STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

D8 A Bucket of Olive Drab

When the 35th and the 340th closed the road at Contact Creek, the Colonels replaced the catskinners on the dozers.

“A Bucket of Olive Drab,’ the Caterpillar Company called the D8 Bulldozer they shipped to the Army. They also called it the “indispensable, all-purpose weapon of the Engineers”. The big crawlers made the Alaska Highway Project possible in 1942.

The Big Machines Could be Delicate Too

The D8 weighed in at twenty- three tons. Its six-cylinder, air cooled, diesel engine moved it over the ground at 5.8 miles per hour. Its starter, itself a 24-horsepower gas engine, only operated in warm temperatures, so, during winter, the machines ran 24/7. They would have had to anyway, to prevent oil from congealing in the crankcase.

The mud played hell but the dozers and the men coped.

Each regiment had twenty D8’s and an assembly of smaller tractors-D4’s, D6’s and D7’s. The D8’s worked twenty to twenty-two hours a day, seven days a week. Theoretically they stopped for two hours each day for maintenance—minor repairs and lubrication. Catskinners regularly diverted from the path to rescue other dozers—and trucks and jeeps—mired in mud. They also diverted to drag carry-all scrapers and non-motorized graders through the woods.

The dozers forded small streams, ferried over rivers. On the ground between the waters, they gouged a continuous sixty to ninety-foot-wide right of way through the woods. Occasionally the Catskinners stopped to help the company built a bridge or culvert, but mostly they plunged ahead. And these ten-foot-tall monsters, pushing a twenty-one-foot blade, pulling a fifteen foot body, lumbering, often in tandem, through the woods, came to epitomize the Alcan project.

As proud catskinners worked the levers, D8 engines roared, spewing black smoke, and giant tracks ground through dirt and mud, alternately spinning and catching. Out front, giant blades pushed down trees; gouged out dirt and stumps. Men swarmed around them, cutting and milling trees for bridges and culverts; burning the ‘slash’ or stockpiling it for corduroy. From his platform the catskinner couldn’t see over the engine and the giant blade to the ground immediately in front. Stories of commanders’ jeeps squashed and buried by marauding D8’s fill the annals of the Road.

D8 Specifications

Monte’s Legs

The story of Monte’s legs has Alaska all over it.

Another unique Alaskan

Life there is like nowhere else on the planet. It takes a unique kind of person to live there and love it.

A few months ago, researching our work in progress, my partner and researcher, Chris, ran across a story that ran in the Fairbanks News-Miner on August 15, 1942. She passed it on, thinking there might be a post in it.

There’s definitely a post in it.

The reporter tells us that he got his information from a gentleman named Richard C. Rothenberg. So I’ll tell you that he is my source too.

In December of 1910 and Alaska trapper named Monte ran his trap line on a day when the mercury dropped to 58 below zero. Being a trapper, and an Alaska trapper at that he forged on. And his legs and feet froze!

He made it back to his cabin and sent word back to Fairbanks that he had a problem.

Doc Mathewson broke out his sled, harnessed his dogs and went looking for Monte. He found him, brought him on his sled back to the hospital. And amputated both of his legs.

Kind of a disaster for a trapper.

The Fairbanks community liked Monte and Alaskans stick together. They did a fund raiser and accumulated enough money to get him to Seattle and get him equipped with artificial limbs–$3,800.

Monte travelled by sleigh to Valdez and from there to Seattle by steamship.

Eight months later, in August, he landed, equipped with man made legs, back in Valdez. Leaving his ship behind, he broke in the new equipment by walking to Fairbanks—370 miles. (I know there wasn’t much traffic on the Richardson, but surely someone could have stopped and offered a ride!)

I, of course, don’t know Mr. Rothenburg. But the Daily News Miner clearly found him credible.

And Alaskans are incredibly tough.

I’m deeply ashamed of my suspicion that loyalty to the story trumped loyalty to the facts.

