STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

Carcross Knew There Was a War On

People in Carcross knew, vaguely, that there was a war on. Townspeople even installed black out curtains on their windows—just in case. But the sudden influx of soldiers came as a shock. At first, they simply moved through to Whitehorse, but then, in May, they began to pour off the train and set up camp.

Ten year old Millie Jones had spent her life in Carcross—Mom cooked at the hotel, Dad and Grandpa worked for the railroad. When that first train stopped and began disgorging soldiers, she ran, bursting with excitement, to the depot with her schoolmates to see the “black white men”.

A group of black soldiers in front of the Carcross Depot 1942 — Black Soldiers at Carcross Depot 1942

That the black soldiers never came into the hotel or even to the front door, mystified Millie. They did, though, come to the back door to request drinking water. And Millie’s mother supplemented that refreshment with fresh baked bread. Sometimes with cookies.

Helping to clear the dining room one evening, carrying a stack of dishes to the kitchen, Mille heard the most incredible sound she’d ever heard coming from the back porch. She aimed the stack of dishes at the table; missed; didn’t even notice.

Someone had rolled the piano out to the porch where a black soldier brought sounds out of it that Millie had never heard before. And other soldiers gathered around with other instruments—guitar, trumpet, banjo… In her living room in Whitehorse, seventy years after the fact, Millie’s face shines at this memory from her girlhood. Asked, somewhat hesitantly, whether she remembered the name of the tune, she flashed a broad grin and, without hesitation, said “Pistol Packing Mama”.

A striking feature of the photograph that hangs in the depot at Carcross today, a large group of black soldiers in front of the depot in 1942, is the number of musical instruments they carried. Lt. Mortimer Squires who served as regimental motor officer in 1942, remembers the soldiers spontaneously breaking into song—sometimes forming into quartets or breaking out a guitar or harmonica.

These men grew up in the Delta during the 1930’s. Why I’m I surprised they brought music to the road?

Hoge had Cast the Die

So Hoge had cast the die. The 93^rd would build the 70-mile supply road from Carcross to the Teslin River. And, ironically, Hoge’s racism handed the men of the 93^rd an opportunity.

The Army expected little of its black soldiers; typically gave them the least demanding jobs around. But Hoge had given the 93^rd a mission that would demand a very great deal—in skill, endurance, ingenuity and just plain guts. And, given a chance to prove themselves, the men of the 93^rd would do so—and then some.

On May 1 Col. Johnson, commander of the 93^rd, accepted the loan of two bulldozers from the 18^th Engineers and aimed his regiment at the WP&YR. The black soldiers of the 93^rd moved out of Skagway, on to Carcross and out into the wilderness. And the race problem left town with them. For more on the 93rd–and other regiments on the Highway click here

Lt. Price led a platoon of the 93^rd out of Skagway and up to Carcross on April 27.

By May 1, the whole regiment was on its way. A rail car held sixty men and each train hauled four to five cars. Moving the regiment required several trains and each took seven to ten hours to make the trip.

For more on the WP&YR click here

Sgt. Bollin, Company F, remembered his trip over the pass. “To see a mountain close up, and to go up it, it’s a thrill of a life time. And you get to wherever you think the top is, and there’s more snow up there than you’ve ever seen.”

The men of the 340^th, stuck in Skagway, occupied themselves with community projects. Some improved the Dyea Road using shovels, picks, wheelbarrows and a few trucks. Others improved sidewalks, streets and the general appearance of Skagway.

Colonel Lyons even assigned some soldiers to help the ladies of Skagway prepare and plant their spring gardens. “It’ll help keep the boys in shape.” Scraping at the thawing ground, soldiers planted seeds and bulbs.

Young men on a great wartime adventure—one wonders how they felt, helping the ladies of Skagway tend their flowers.

Hoge’s Problems Didn’t end in Seattle

So with help from Elliott, General Hoge pried his equipment out of Seattle and got it headed up the Inside Passage. But his problems moved with the equipment.

