STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

Japan Threatened America

Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 then launched coordinated and successful assaults all over the Pacific. The suddenness and sheer scale of disaster set America’s leadership back on its heels, scrambling to plan a response. FDR, his cabinet and his generals saw terrifying vulnerability in Alaska and the Aleutians and ordered the Corps of Engineers to address that vulnerability by building a land route to the exposed outpost.

The Corps leaped into action.

The Corps exists to build things fast. They don’t necessarily build efficiently, they don’t build at the lowest cost, they don’t even necessarily build with high quality. But in a military crisis the Corps gets it done.

General Sturdevant had submitted a plan on two days’ notice, knowing as he did so that it was at best a vague outline; and, even as he wrote, he was setting the machinery of the Corps in motion. He met with Colonel William Hoge, his choice to command the project, on February 12, and Hoge departed for Dawson Creek immediately.

In Dawson Creek Hoge went looking for men who knew what he needed to know about the North Country, and he found Knox McCusker.

A few nights ago, I posted about McCusker—one of the toughest and most effective of the men who had worked to create and improve trails through the Canadian Rockies. I left him anticipating the need for a land route to Alaska, thinking about the route and waiting to meet the man who would build it.

That man arrived in February 1942.

Who Got Rich?

Soapy Smith Got Rich but Not by Mining Gold — Soapy Smith Having a Beer

Against all odds, thousands of the Stampeders who invaded the North Country in search of gold made it to the Klondike, and some got rich. Dawson City became, for a time, the largest city north of San Francisco. Saloons, dance halls, butchers, clothiers and blacksmiths lined its streets. Down on the Alaska Peninsula, Skagway mushroomed into a rough wild-west town with eighty saloons, hundreds of prostitutes and at least one famous gangster named Soapy Smith.

Some people struck it rich, mostly the merchants, profiteers and hookers who traded their goods and services for the gold seekers’ dwindling funds. But everywhere along the route, the massive influx of travelers changed the route itself.

Investors rushed to put together financing for a narrow gauge railroad over the White Pass from Skagway through Caribou Crossing to a burgeoning tent city they called “Closeleigh” at the downstream end of the Miles Canyon rapids. “Closeleigh” didn’t stick. The Stampeders who passed through thought the rapids looked like the white mane of an enormous horse, and the city, the gold rush bequeathed to Yukon Territory would forever be known as Whitehorse. Read about the genesis of the Gold Rush Read about what it took just to get there.

The Gold Rush ended—as abruptly as it had begun—and the outsiders went away. A few remained behind to become part of the permanent population of the North Country, but the North Country itself returned to its natural state of rugged isolation. But the ghost towns, the trails and roadhouses, the railroad and its inland terminus, Whitehorse, remained as permanent fixtures, blending in as if they had been there forever.

They would all be part of the world that awaited the arrival of the Corps in 1942. Click Here to Find More Information about the Alcan Project

Yukon River Route

Our would-be prospectors are headed for the Yukon River route to Dawson City. We’ve followed them by ship to Skagway; watched them climb up Chilkoot Pass to the Canadian border—over and over again until they accumulated a ton of supplies.

Now the route led twenty-six miles across Lake Bennett, two and a half miles through the narrows at Carcross, nineteen miles down Tagish Lake, five miles on Marsh Lake and finally onto the Yukon River. And this route was no route at all until the ice broke up in the spring.

In early May of 1898 a motley flotilla of seven thousand boats and rafts lay poised at Lake Bennett. Builders worked frantically on as many as a thousand more at Lake Lindeman and Caribou Crossing. The boat builders stripped every bit of forest they could reach.

On May 29^th, word reached the happy travelers that the ice down river had broken. An incredible flotilla–canoes, scows, rafts and barges–burst like race horses from the gates out into Lake Bennett, surging toward the narrows at Carcross. Attrition, of course, began immediately. Many of the vessels in the ragtag flotilla fell apart before they even got across Tagish Lake.

The lucky ones made it onto the Yukon River intact. But the River had its own treat in store; carried them directly to Miles Canyon where the it boils, deep and viciously powerful, through the Whitehorse Rapids. The rapids had a voracious appetite for boats—and goldrushers.

