STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

Canada’s Reaction

A symbol of Canadian independence and authority

Canada attracts people up from the United States and we carry attitudes and assumptions north across the border. A famously friendly lot, Canadians don’t always challenge our mistaken assumptions. And they don’t take us to task for our attitudes.

The things we get up to down here don’t always leave Canada, our oldest and very best international friend, with a warm fuzzy feeling. And the things we get up to up there can leave our neighbors even less happy!

Maternity Alaska Style

Maternity ward? A cabin in Eagle Alaska—in January.

If the history of the subarctic north fascinates you, people who choose to live there especially fascinate you. The weather, the terrain, the geology, all downright hostile, draw utterly unique people who choose to live there because of the difficulty and danger, not in spite of it.

Throughout the twentieth century, the prospect of free land has drawn people from the lower 48 to Alaska. During the seventies high wages from contractors constructing the Trans-Alaska Pipeline drew thousands. Most of those people turned around and headed back home as soon as possible.

The ones who stayed became Alaskans.

Shirley Balinski–More on Homesteading Alaska

A year or so ago researcher Chris talked me into signing up for a massage. I loved it. I get one once a month. My massage therapist, a tiny little lady, into crazy sports like roller derby, fell and damaged her wrist recently and this morning I met a replacement—a replacement whose parents homesteaded in Alaska, who grew up in Alaska!

I didn’t get the whole story, of course. I got excited and talked too much. But one story I did get gives you the flavor of Alaskans.

Pregnant for the first time my therapist’s mom’s maternity ward was a cabin at Eagle on the Yukon River. This lady delivered her first daughter in January with no one in attendance but her young husband. Stuck in that snow bound cabin, the baby girl didn’t contact the rest of humanity for four weeks.

Alaskans!

Alaska Lady, Mary Hanson–Another Homesteader

I’m told mom and especially dad love to tell stories. My new best friend promised to put me in contact.

Expect more from these folks in the next few weeks.

For more on homesteading Alaska

Sgt Lee on the Alaska Highway

The Most Famous Achievement of Sgt Lee’s Regiment

Sikanni Chief Bridge

Staff Sergeant Otis E. Lee remembered his time with the 95^th Engineering Regiment on the Alaska Highway Project succinctly and pungently. A black soldier, Sgt Lee did not enjoy his time in British Columbia.

In charge of first platoon he supervised transportation—trucks, tanks (armored personnel carriers, actually), tractors, road graders… His men drove it, operated it and maintained it. After the road “holed through” in September, Lee’s regiment remained in country to maintain it. Lee remembered keeping the snow off…

The managed to get blades for the trucks—sand and snow blades. But they had no salt. The mission, to keep one-third of the highway open, could not have been more difficult.

One of Lee’s drivers drove his truck off the side of a mountain and died. Three others tried to walk back to camp from their disabled truck and froze to death.

Sergeant Lee sums up his experience this way, “The only good day I had was the day I left. That was on Easter Sunday. The snow was three feet deep and it was still snowing.”

And, perhaps the saddest memory? “I saw only one woman in the eleven months I was up there.”

Video of Snow Removal Today in BC

Smitty Schmitt’s War—with the elements in Yukon

Smitty Schmitt, early in 1942, received orders to report for duty at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana. He and his wife packed up and headed south from their home in Schenectady, NY. In camp, he reported to the regimental adjutant of the 93^rd Engineers.

93rd Engineers Making Road

“Do you have a car and are you married?” the officer asked. Smitty, of course replied “yes” to both questions. “Sell your car and ship your wife home, because we are shipping out in two days.”

Thus began Lt. Donald J. Schmitt’s adventure.

With a few other white officers and 1,200 black soldiers, the lieutenant travelled by train across the United States; then by ship through the North Pacific and up the Inside Passage to Skagway, Alaska; and, finally, by narrow gauge rail straight up into the sky—and into Yukon, Canada.

From the Subarctic North to Burma and India

Dutch Harbor, the Next Island Over and the Main Facility in the Aleutins

Gouging a Road through Yukon

Clyde S. Deal came to te subarctic north to join the 93^rd Engineering Regiment in Yukon in April 1942. Through the summer he helped build the supply road from Carcross to Johnson’s Crossing on the Teslin River, learned to deal with muskeg and airplane sized mosquitoes. Through the late summer and into the fall he worked behind the white 340^th on the road to the Continental Divide.

Teslin River, the center of the Action for Clyde’s Regiment

By November the subarctic north had showed its true colors. Clyde found himself in a frigid camp at Judith Creek about fifty miles from Whitehorse headquarters. Working at maintaining the rough road they had just helped build they heard, one day, a loud air horn. Turning to look they spotted a Greyhound bus moving up the Highway!

Exercising the “mushroom” approach to management (keep ‘em in the dark and feed them sh*t) the Army hadn’t bothered to inform them that the road had opened!

The bus carried no civilians, only soldiers, one an officer who later joined the 93^rd in the subarctic.