Arriving in Skagway, it quickly overwhelmed the tiny harbor. Besides being small, Skagway Harbor offered twenty-foot tides which made the process of unloading vessels complicated. Incoming vessels waited for high tide, then, 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 cargo to higher ground.

In the end the engineers dug a long, deep slip, piling the dirt and rocks they removed into a ‘fill’ alongside. Vessels could remain afloat in the slip and cranes could work from the fill whatever the status of the tide.

Material safely above the water line in Skagway, of course, still had a long way to go to reach the highway and its builders. The WP&YR provided the next link in the transportation chain. In April 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 trains.

Eight to ten heavily loaded railroad cars, pulled by three to five locomotives and pushed by one, would roar laboriously up and up and around and around through the White Pass. And what goes up must, of course, come down. Emptied of cargo in Carcross or Whitehorse, each train had to return to Skagway over the same difficult route. Soldiers called the WP&YR “The Wait Patiently and You Can Ride.”

The unceasing traffic wore on the old narrow-gauge track. The Army could bring in locomotives and rolling stock, but they couldn’t do much about track and roadbed; hauled much heavier loads than those could stand.

With time, the Army adapted; ran smaller trains. One engine and a pusher would pull small trains up the mountain to Lake Bennett where crews assembled them into a longer train for the run along the lake and on to Whitehorse.

Problems Pile Up in May

The problems that had emerged to plague the Alaska Highway Project in April piled like dirt in front of a bulldozer blade in May. 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.More on Crowded Skagway

Two problems—getting equipment to theNorth Country and then getting the equipment and the men who would use it through a seemingly endless wilderness to the work site—emerged as potential ‘deal killers’ everywhere along the road, threatening to end the project before it even got started. In Yukon Territory those two problems emerged in their most virulent form.

In 1942 a road building engineering regiment came equipped with twenty D8 diesel bulldozers, twenty-four D4 gas bulldozers, six pulled road graders, three patrol graders, six rooter plows and six 12-yard carrying scrapers. To support and supplement these, each regiment had ninety-three 1/2-ton dump trucks, a 6-ton prime mover truck, seven 4-ton cargo trucks and nine 2 1/2-ton cargo trucks, twenty-five jeeps, ten command cars…

More on the History of the Alaska Highway

The list goes on, but you get the idea.

The 35^th had brought its equipment and all but destroyed it getting into position. The other regiments were waiting for theirs and struggling to get into position. Those few troops who managed to get 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.

General Hoge wouldn’t be building a highway until he broke that jam, and at mid-month he flew to Seattle to see what he could do.

New Piers for the Army Transportation Service at the Port of Seattle 1942

The demands imposed by the war had overloaded the system of ocean transport, driven it into chaos. Military commanders and civilian managers all over the world confronted pieces of the emergency and they all required resources—men, supplies and equipment—they needed to move over the oceans. Demand for ships and harbor facilities vastly exceeded supply and everybody’s requirement had an urgent priority.

At Seattle Harbor, Hoge found large scale confusion and disorder. Luckily, he also found E.W. Elliott, a private contractor who had managed to acquire tugs and freighters and had shipped equipment north for the Public Roads Administration. Elliott agreed to do the same for Hoge.

Elliott’s talents proved equal to the challenge. He assembled a collection of freighters, tugs, barges, scows and several pleasure yachts and talked the Navy into assigning a gunboat named Charleston and several converted fishing boats to protect his ragtag convoys. By hook or by crook, he began to move Hoge’s equipment.

The Trail at Muncho Lake

The men of the 35^th Engineers stood by in Ft Nelson, ready to build a road. And McCusker had bequeathed a route. Scouting that route from the air, though, Colonel Twichell and civilian Curwen could only see the relatively easy terrain to Summit Lake and sixty-five miles beyond. At a cloud-shrouded pass near Muncho Lake (just a little past today’s Toad River) the faint trail disappeared.