In the end a minority made it to Lake Lebarge and through the final leg down the Yukon to the crowded docks at Dawson City. The detritus of those who tried and failed littered the path from Lake Bennett.

Chilkoot Pass

The most dramatic, certainly the most romantic, event that ever occurred in the North Country, the great stampede to the gold fields of the Klondike, came down to tens of thousands of men and women facing the timeless challenge—the incredible difficulty of traveling through the subarctic north. Like all their historical predecessors, thousands of rowdy stampeders, wound up using and improving long established prehistoric paths.

Lake Bennett offered the most obvious access via the Yukon River. Ships could carry the stampeders to the small port of Skagway which, as the crow flies, lay only a few miles from Lake Bennett. Unfortunately, stampeders weren’t crows, and travelling those few miles meant climbing from sea level to the top of the coastal mountain range that towered thousands of rugged feet above Skagway.

Two passes exist through the mountains to Lake Bennett, the White Pass and the Chilkoot. In truth they are ‘passes’ only because it was humanly possible to traverse them. Standing at their bottoms today, looking up at the towering peaks that are billed as the entrances, a traveler is mystified. That these are ‘passes’ is certainly not obvious.

The ‘easiest’, the Chilkoot posed a brutal 3,789-foot climb—straight up from Dyea to the Canadian border. And the Canadian Mounties, faced with a rising death toll, made rules. No one would be allowed to enter Canada until he or she could show the Mounties at the top of the pass a ton of supplies.

The rushers hefted 150-pound packs, grabbed a stabilizing rope and climbed, single file, 3,789 feet up to the border; did it again; and again; and again, until their pile at the top weighed 2,000 pounds.

Prospectors Already in the North Country Came First

Word of a massive gold strike spread through the North Country and prospectors rushed to the Klondike and Rabbit Creek, now known as Bonanza Creek.

But the North Country is a long way from “civilization”. It took nearly a year for word of the events along Bonanza Creek to reach the outside world. On July 17, 1897 the Portland arrived in Seattle from Dawson City and The Seattle Post Intelligencer breathlessly reported that it carried “more than a ton of gold”. The Excelsior landed in San Francisco the next day, and The San Francisco Examiner reported that it, too, carried tons of gold.

Any prospector who could pull up stakes and instantly head north did so. And, while the stories they sent back made the difficulty of the trek imminently clear, they also invested it and the North Country with an air of romance and adventure. Clearly millions in gold were there for the taking if one was man enough to get there and take it.

The flow of prospectors heading north quickly swelled into a flood of “cheechakos”, tenderfoot, would-be prospectors, and the stampede to the Klondike was on.

God Had Seeded the North Country with Gold

The tiny, scattered populations of First Nations natives and fur traders didn’t know it, but God had seeded their remote subarctic Country with a substance that, at the turn of the 20^th century would bring it to the attention of the world with a bang. During the last decades of the 19^th century small gold strikes occurred in Sitka and Windham Bay. In 1880 Joseph Juneau and Richard Harris made a significant strike in Juneau. Word spread, and a

trickle of hardy prospectors began making their way north.

They used, of course, the same trail systems as the primordial tribes and the traders; and they extended them just a bit here and there.

The few early prospectors blended in. They rested, refitted and even made homes at the trading post towns and villages. Some took native brides. And, like their predecessors, they changed the world of the natives, teaching t

hem the value of gold and how to seek it.

Down on the Alaska Peninsula the Tlingit tribe controlled the difficult routes over the coastal mountains into the Yukon interior. They used those routes—one over the White Pass and the other over the Chilkoot—to trade with the tribes of the interior. In the 1890’s “Skookum Jim”, a member of the Tlingit Tribe, worked as a packer on the Chilkoot and

had spent years exploring the White Pass.

In 1896 Jim and his friend “Tagish Charlie” accompanied George Carmack, a prospector from Seattle, to the area around Rabbit Creek in the Klondike. There, on August 17, they made the gold strike that would reverberate around the world.