A vast support network came to the far north in early 1942, right behind the seven engineering regiments. By July the regiments worked in the wilderness building road. The support network had mushroomed, and its parts and pieces worked all around the engineers.
Topo Engineers surveyed routes through every kind of terrain the path of the Highway had to offer. Port Battalions and Railhead Quartermaster detachments moved trucks and dozers from ship to rail car. In Skagway, much to the dismay of the WP&YR management, an Army Railroad Battalion came to run the railroad for the duration. Signal Corps companies scattered the length of the way among the field companies, providing communication.
Supplies at Dawson Creek
Quartermaster Truck companies worked out of each port of entry—Dawson Creek, Skagway, Valdez—hauling an endless river of food, supplies, parts, and, especially, diesel fuel and gasoline out to the line.
Every part of the road had water to cross. Until a river could be bridged, Pontoon Engineers moved men, trucks and bulldozers over and back. By the end of July, the 73rd Pontoon Engineers had heavy scow ferries working across the Tagish River and cross the Teslin River at Johnson’s Crossing.
The 340th Crossing the Tagish River
Small detachments of specialists in shoe repair, clothing repair, tent repair came attached to every regiment.
In a dangerous place, doing a dangerous job, soldiers occasionally needed repair themselves. The medical corps brought a hospital to Whitehorse, and each regiment had a medical detachment—doctors, dentists, field treatment stations, medics.
At Mentasta Pass the black soldiers of the 97th met their toughest, most dangerous problems; met them and solved them.
Back in March, Generals Sturdevant and Hoge hurriedly planning their assault on the North Country wilderness, ordered the 97th from Florida to Valdez, Alaska. From Valdez they directed them up the Richardson Highway to Slana, Alaska. From Slana they directed them to follow and upgrade the old Valdez-Eagle Trail through the Wrangell Mountains. That plan probably made sense on the generals’ maps.
It fell to the young black soldiers of the 97th to make the generals’ plan work in the reality of Alaska.
By the first week of June the regiment reached Slana, and on June 7 they started turning the Valdez-Eagle Trail into a road.
Captain Doyle described the first days. “Starting from Slana, Alaska, with inexperienced operators, the cats started a side hill cut on the Slana sand hill. While the operators were still getting the feel of the dozers and graders and carryalls the road followed the Slana River to Lake Mentasta.”
Massive mountains loomed out front. The soldiers could see there would be no getting around them, they would have to build through. Thirty miles out they came to a small lake sunk deep in massive mountain rock, Mentasta Lake. The young soldiers turned their dozers and carryalls east to penetrate the mountains at Mentasta Pass. Forward progress came to an abrupt halt.
The old pack horse trail twisted and turned through the pass, hugging the sheer cliff. Some sections disappeared in washouts; sliding mud plugged others. Threading bulldozer tracks back onto their sprockets while the dozer hung over a precipice turned out to be a skill not everyone could master. Sgt Monk explained in an interview years later that the operator “…got to know how to drop that blade to keep from tumbling down the mountain.”
The 97th built just thirty miles during their first two months; spent most of that time in Mentasta.
Up to the Pass, the soldiers of Company D convoyed between towering cliffs of piled snow, rode benches on either side of a bouncing and sliding canvas covered truck bed, out into the valley beyond the Pass and on 50 miles to Tonsina. Six days later the soldiers of Company C followed them through the pass and then took the lead. Their trucks slewed and rumbled 163 miles, all the way to Slana, the end of Alaska Highway Commission maintained road. At long last, Colonel Whipple had soldiers at his starting point.
At the end of May, just as the trickle of vehicles and equipment coming into Valdez turned into a flood, the trip to deliver them to the line got much longer. And a lot more interesting.
A driver rumbled past the quickly emptying 13-mile camp, the foundations at Wortman’s and into Keystone Canyon. And, entering Keystone, he found himself in a different world.