The key to the McCusker route lay beneath those clouds. Consulting with the local Canadians who knew the country had worked once; Curwen suggested they do it again. And local experts agreed that a route down the Liard River and then up the Trout River would work. Back in the air, an ecstatic Ingalls found that suggestion entirely workable. A sheer limestone cliff blocked passage along Muncho Lake, but, with enough dynamite they could fix that problem.

While Twitchell and Curwen worked on the path from Ft. Nelson to Watson Lake, Hoge took on routing through Yukon. Flying with Les Cook in his Norseman, Hoge found an unexplored and unmapped network of valleys from Lake Teslin to the Upper Liard Valley west of Watson Lake. The elevation never rose higher than 3200 feet. The valley network would do.

So, at the end of the month, here’s General Hoge’s April…

He had four regiments on the ground—the 35^th in the Southern Sector, the 18^th already forging north from Whitehorse toward Alaska, the 93^rd and the 340^th in Skagway. And he had three more on the way—the disorganized but game black 97^th anchored in Valdez Harbor, the inexperienced but game white 341^st ready to invade Dawson Creek via the railroad depot, and the relatively organized and experienced black 95^th who would bring up the rear into Dawson Creek.

He had tasked the 341^st and 95^th to upgrade the winter trail to Ft Nelson—hopefully before the 35^th starved to death.

If he had his men in country or on the way, though, supply, equipment and transportation problems had just got started. Worse, poor to non-existent communication between Ft. Nelson and Whitehorse rendered command and control nearly impossible.

At the end of the month, Washington divided command of the project—Hoge would command the four regiments in the northern sector. Colonel “Patsy” O’Connor would take command in the south.

By May 1, with headlong effort and absolute determination, mired in colossal confusion, the Corps had the vital land route to Alaska under construction.

Sort of.

The Road from Ft Nelson

A few weeks ago, I posted about the dramatic effort of the 35^th Engineering Regiment to get to Ft Nelson before the spring thaw. On the first of April, bedraggled, surrounded by their abused and broken machines, the soldiers of the 35^th bivouacked there.

General Hoge had ordered the 340^th and 93^rd Engineers into Skagway and Yukon to build road south and east. The 35^th he ordered to build north and west over the Continental Divide to meet them somewhere near Watson Lake.

But between Ft. Nelson and Watson Lake an intricate system of rivers drains the Canadian Rockies. Where the rivers don’t cascade down precipitous mountain cliffs, they slow to create vast, intractable muskeg swamps. In the Rockies “Mother” nature would fight back–hard.

Long before the officers of the Corps of Engineers knew Ft Nelson and Watson lake existed, Knox McCusker had created a crude trail between them. Obviously Ingalls and the 35^th could follow McCusker.

But McCusker had forged right over the most forbidding mountains in North America. Maybe the 35^th could avoid those by following him out just 40 miles and then branching northwest to follow the Liard River to Watson Lake?

On April 16^th Ingalls and some of his staff, including Lt. Col. Heath Twichell, boarded Hoge’s Beechcraft in Ft. Nelson for a reconnaissance flight. Twichell remembered looking down from the Beechcraft. “The country was covered with small spruce, the unfailing sign of muskeg.” The bane of the Alcan Project, muskeg is a soft mixture of decaying vegetation, swampy, frozen to solid ground in winter but boggy muck from spring to fall.

Increasingly discouraged, Ingalls and Welling flew recon over the area for days, reluctantly concluding that the Liard route wouldn’t work. Looking for alternatives, they encountered PRA engineer, Fred Curwen.

Curwen had just spent a month scouting the McCusker trail via dog sled. He had reached Summit Lake, ninety miles out, when the raging waters of the spring thaw forced him to turn back (just a few miles from Toad River). He hadn’t been able to scout the entire length of the trail. But he felt strongly that McCusker had picked the correct route.

