STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

Morale Leads the 95th to Sikanni Chief

Morale among the black soldiers of the misused and abused 95^th Engineers confronted their new commander, Lt. Colonel Heath Twichell, with his biggest problem and he proposed to fix it.

Link to the last story in this series “Pink Mountain and the 95th”

The Army, Twichell knew, considered his new troops substandard; didn’t trust them to operate heavy equipment. He instituted extra training with the heavy equipment he had, and he had operator’s names painted on vehicles and equipment, making clear their responsibility to repair and maintain it.

Should a soldier fall short, his name would be scraped off and replaced with another. Their status in the regiment at stake, the catskinners rose to the challenge. Twichell, Finis Austin, chaplain of the 93^rd noted in his book written many years later, encouraged black soldiers to develop ambition and drive and self-respect.

But Twichell needed more, something dramatic. Following the white 341^st, the 95^th fell “heir to a lot of unglamorous work” Exploring, locating, and clearing, the 341^st led the charge. As the road approached the Sikanni Chief River, Twichell saw an opportunity.

The glacial waters of the Sikanni Chief pour through a canyon between two mountains. The grade down to the river and back up exceeds ten percent. In 1941 a Canadian construction crew working to create a string of airports to Alaska, took three days to get ten sleds of equipment down the last mile to the river. Engineers at their desks in Whitehorse estimated two weeks to bridge the 300-foot-wide river. O’Connor budgeted five days and agreed to give the 95^th a shot at building it.

The 341^st, of course, had reached the river first. Company A of the 341^st dynamited cuts into the treacherous hillside to create approaches. Company B hauled a “seemingly unending number of pontoons” down the steep hill to the shores of the river. On the 20^th of July, Company C put a temporary pontoon bridge across the river.

Now Twichell brought his Company A, 166 men, to the site; their mission to build a trestle bridge across in just five days. The commander of Company A, one Lt. Lee, sent two platoons out to serve as point for the effort. Constructing a raft, empty fuel barrels lashed to logs, Sgt. Brawley and Sgt. Price took a platoon to the north side of the river. Sgt. Tucker and Sgt. Bond took another to the south side.

Nervous, Lee had asked Sgt. Brawley, “do you think we can do this in four days?” Excited, Brawley replied, “Yesir, Lieutenant Lee, yesir! We can get it done in four days, you and me.”

The new bridge replaced the orignal a few years later

Sikanni Chief River Today

Pink Mountain and the 95th

Pink Mountain took five soldiers from the 95^th the very day Lt. Colonel Twichell replaced their disgraced commander, Colonel Newman. Twichell inherited major problems—disorganization, dismal morale, lack of a real mission. But before he could turn to those issues he had to deal with the immediate crisis.

Link to Another story on the 95th “Rushed North—for What?”

On July 19 the 95^th bivouacked at Beatton River. Some 20 miles away the unusual peak of pink mountain had roused everybody’s curiosity. On the 19^th the soldiers had a day off to clean up and do laundry. Five of them finished their laundry laid it out to dry and then left to go see the mountain up close. They had no knowledge of the terrain, no compass… But in the crystal-clear air the mountain appeared much closer than twenty miles.

Late afternoon, seeming no closer to the mountain, they turned back. Without the mountain out front to guide their course, they followed a stream through the deep woods. The stream abruptly turned south—the wrong way. Two of the men continued to follow it, hoping it would take them to a settlement or someplace with people who could help.

Three of them continued east, turning occasionally to take a reverse bearing on the mountain behind them to determine the right direction. They reached the Highway and two days later indian searchers from the regiment found and rescued them.

The other two men, not so fortunate, found an Indian village. The inhabitants had left on a hunting expedition. The two men split up. One continued searching for the Highway. Surviving on berries and killing porcupines and what he called “fool hens”, a species of partridge, he wandered the woods for 35 days before he found an old trail that led him to the Highway.

Twichell wrote his wife a long letter about the incident. He told her he visited the soldier in the hospital tent the next day, found him “still weak from exposure and hunger, but told a connected story.”

Employing Indian trackers, the regiment continued the search for Bosten, the last man. They never found him.

“It was our first casualty of the kind, and we hope the last.” Twichell told his wife.

Theres a small town there today.

Rushed North—for What?

Rushed north by the Army to help in the urgent effort to build over a thousand miles of Alaska Highway through subarctic wilderness, the soldiers of the 95^th found themselves with little to do. They occasionally found themselves serving as stevedores and delivery drivers for the white rookies of the 341^st. More often they simply remained in camp, surrounded by mud, huddled under rain-soaked canvas.

Link to the last story in this series “O’Connor Caught a Break but Didn’t Know It”

Froelich Rainey, visiting the highway in 1942 to report for National Geographic, hitched a ride out of Charlie Lake in a convoy of supply trucks piloted by members of the 95th. His young black driver wanted desperately to be home in Virginia in the “bright hot days of his homeland. This awful country, nothing but cold rain, mud and trees.” It took them six hours to travel fifteen miles.