From our book in Progress, A Different Race:
Suddenly climbing, he hurriedly shifted down through the gears to the lowest one. Towering rock cliffs punctuated at intervals by cascading waterfalls, Bridal Veil and Horsetail, closed in on him from both sides. His skinny dirt passage, cut into the cliff on his left, climbed; and, as he climbed with it, the cliff fell away on his right. At its bottom the cascading water found the Lowe River and rushed back toward Valdez and the ocean.
The Photo is from a Different Project, But this is what Keystone looked like.
The road wound along the cliffside. The canyon on his right got deeper. Periodic ruts and washouts narrowed the road to barely more than the width of his vehicle and his right-side tires or tracks rolled over crumbling dirt right at the edge of a precipitous drop that went, as he climbed, from hundreds of feet to thousands of feet.
At the top of his climb the driver rumbled into Thompson pass. The civilians of the Alaska Road Commission and the soldiers of Company E had cleared a path through the pass, but snow still towered four stories high on both sides of the road. Occasionally a piece of the snowbank would collapse into the path, blocking it for a few hours while soldiers and civilians scrambled to clear it.
The Dock, Alaska Avenue, Turn Right on the Richardson
Young black soldiers from the Carolinas and Georgia who came to Valdez, Alaska with the 97th Engineering Regiment weathered the shock of an Alaska winter. They worked between the snowbanks on Alaska Avenue out to tent cities, bivouacs, thirteen miles out of town on the Richardson Highway and near the crumbling ruins of Wortman’s Roadhouse at the entrance to Keystone Canyon.
Thompson Pass closed for winters. In May 1942 the young black soldiers camped near the crumbling foundations of the old Wortman’s roadhouse, helped the Alaska Road Commission clear and open the Pass.
Wortman’s Roadhouse–Only a Foundation in 1942
In mid-May Bulldozers and trucks began to arrive at the Valdez Dock.
The following is from our book in progress, A Different Race.
Black soldiers scrambled aboard each arriving ship, unchained the deck loaded vehicles, and fired up the roaring, whistling diesel engines. Trucks and later dozers rumbled down to the dock, along its length across the mud flats to Alaska Avenue, then moved out in file on the avenue to the crowded airstrip. At the airstrip men from the line companies took over to drive them out on the Richardson.
The View Up Alaska Avenue from the Dock to the Richardson
Like the docks, the Richardson Highway had never seen such traffic. And it came at the worst possible time of year. A rough, two-lane gravel road at its best, the highway required constant maintenance. In May the spring thaw turned mountains of snow into water and stretches of the highway dissolved into rutted muck that marching soldiers and heavy vehicles churned into a quagmire.
Pulling out of the airstrip and turning onto the highway a young black soldier faced a flat stretch of dirt road bordered by a few frame buildings. A pole frame supported a wooden sign, “Richardson Highway…” His eye followed the line of the road to an ominously looming range of mountains in the distance. He rumbled along for a few miles, the mountains got closer.
Until May 20 his trip would end at the 13-mile camp or maybe just a few miles further at the crumbling foundations of the old Wortman’s Roadhouse where the soldiers of Company E bivouacked while they cleared snow from Keystone Canyon and Thompson Pass. As trucks came to the line, the companies gained mobility, could convoy instead of walking. But until Thompson Pass opened, their mobility didn’t mean much.
Slims River threatened to stop the soldiers of the 18th cold in July 1942.
At the southern end of Kluane Lake, Slims River feeds it with melt water from the Kaskawulsh Glacier. The road the soldiers built rounded the southern end of the lake, eight miles of deep muskeg and mud, to the mouth of the Slims. Across the river they would turn north and build their road along the lakeshore to Burwash Landing where they would turn west away from the Lake and toward Alaska.
Approximately half the regiment bypassed the river; ferried themselves and their dozers across the lake itself and went to work on the road on the far side.
Other soldiers stopped to work on the eight miles of muskeg and mud around the end of the lake. Grizzly bears populate the Kluane lake region and a soldier named Cassell, remembered a grizzly that found a D8 dozer thoroughly captivating.