Today’s News Miner

Civilians on the Alaska Highway Project

Endless Trains of Equipment from Iowa Headed for Alaska

Soldiers and Civilians

Civilians work different. The Army can dispatch soldiers, organized into military units with equipment more-or- less-in hand, relatively quickly in an emergency. Soldiers in wartime face danger and endure hardship. Speed trumps quality. In 1942 at the point of the spear, soldiers plowed into the Far North wilderness, endured, survived and carved out a rudimentary Alaska Highway.

But the Army also turned to the Public Roads Administration (PRA) to surround the battling soldiers with civilian contractors. Civilians would take more time to get organized, recruit workers and get to the job. The civilians would not expect to face unreasonable danger or endure unreasonable hardship. But, once in place, civilians would work more methodically, would concern themselves with quality as well as speed.

The Corps had dispatched soldiers to Alaska in April, the soldiers of the 97th. In May the PRA dispatched Iowa Contractors Lytle and Green and their civilians.

Lytle and Green had three primary missions. They would “widen, improve or relocate” the road from Gulkana to Slana. They would follow the “engineer troops” from Slana through Mentasta Pass and on to the Tanana River, upgrading their “pioneer truck road.” And they would build a road from Big Delta southeast to the Tanana River crossing. Immediately after Lytle and Green signed their contract with the PRA, they went back to Iowa and signed contracts with fourteen subcontractors.

The fourteen Iowa contractors “…from Cumberland to Independence, from Cedar Rapids to Hawarden and a dozen other Iowa communities,” immediately began recruiting men to do the work and loading equipment—bulldozers, scoop shovels, graders and trucks–onto rail cars.

Through late May, June and into July a flood of civilian workers made their way north. Some sailed north from Seattle or Prince Rupert. Most went to Edmonton, Alberta by rail and then flew north to airports near Big Delta and Gulkana on Army transport or commercial airlines.

The civilians came to Gulkana HQ–and waited.

Getting men north proved relatively easy. All the contractors had men in place long before they could get equipment to them and put them to work. Chained down on railroad cars, some of the equipment made its way to Seattle and some made its way to Prince Rupert in British Columbia. Equipment piled up at both ports through June while the contractors struggled to find ocean transport to Valdez. On June 7 fifty carloads of equipment waited in the yards at Prince Rupert.

Milton Duesenberg’s History of Civilians on the Road

Food and, Inevitably, Latrines and Garbage

Food topped the list of things every soldier on the Alaska Highway in 1942 absolutely despised. Without exception, the soldiers hated their monotonous and dismal meals. Fresh food supplemented endless field rations, but only intermittently. One company of the 93^rd Engineers actually had no cook stove; the mess sergeant made do with an open fire and an oil drum oven.

Chickens by the Truckload

Leonard Cox of the 340^th Engineers loved it when Mutton made it to the field. When mutton appeared in the mess, Leonard could eat all he wanted, because everybody else hated it.

Lt. Walter Dudrow of the 93^rd remembered mutton the way most of the men did. “The cooks tried many ways to make this ‘damn’ goat taste good, but we had it too often.”

When they could, the soldiers supplemented their rations themselves with moose, bear and fish. Andrew Jackson of the 97^th remembered, “Bear steaks taste as good as T-bone steaks.”

Mostly, though, the soldiers subsisted on dehydrated eggs and potatoes, insect dotted pancakes and most of all canned meat and chili. William Griggs of the 97^th told an interviewer, years later, about taking chili to a nearby native village and trading it for smoked salmon. “Finally, the Indians told us to bring something else to trade. They were tired of the chili.”

The soldiers despised the fare, but they ate it. And men who eat, to put it somewhat delicately, eliminate. Companies in the field had to get rid of garbage and “eliminations”. Chester Russell of the 35^th described the problem this way.

“You’ve got a regiment of men up there, no water, no toilet facilities and you’ve got to make up this camp, toilets, garbage pits. And you’ve got to dig through this ice, and you’ve got one air compressor, and all the rest is picks. You hit that old ice with a pick and it just bounced back in your face. Every time you moved, they had to dig out the garbage pits… and then when they moved again, they’d cover them all up and put a sign up saying what it was, garbage pit or a latrine.