Colonel David Neuman, commander of the 95^th exacerbated the problem. Army censors began to notice a pattern in letters from the 95^th. One 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.”

When Lt. Joseph J. Sincavage, a white officer in the 95th, recorded his disgust in a letter to his wife, the censors brought it to command attention. Some of his fellows he told her were “dastardly punks. . .it was disgraceful.” He told her about 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.”

Some of the soldiers could build their own morale

When, back in Washington, General Sturdevent read Lt. Sincavage’s letter the ‘shit’, as they say, ‘hit the fan’. Neuman who had injured his leg and secluded himself in his tent with a bottle—no, several bottles–wasn’t demoted. The Army didn’t work that way. They sent him “home for his health”.

On July 19, Lt. Colonel Heath Twichell, executive officer of the 35^th Engineers, assumed command of the 95^th Engineers, and inherited their crushing morale problem.

Colonel Twichell’s son’s book on the project.

O’Connor Caught a Break but Didn’t Know It

O’Connor, Colonel James A. “Patsy” O’Connor, southern sector commander on the Alaska Highway Project, finally caught a break in May. One of his regiments, brand new, sorely lacking in experience, fresh off the shocking disaster at Charlie lake had a lot of learning to do. But at the end of the month, one more regiment joined O’Connor’s team when the 95^th Engineers came up from Ft. Bragg, North Carolina.

They had existed as a regiment for a full year. They had under their belt thirteen weeks of training at Ft. Belvoir, construction projects at Camp A.P. Hill and ten weeks of training at Ft. Bragg. In short, the 95^th had jelled into a working team that brought significant training and experience to the project, qualities O’Connor desperately needed. They knew their job and how to do it. Moreover, their equipment followed close behind them—including heavy equipment. The Corps had sent O’Connor, struggling to reorganize and recover from a disastrous month, a tremendous asset.

Link to another story “Twichell, Father and Son, and the Alaska Highway”

But the men of the 95^th, like those of the 93^rd and the 97^th, were black. Their resume mattered less to O’Connor than their color. When the 95^th’s heavy equipment arrived at Dawson Creek, O’Connor immediately handed it over to the 341^st!

The 95^th would come to the highway with two bulldozers, one grader, a carryall, less than twenty small dump trucks—and hand tools.

The Army’s Take on the Highway Project

The skin color of the soldiers of the 341^st mattered more than their demonstrated inexperience and its consequences. O’Conner pointed them and ‘their’ new heavy equipment at the road and ordered the black soldiers of the 95^th to fall in behind them to clean up the roadway with hand tools. The soldiers of the 95^th swung picks and wielded shovels, hauled dirt with wheelbarrows and felled trees with axes and saws.

Whatever enthusiasm they had for the Alaska Highway project dissolved. One soldier, Henry Roberts remembered it succinctly. “Morale was bad”.

North Country Lessons

North country lessons sometimes came to the Corps the hard way. In May the North Country taught the Corps that what they didn’t know posed difficult problems. What they didn’t know they didn’t know could lead to catastrophe.

Link to another story “Muskeg Flats”

On April 31 the 341st had been together less than two months. But with the 35^th, in Fort Nelson, sick and running out of food, General O’Conner needed a supply road to them—yesterday! The Corps had brought the 341^st to Canada to provide that road, and, for better or for worse, the under equipped and inexperienced regiment had to get it done.

The Regiment made its way a few miles up the Highway to the foot of Charlie Lake, just outside of Fort St. John, and put their small allotment of D-4 dozers and trucks out on the road—counting on, on the job training to bring their operators and drivers up to speed. In a letter to his wife, Commander Lane noted that ribbon clerks and office workers from Brooklyn and Jersey City didn’t bring a lot of useful background to the job of operating heavy equipment.

This memorial to the dead soldiers stands today

Lane put his men in the woods with hand tools, cutting a wide swath and burning the downed trees and brush on top of the right of way. North country lesson one? Removing the insulating vegetation and then applying heat, turned what had appeared to be ‘ground’ into a sea of bottomless mud.

Lane sought a different solution and thought he found one in Charlie Lake. The placid little lake ran 12 miles in the right direction—a perfect bypass around the mud.

Lane moved his second battalion to the upper end of the lake; would use the lake to bring their equipment up and start them working north from there. The 74^th Pontoon Company built Lane a broad, flat raft, equipped with several 22 horsepower outboard motors, riding on three pontoons. On May 14, loaded with a radio car, a small angle dozer, two officers and fifteen enlisted men, the ungainly craft motored out onto the lake and headed north.