A Yukon Grizzly Bear
One night a sergeant of the 18th, working his D8 into and through the trees, acquired a grizzly bear guide and companion—a determined guide and companion. He swerved toward the giant bear and it ran away, but as soon as he returned to his work, the bear returned. Having tried this maneuver several times, he finally turned decisively and gunned through the woods after the racing bear, raising and lowering the D8’s massive blade.
The remaining soldiers, the ones who spent July putting a 1044-foot bridge across the Slims had the most difficult job of all.
Getting Started on the Bridge
The bridge would, of course, sit on pilings driven into the river bottom. But solidly frozen gravel bottomed the Slims. The engineers rigged a way to pressurize water and blast it into the bottom to break it up, thaw and soften it. But doing that required working in frigid glacier melt against a current that flowed past them at six miles an hour.
Driving the Piles After Softening the Bottom
Not a particularly deep river, the Slims complicates things by constantly changing its depth. And the depth of the river fluctuated, as much as ten or even eighteen inches on a particularly difficult day.
Kluane Lake lay in the path of the 18th Engineers, working north from Whitehorse, and when they reached the southern tip of Kluane in July 1942, their relatively easy going came to an abrupt halt. The Slims River brings glacial melt water to feed the lake there, and some men of the 18th stopped to bridge the river. The rest had to get themselves and their dozers to the far shore and build road north along it.
General Hoge dispatched the 73rd Pontoon Engineers to Kluane. At Burwash landing, north along the lake, they rented two motor launches; built two rafts; would load the bulldozers of the 18th on the rafts and tow them across the lake.
Raft Loaded with Bulldozer at Shore
The recent tragedy at Charlie Lake down in the Southern Sector had taught the Corps a lesson about the apparently placid lakes of the North Country, about the hazards of towing heavily loaded rafts across them. In May seventeen soldiers had pitched from their overturned raft into Charlie Lake and twelve of them had drowned. Like Charlie Lake, Kluane Lake could boil up quite suddenly if the weather changed.
New rules decreed that personnel would ride on the launch, not the raft, but that didn’t resolve the safety issue. Carrying a twenty-three-ton bulldozer, a pontoon raft had little freeboard, rode very low in the water, and resisted the drag of the launch, pulling its stern deep into the water. Given the slightest turbulence both vessels took on water.
Unloading the Raft
Fred Rust served with the 18th, remembered crossing Kluane Lake with his dozer. First, he had to wait for calm water; waited for several days. When the men of the 73rd finally judged the crossing safe, they loaded the dozer and chained it down, hitched it to the launch.
Three of them operated the launch. One of them steered, the other two bailed water. Out on the lake, forced to tinker with balky launch motors, they fell behind with the bailing. The pontoon men asked Rust to steer so all three could bail.
“It gave me a funny feeling to stand in that leaky little tub and look back a couple of hundred feet at my D8 riding sideways almost on top of the water.”
Challenge one for the epic Alaska Highway Project in 1942 had been to mobilize thousands of men, acquire their equipment and move everybody and everything over vast distances to the Far North.
Meeting that challenge had immediately created challenge two. Thousands of men and massive stocks of equipment and supplies jammed points of entry at Dawson Creek, Skagway and Valdez; the Corps struggled to get men and equipment out to their work, deep in the interior.
By the beginning of July, the challenge had evolved yet again. In place, for the most part, and working, thousands of soldiers up and down the road struggled to build highway. And thousands of support troops and civilian contractors struggled to supply and support them.
The 35th Out Front in the Southern Sector
Coming north through the Southern Sector, the men of the 35th had conquered Steamboat Mountain, grappled with their ongoing problem of finding a route and arrived at Summit Lake on July 4th. Their supply problem had continued unabated. Chester Russell remembered two soldiers dragging two mountain sheep into camp at Summit Lake–the first meat he had eaten in three months.