Does an Army travel on its stomach?

Old Fort, Thad Bryson’s Return

Old Fort, North Carolina. Thad Bryson grew up there, but in the run up to WWII, the Army reached out for him. He wound up with the 97^th Engineering Regiment at Eglin Field in Florida where he met the Tuskegee Airmen. Black men had more choices than he had dreamed.

Thad Bryson meets the Tuskegee Airmen

The Army sent him north to Alaska with his regiment where he cooked for the men in his company through their summer and fall on the Alaska Highway Project and then through the misery of the coldest winter on record in the Tanana Valley. When a white gas stove blew up in his face in early 1943, his white company commander saved his vision by insisting the medics ship him to Walter Reed Army Hospital.

Thad Bryson’s Winter

Discharged from Water Reed, Thad returned to Old Fort, but he lived a very different life than the one destined for him.

Thad married, had kids, worked two and even three jobs to make ends meet. In Old Fort the War and the Army had changed nothing except Thad. Jim Crow, alive and well through the forties and fifties and well into the sixties dominated his life and the life of his family. Thad cooked in the kitchen at white Marion High School just a couple of miles from his house. His son Fred rode a rickety bus 13 miles over rough roads to the black school.

Thad’s boss, the white school principle, noted and regretted the stupidity of that rule. He did nothing to change it, but at least he recognized absurdity when he saw it.

The white school board closed this black school in Old Fort, forced the kids to travel several miles to Marion.

Old Fort didn’t change, but Thad Bryson and millions of black men like him had changed, and nothing could change them back. Thad raised Fred and his siblings with aspirations. Taught them to survive, but to accept no limits.

The black children protested the closing of their school.

Fred assured us that some white people reached through the barrier between the races. In 1950 the Sears store in Asheville had two water fountains. Fred, a thirsty little boy, stepped to the fountain reserved for blacks and found it broken. He wanted a drink, and the fountain reserved for whites stood right there. Thad regretfully told his son he’d have to wait.

A white man standing nearby heard the exchange; looked at little Fred and asked him if he wanted a drink. Fred nodded. The man picked him up, carried him to the white fountain and helped him to a drink of water.

It really doesn’t have to be so damned complicated.

Near the end of Thad’s life, Fred asked him if he could go back and live it over, would he change anything. The old man grinned at his son. “I might want to go to college and then learn to fly airplanes.”

For a fascinating look at black history in Old Fort

Thad Bryson Winter

This is the country where Thad spent his winter.

Thad Bryson, a young black man from Old Fort, North Carolina met the Tuskegee Airmen. Shortly after that his regiment, the 97^th Engineering Regiment quite suddenly left Florida—for Alaska!

Thad Bryson meets the Tuskegee Airmen

Thad’s son Fred shared with us his dad’s stories. Like a lot of veterans, Thad didn’t talk about it much; but, when he did, the word cold came up a lot. And, coming from the memory of a man who slept in a tent at 70 below, the word “cold” reverberates.

More on Winter in the Tanana Valley Alaska

Thad grew up complaining about sharing a tiny bedroom in a two-room farmhouse, but in his Alaska tent he would have “given anything to be back in that despised bedroom”.

In Thad’s old age, son Fred often drove him to visit his old friend and Alaska partner, Boyd. Thad and Boyd had partnered “through hell.”

Fred’s recounting of Thad’s memories led inevitably to the intricacies of race.

In 1942 in a segregated Army, young white officers led the young black soldiers to the road. Young white men and young black men in the 1930’s grew up in two different Americas; shared the same physical space but little else. If black men thought about white men or white men about black, they thought in caricature. Most of the white officers brought prejudice to the Army and the Army amplified it. Most of the black soldiers brought fear to the Army. And the Army amplified it.

Fred made the startling comment that he wished he knew his dad’s company commander’s name; wished he knew because Thad remembered him with affection.

Off the road but still in Alaska in early 1943, Thad served Company B as a cook, and one morning a white gas kitchen stove blew up in his face; seriously burned him and threatened his eyesight. From his cot in the hospital tent he told the captain he wanted to stay with the regiment, but the captain would have none of it.