As we have seen, the paths—the only paths—through the North Country had been handed down through time. If they existed, people who lived there knew them. The officers of the Corps were slowly learning to listen. Maybe McCusker had known what he was doing?

General Hoge’s Problem

General Hoge directed the 1500-mile project from a ramshackle office with a homemade desk and empty packing crates as file cabinets at Headquarters in Whitehorse. The Hoge Highway “the Burma Road of North America” would be a more finished bit of construction if it did not have to be done in a terrific hurry. But it did have to be done in a terrific hurry.

With two regiments jammed into Skagway and a highway to build, Hoge made plans and ordered their execution with frantic haste. The 93^rd and the 340^th needed to be out on the road—bulldozers be damned.

The snarl of men and equipment at the WP&YT rail head in Skagway mushroomed into a major problem. The railroad’s capacity had grown steadily since its completion in 1900. By the time of WWI, the railroad carried 10,000 to 15,000 passengers and thirty tons of freight per year which meant travelling over the pass once or maybe twice a week. By the 20’s and 30’s the train traveled daily over the pass.

Now, in April of 1942, the train was crossing the pass, ten to fifteen times a day, if not more, and doing it with an inadequate supply of locomotives and forty-year-old train cars. Frank E. Andrews, PRA construction engineer in Whitehorse, warned Hoge that a major transportation bottleneck threatened.

Some of the heavy equipment for the 18^th had arrived and made its way through the bottleneck. The remainder might arrive sometime in May. Heavy equipment for the 93^rd and the 340^th had not arrived and no one knew when it would—good for the bottleneck but bad for the road.

Skagway Life Developed a Routine

Life in tiny Skagway developed a routine during the first forty years of the century.

From mid-June through August, Steamships loaded with tourists piled into the harbor three to four times a week. A sheer rock cliff bordered the dock where they tied up, and it was covered with painted emblems, each representing a ship’s maiden voyage from Skagway. Among the ship emblems, a white skull represented Soapy Smith, the most famous con man and gangster of the Gold Rush days.

Trains ran daily from the Skagway station to Lake Bennett, Carcross and on to Whitehorse.

After mid-September, the ships came less frequently. Trains ran only two to three times a week and snow drifts blanketed the tracks. Mail to Skagway that came almost daily during summer came only twice a month in the winter. The little town entered a period of almost total isolation, supporting and entertaining each other through the long winters until the outside world returned in June.

The white citizens of Skagway shared their space, if not their social and economic world, with one hundred or so First Nations of the Tlingit tribe. Their forebears had inhabited the islands, bays and river mouths of the long inlet from the Pacific that would be called the Lynn Canal for centuries. To the white citizens of Skagway, the Tlingit’s rich and sophisticated culture and their complex social organization were invisible.

Acquaintance, even friendship, occurred between whites and Tlingits, but they ended at the front door. Tlingits watched movies at the Tropea family’s theater, but only from the balcony. Not part of the Skagway community, Tlingits were not welcome at community social events. White’s referred to natives as “Siwash”, a hurtful ethnic pejorative that vividly expressed contempt for the Indians and everything about them.

Life for Tlingits in Skagway resembled, in many ways, life for Blacks in Southern Louisiana. Louisiana, of course, had codified the rules in a system of Jim Crow laws where in Alaska they were a matter of custom. But the effects were similar—a fact that didn’t escape the black troops of the Corps when they arrived in country.

The unique and isolated little town made its way through the decades, mostly oblivious to the outside world and its doings. Its residents barely noticed when the outside world exploded into war in December 1941.

They noticed when the Corps of Engineers brought the war to their doorstep in 1942.

A Gold Rush Memory

A Gold Rush memory to the summer tourists and outsiders who heard its name, Skagway was home and community to the people who made their lives there.