Bringing Up the Rear in the Southern Sector
The soldiers of the 341st and the 95th struggled behind them, installing culverts and laying endless corduroy.
Bulldozing 93rd in Yukon
Over the Rockies and on north in Yukon Territory, the soldiers of the 340th worked south and east to meet the men working north, worked from Nisutlin Bay in Teslin toward the Continental Divide. To get to Teslin they had walked and driven a road built by the black soldiers of the 93rd. In their wake the 93rd reorganized to upgrade and extend their road. Command would shortly change the plan in Yukon, but, for the first time, all the soldiers there focused on building highway.
The 18th Engineers at Kluane Lake
North of Whitehorse the 18th struggled to get around Kluane Lake; ferried men and supplies across on two rafts built by the 73rd pontoon engineers, towed by two launches rented at Burwash Landing.
The 97th in Alaska
Up in Alaska, still struggling to get to their portion of the Highway, the 97th had to build their own access road, had worked their way to the Mentasta Pass and all but stopped. The old pack horse trail they followed twisted and turned through the pass, hugging the sheer cliff. Some sections disappeared in washouts; sliding mud plugged others.
Threading bulldozer tracks back onto their sprockets while the dozer hung over a precipice turned out to be a skill not everyone could master. Sgt Monk explained in an interview years later that the operator “…got to know how to drop that blade to keep from tumbling down the mountain.”
The Sikanni Chief River, glacial, 300 feet across, pours through a canyon between two mountains and directly across the route of the Alaska Highway north of Fort St. John. The grade down to the river and back up exceeds ten percent. And The Alcan builders needed to bridge it.
The segregated 95th Engineers, working north behind the white 35th and the white 341st had serious morale problems and their new commander, Heath Twichell, saw an opportunity to address them at the Sikanni Chief.
Engineers at their desks in Whitehorse estimated two weeks to bridge the river. Colonel O’Connor, Southern Sector Commander, budgeted five days. And he reluctantly agreed to give the 95th a shot at building it.
Twichell brought his Company A, 166 men, to the site; their mission to build a trestle bridge across in just five days. Company A delighted the Colonel by promptly raising the ante. Each and every man agreed to bet a month’s pay that they could do it in four. Obscure black regiment or not, the 95th got the attention of the rumor mill. Word of the bet buzzed the length of the highway.
The Bridge Under Construction
The commander of Company A sent two platoons out to serve as point for the effort. Sgt. Tucker and Sgt. Bond took a crew to the south bank. Constructing a raft, logs lashed to empty fuel barrels, Sgt. Brawley and Sgt. Price took a crew to the north bank.
In the surrounding woods, Sgt. Harvey and Pvt. Hickens selected trees—monsters for trestles that would stand up out of the water and support the bridge; long, straight ones for bridging timbers that would run horizontally from trestle to trestle; and an endless number that could be sawed into plank decking that would span the bridging timbers and offer a roadbed.
As fast as Harvey and Hickens could select them, their fellows swarmed to cut them down, lop off limbs and hew them into timbers and planks. And as fast as bridge members emerged from the raw timber, others swarmed to drag them down to the river bank.
The point platoons worked in the water. Anchored to the shore with ropes, they waded, chest deep, icy water surging around them. They built cribs up from the bottom; floated the massive trestles to them and stood them upright; filled the cribs with rocks to stabilize the trestles. The soldiers rotated into and out of the water. Numb and stiff, one group would struggle ashore to warm themselves at roaring fires, while another took their place in the torrent.
On the Bridge
When they had trestles in place, the men in the frigid water hoisted bridging timbers to span from trestle to trestle. Then, finally beginning to emerge from the water, they spanned the bridging timbers with decking.
The whole area around the emerging bridge hummed with activity. The men in the woods made music; sang spirituals; kept time with their ringing axes. And the work didn’t stop when the sun went down. At night a line of trucks cast their headlight beams into the darkness to illuminate the site.