The captain faced off with the reluctant Army doctors, insisted that they send Thad back to Walter Reed hospital for treatment. Treatment at Walter Reed almost certainly saved his sight. That same company commander arranged for a medical discharge that sent Thad home to Old Fort.

Fred wonders about that white captain. And, God knows, we do to.

Researcher Chris, of course, knew his name. Captain Roger Forrestal. “Yes,” Fred said with a big smile. “That was it.”

Researcher is trying hard to find Forrestal’s kids.

The Road to Fairbanks

Richardson’s road to Fairbanks replaced Abercrombie’s trail to Eagle on the Yukon, but nobody replaced the Richardson Highway until the US Army Corps of Engineers, in a feat many had considered impossible, installed a totally new way to get to Fairbanks—a land route from the railhead at Dawson Creek, British Columbia.

Humble, Vaguely Malodorous Canvas

Humble, vaguely malodorous, canvas, on the Alaska Highway in 1942, supported life in bivouac. Canvas tents provided barracks, mess halls and offices. Men slept on folding canvas cots. Canvas “lister bags” stored treated drinking water. Canvas enclosures became mechanical repair shops. In canvas enclosures, soldiers transformed empty fuel drums into stoves, showers and bath tubs.

Routine but Not Easy

The 18th Engineers Bivouacked along Kluane Lake in Northern Yukon.

Life settled into a routine by the first of August. That didn’t mean it got easy. All the soldiers, white and black, had worked in the woods for weeks. The racial issues that plagued the black regiments hadn’t gone away, but by August they lurked in the background–part of the routine.

New Plan and new route–more on August

The details of daily living and working—eating; sleeping; recreating (or lack thereof) and, above all, gouging a highway out of the forbidding wilderness, one mile at a time—had fallen into a pattern that more or less applied to all of the regiments. The road emerged, threading its way through the vast wilderness; and everybody focused on completing it.

Black Soldiers of the 93rd Bridge Deadman’s Creek

The mosquitoes disappeared in August, but the North Country had more creatures than one up its sleeve. Swarming Gnats, accompanied by “no-see-ums”, replaced the mosquitoes; made the mosquitoes seem almost gentle by comparison. Small, built for speed, a gnat used its tiny mandibles to attack and eat a man’s flesh, leaving behind a swollen, itching clot of blood. Gnats especially favored ears, but they weren’t picky, and clothing offered no protection. One surveyor, eyes swollen and ears bloody, found six more gnats in his navel.

The North Country finally dried out in August, but that, too, offered the troops only temporary relief. The endless mud dried into endless red dust that swirled to cover duffle bags, pack the creases in fatigues and abrade vital machine parts. Soldiers of the 93^rd, convoyed by truck to Teslin Post, arrived unrecognizable, their faces totally obscured by red dust.

Life in the field had become routine; but no amount of routine could make it easy.

Kidnap the Kids

Meeting the Inland Tlingits

Kidnap the kids for their own good, government policy in the early 20^th Century.

At the biannual Inland Tlingit Celebration Chris and I have horned in at the head table—and got away with it. We came to meet Ida Calmegane, but two other elders share the head table with her. And we learn the history of the kidnap.

Ida Calmegane, Emma Shorty and Pearl Keenan are Tlingit Elders, not just respected but revered as repositories of history, language and culture—living archives.

Emma Shorty, now in her mid-eighties, lived a sad story in First Nations history.

Early in the 20^th century the government of Yukon decided that Tlingit kids could live happy, prosperous lives only by ceasing to be Tlingits. A helpful government would turn them into white people. Accordingly, they dispatched the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Mounties) to kidnap the kids, take them from their families and move them into special schools.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs took four-year-old Emma from her family in Teslin; took her to the Chooutla Indian School in Carcross. Schools like Chooutla exercised discipline that amounted to inexcusable cruelty. Getting caught speaking Tlingit brought an especially severe reaction. Emma vividly remembered the misery of her twelve years at the Chooutla School.