the age of our oldest granddaughter—and they showed every one of the characteristics of that age.

Chris read the letters and then she dug into the photographs—grainy, black and white, images of the man who was—but also wasn’t—her father and images of a very different place and very different people. She read the letters again; and, between the lines, his passionate pride in the project he worked on began to sink in. We both began to study the incredible construction project that created the first land route from the continental United States to Alaska, an epic project and a very big deal.

And another thing struck us as we looked at the old photographs. Most of the faces were black We knew, vaguely, that Tim had served with black soldiers. We didn’t understand army segregation during that era—didn’t know that black soldiers served exclusively with other black soldiers all commanded by white officers. That struck us both as wrong, but Tim, no way a racist, played a part in it. How, exactly, did that work?

Another tour through the letters and photos had Chris thoroughly hooked—obsessed, I told her. The sewing room and office in the basement of our home began to fill with books and pamphlets and printouts from the internet. Chris read everything she could find about the highway and then went looking for more. The Highway came to dominate her thoughts and our conversations.

Seven regiments built the highway, but the black soldiers, like ghosts, had somehow disappeared from the history. Newspaper and magazine articles, film, photos from 1942 followed the white regiments. More recent material revealed a few details about the black regiments—but not Tim’s regiment, the 93^rd Engineers.