Complete Bridge
And, if the men worked day and night, so did the cooks. They provided warm meals and midnight snacks of hot coffee and biscuits.
Not five days; not even four days; in just three days the frantic activity ground to a halt. The 95th had bridged the Sikanni Chief.
First Vehicle Over
The Long Trail, the published history of the white 341st Engineers contains not a single word to suggest that black soldiers even participated in spanning the Sikanni Chief River.
The first step in getting filthy rich on the Klondike in 1898? Getting to the Klondike in 1898. The “All American Route” came through the North Pacific, the Gulf of Alaska to Valdez, Alaska and then over the Valdez Glacier. Good luck with that.
But let’s say you survived all with your determination to get to the Klondike intact. You’ve crossed the summit of the glacier. Now what?
You’re not climbing any more, so you can increase the weight on your sled to 800 pounds and that means you go faster. Past the summit you move on to the shore of Klutina Lake, 150 miles out of Valdez. You stop there, maybe join forces with fellow travelers, and build a boat.
Klutina Lake become Klutina River
You launch and start down the Klutina River. A whole lot easier than walking. But the Klutina has rapids, a couple or relatively easy ones then tougher ones. Hazelet described the next miles. “This river…is strewn with wrecks of all kinds. Goods can be seen every few rods along the river put out to dry, broken boats are piled up every little distance and all seems one grand wreck.”
Scenic View of Copper River
You’re lucky. You make it to Copper River, turn up the Copper toward its headwaters. But the Copper River proves as hazardous as the Klutina. Hazelet again. “Came to a high bank of 150 feet… We could see the rocks and gravel start from the top and roll down… The stones that were falling were from the size of one’s fist to that of a half bushel… We pulled for our lives… Suddenly without any warning the current caught her and shot out into the river like a bucking bronco.”
Prospector’s View of Klutina River
You’re still lucky. You make it. And you keep making it. Into and through interior mountain ranges as rugged and much taller than the coastal ranges, along and across more rivers whose names run together in your weary brain.
You cross the border into Canada, make your way to Forty-mile on the Yukon River and float down to Dawson City. And, finally, you get filthy rich.
Or not.
Hazelet found gold, but out of 4,000 to 5,000 prospectors who crossed the Valdez Glacier in 1898 he was one of the very few who succeeded.
The segregated 95th came to Dawson Creek under command of Colonel David Neuman. I posted a few days ago about their sad reception . Their commander soon made things incomparably worse.
When, in wartime, soldiers write letters, Army censors review them. And censors noticed a pattern in letters from the soldiers of the 95th. Pvt. Dulin, for example, wrote simply that Colonel Neuman “…was a problem.” Corporal Jonathan Welch wrote, “That old southern principal of keeping Negroes as slaves is still being practiced.”
The censors noticed, but nothing much happened.
The Long Road of the 95th
But then Lt. Joseph J. Sincavage, a white officer in the 95th, recorded his disgust with his command in a letter to his wife. Some of his fellows were “dastardly punks. . .it was disgraceful.” He told her of one white officer who lolled in bed while his black platoon sergeant did his work. He ended his letter with this, “The Army works for the officer, but the colored man was his slave.”
Mired D4
The censors sent that letter up the chain of command. The chain had noticed the 95ths lack of progress. Rumors about Neuman had circulated. Sincavage’s letter made it all the way to General Sturdevant in Washington.
The excrement, as they say, hit the fan.
Neuman had officially injured his leg. His self-treatment consisted of secluding himself in his tent with a bottle—no, several bottles—leaving the 95th to fend for itself.
When that report made it back to Sturdevant, he relieved the Colonel of his command. The Army didn’t demote or prosecute him—the officer corps didn’t work that way. But they sent him “home for his health”.
Dozer at Partridge Creek
On July 19, Lt. Colonel Heath Twichell, executive officer of the 35th Engineers, assumed command of the 95th and immediately set to work on their crushing morale problem.