Clyde moved with the regiment to Chilkoot Barracks at Haynes, Alaska in December, and then he shipped out on a troopship through the storm swept Gulf of Alaska to a new subarctic home in the Aleutians.

At Unmak, the next island out from Dutch Harbor, Clyde’s company built barracks, offices, runways and generally maintained the defense facility while he advanced to Captain and to command of his company. The regiment supported the Army Air Corps and the Navy at Unmak until August 1944 when they took ship and navigated the Gulf again to Fort Lewis, Washington.

The Army being the Army and wartime being wartime, they took ship again almost immediately and headed across the Pacific to decided non subarctic Burma.

They sweltered in tropic heat and humidity until August 1945 when the Army Air Corps and the Atomic Bomb brought an abrupt end to the war with Japan. The Army shipped Clyde and his men to Calcutta and then across the Pacific again to home.

“I’d say the 93^rd had the best of extremes… twenty-seven months in the Yukon, Alaska, and the Aleutians followed by seven or eight months in India and Burma.”

Liard Hot Springs

Liard Hot Springs, four hundred seventy miles northwest of Dawson Creek, British Columbia and Mile Zero of the Alaska Highway, provided a thoroughly unusual experience for the soldiers who built the great Highway in 1942.

Appendicitis

The Bridge to the North Side of the River

Appendicitis doesn’t normally amount to a major threat—unless you get it on the North Bank of the White River in Northern Yukon in November 1942. The you need bush pilot Les Cook and his Norseman Monoplane.

Comrades place the young soldier on a litter and carry him two miles to the river. The bridge isn’t finished but they lay planks across the gaps and carry him across. From there a field ambulance carries him back to the Donjek camp.

But appendicitis requires surgery and that calls for a surgeon. Major Norberg radios Whitehorse for an evacuation plane. And they wait. Apparently evacuation pilots hesitate to fly into the teeth of a Northern Yukon storm. They wait in vain. Major Norberg radios again, explain that the patient can’t wait any longer for evacuation, the surgeon (s) need to come to Donjek. Appendicitis can become urgent very quickly.

Enter Les Cook and two Army surgeons who volunteer to brave the weather between them and Donjek. Cook flew past Donjek in the snow, saw the white and knew he had to go back. On the ground soldiers scrounged vehicles, lined them up along a sand flat with their headlights lighting the “runway”. Cook brought them down through the snow and an ambulance delivered the surgeons to the headquarters building.

Spare Parts

Spare parts became precious. The Alaska Highway that spooled out behind the soldiers with their dozers and carryalls and hand tools in 1942 swarmed with smaller vehicles, especially deuce and a half trucks. The equipment plowing through the woods required more than mountains of 55-gallon drums of fuel. Mud pulled hoses loose, tracks and rollers broke. Truck axles broke. Tires wore out and blew out.

Fuel for the Monster Dozers

Each company assigned ‘mechanics’ as the first line of defense against equipment problems. Relatively few of these men brought training and experience to the job. One of them, John Bollin of Company F of the 93^rdEngineers, had never clapped eyes on most of his equipment before he arrived in the North Country. Civilian John had worked for a dry cleaner in Virginia. Years after the fact, he told a PBS interviewer, “He was an asphalt and concrete city boy and didn’t know nothing about this heavy equipment.” He learned fast, on the job and in a hurry. “We were able to overcome what we did not know by trial and error.”

The regimental motor pool backed up the field mechanics with specialized equipment and better trained mechanics. In the 93^rd Charlie Mittenbaum, a PRA master mechanic provided training and advice.

In the end, though, regardless of who did maintenance and repair, they couldn’t do it without parts and supplies. The deuce-and-a-half’s crawling the road carried those too—when they could get them.

Not exactly the highway we might picture

In the field and in the motor pool, mechanics resorted to cannibalizing broken equipment to get parts for other broken equipment. Long deadlines, cannibalized vehicles waiting for parts, sprouted and grew across the yards at the regimental motor pools. Other broken vehicles littered the roadsides.

Civilian specialists worked alongside the Quartermaster Corps to try to satisfy the urgent need. Parts orders overwhelmed the Caterpillar offices in Whitehorse and Ft. St. John. Orders for tires overwhelmed G.K. Allen who operated tire supply facilities in Ft. St. John and Whitehorse. An order for 1250 tires might result in delivery of 250.

Fuel for the Monster Dozers

A Typical Fuel Dump. This one at Ft Nelson, British Columbia

Fuel, the bulldozers plowing through the North Country wilderness in 1942 had an enormous appetite for it. If supporting the men in the woods and their furious labor meant, first and foremost, getting supplies to them, getting fuel to the big dozers posed the single biggest supply challenge.

Our Book, We Fought the Road

Writing our book, We Fought the Road, started Christine and I on the story telling adventure that led to this blog. Many of you have asked abou the book and where to get it. You’ll find the it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and in your local bookstore.