Verne Bookwalter, a renowned bush pilot, lived in Skagway. And in the 1930’s, the town decided to clear an airfield along the river, hoping to attract more pilots—and more tourists. They cleared the field of stumps, rocks and abandoned buildings then plowed and seeded it with grass. Despite Mayor Mulvihill warnings, the children of Skagway thought it a great playground.

Harriett Pullen’s Pullen House became a Skagway institution. Guests crowded her dining room captivated by her stories of the gold rush days. The “Days of 98 Variety Show” became an annual tradition. Performers danced with garters on their thighs, poured drinks and ended the evening by reenacting the shooting of Dan McGrew.

In 1926 the railroad hired Dr. Peter Dahl and, with his wife Vera, he moved to Skagway. Dr. Dahl was the only physician for miles and “because of the town’s relative isolation, he was compelled to deal with emergencies that no general practitioner in an urban setting would have to assume”.

Dahl’s memoirs describe one such emergency. Two Indians, a father and son, had been picking blueberries on the turf of a mother Grizzly. Badly mauled they came down from Carcross on the train and Dr. Dahl treated them at White Pass Hospital. (103)

Despite the distance and the rugged mountains between them, more than medical necessity linked the tiny communities of Skagway, Alaska and Carcross, Yukon. In all but total isolation, they had only each other. Dahl’s wife Vera and her friend ‘Dusty’ Hannan alleviated their boredom by travelled regularly to Carcross for marathon bridge sessions.

Dusty Hannan whose nickname came from her habit of saying, as she lowered her hand, “Well, that’s not so dusty”, was one of many unique characters who helped make the little town of Skagway memorable. Carcross, even smaller and more isolated than Skagway, didn’t offer modern facilities. Dusty couldn’t, and didn’t want, to master the use of a coffee can or the frigid outdoors, so when she and Vera rode the train to Carcross, she carried her chamber pot.

“Old Man Davis” who claimed to have fought in the Civil War, made his own, unique contribution to the atmosphere in Skagway. He never bathed because he considered bathing an unnatural activity, incompatible with good health. Winds blew frequently in Skagway and residents knew to be up wind when they encountered Davis.

Fascinating Skagway

Even without the Corps of Engineers and the 1942 invasion, Skagway offers a fascinating story—a story few people outside Yukon know.

Broadway St. Skagway 1942
Signal Corps Photo

The harbor and the railroad amounted to an economic reason to exist—if not much of one. Like the soldiers in ’42, Freight into Yukon came through Skagway. The railroad had to have engineers and brakemen and conductors and mechanics, and management and it took people to keep the docks open. The WP&YR headquartered in Skagway, so its employees lived there.

And tourists came in the summer to hunt game and to explore the legendary country of the great Gold Rush. The railroad joined Skagway and Carcross/Whitehorse, up in Yukon, at the hip—international border be damned. Visitors to Skagway visited Carcross and Whitehorse. And some WP&YR employees lived in Canada.

Harriett Pullen originally came to Skagway in ’98 with the miners and brought her three young sons. The pies she made and sold to the miners became legendary. When the miners left, she opened a small hotel; continued to bake pies; raised her sons; sent them to college. Her son Danny graduated from West Point with the general who would command US forces in Alaska in 1942—Simon Bolivar Buckner. Danny won WWI medals in France before succumbing to the Flu epidemic in 1918.

Joseph and Theresa Rapuzzi migrated from Italy to Seattle. When Joseph went to try his luck in the Klondike, Theresa remained behind with their children. Joseph didn’t strike it rich, but he found a home for his family in Skagway. Theresa, ‘Ma’ ,Rappuzzi, ran the Washington Fruit Store until her death in 1941.

Ma’s son Charlie drove WP&YR trains over the pass. Her daughter Della was secretary to the General Manager of the railroad. Son George worked for the road as a machinist. And Son Louis became Federal Deputy Marshall for Skagway and the surrounding area in 1930.