But storms occasionally visited Charlie Lake and churned the placid mill pond into raging surf, and one chose to visit on May 14^th. Two hours out, just a couple of miles from their destination, the violent combination of wind and waves capsized the raft and pitched its passengers and cargo into the icy water. Despite heroic efforts led by a local trapper named Gus Harden, twelve soldiers drowned.

In a sad denouement, Lane, eating breakfast at Mrs. Hunter’s restaurant a few days after the accident, overheard Rene Dhenin, a local surveyor and guide, talking with his friends about the drowning. Had they asked, virtually any local resident could have shown the soldiers a route around the ten miles of mud—and around the lake.

Charlie Lake today

Heroine of the Klondike–Martha Black

Heroine? The subarctic north had several, but Martha Black stood out even among them.

News of Gold on the Klondike reached the ears of Martha Purdy in 1898. Privileged daughter of a Chicago businessman, mother of two, Martha talked her husband, Will, into following their star to Dawson City.

Martha the heroine had not married a hero and Will backed out, decided to take their two sons to Hawaii instead. But Martha had set her cap for the Klondike. The journey was “more than just my headstrong determination to carry out an idea. It was the pivotal point of my life—my destiny.”

Link to another story “Legendary Alaskan, Mary Hanson”

With her brother and a cousin, she made her way up the inside passage to Skagway, climbed the Chilkoot Pass and in August negotiated the Yukon River to Dawson City. The three hurriedly built a log cabin. And five months later, Martha delivered her and Will’s third son there.

Photograph of climbers with large packs on their backs on the side of a snow covered mountain.

Martha and her son survived, the marriage to Will Purdy did not.

By 1900 the Gold Rush had ended, but the Klondike had captured Martha. She opened a sawmill and a gold ore crushing plant. “…what I wanted was not shelter and safety, but liberty and opportunity.”

Mary described the women of Dawson City. “There were three classes: members of the oldest profession in the world, who ever follow armies and gold rushes: dance hall and variety girls whose business was to entertain and be dancing partners; and a few others, wives with unbounded faith in and love for their mates, or the odd person like myself on a special mission.”

In 1904 Martha married George Black.

In 1912 the Canadian government appointed George Commissioner of the Yukon. He moved on to the House of Commons and, when he got sick in 1935, the people of Yukon elected Martha to replace him, making her, at age 70, the second woman to serve in that House.

Color photo of middle aged lady fishing.

Martha published her autobiography, My Seventy Years, in 1938. Twenty years later she updated and republished it as My Ninety Years. Her publisher released it again, posthumously, as Martha Black: Her Story from the Dawson Gold Fields to the Halls of Parlaiment.

Martha’s Book on Amazon

Vanilla Extract

Who knew you could get plastered? One cook did.

Vanilla Extract turned out to have unanticipated uses… Lt. Dewitt Howell told Donna Blasor Bernhardt about it as he recounted his memories from the construction of the Alaska Highway.

SS Nisutlin

SS Nisutlin, Canadian steamer, and its Canadian crew transported men and equipment for the 340^th Engineers to Morley Bay where they would start their section of the Alaska Highway. Out of Whitehorse the SS Nisutlin flowed with the Yukon, but when it turned onto the Teslin River, it turned up stream. The soldiers they transported had a pretty good trip. The Canadian crew?

Not so much.

General Hoge had ordered the 340^th to build highway from Teslin through Yukon toward British Columbia. On the other side of the Continental Divide they would meet the 35^th Engineers coming the other way. To do that the 340^th had to get men and equipment to Morley Bay–a long, long way from Skagway where, in early May, the regiment cooled its heels.

Link to another story “Yukon River Route”

A bit more than half the regiment waited for the segregated 93^rd to build them a road. The WP&YR would carry the rest of the men and, if it ever got up the Inside Passage, the regiment’s heavy equipment to Whitehorse. At Whitehorse they would transfer to river steamers like the SS Nisutlin, travel down the Yukon River the up the Teslin River and over Teslin Lake to Morley Bay.

Tiny Carcross

Tiny Carcross, Yukon. The soldiers of the 18^th Engineers barely noticed as they travelled past and on to Whitehorse in April. In May the trains carrying the black soldiers of the 93^rd Engineers, to the surprise and delight of her citizens, stopped in Carcross and discharged their passengers.

Link to another story “Carcross Met the Black Soldiers”

Long before 1942, trains out of Skagway headed directly up into the coastal range, negotiating two tunnels and two precarious bridges over the Skagway River in the first few miles. Just beyond the summit perched Bennett, British Columbia –one church, a few dilapidated cabins and a depot—and from Bennett the lake that shared its name wandered away eastward into the crags at the top of the Coastal Range, its waters, azure in summer, dark under the ice in winter.

Forty miles on Carcross nestled into the backdrop of Caribou and Nares Mountains. Rattling over a rusted swivel bridge across the watery narrows, the train groaned and clanked to a stop at the depot.

Matthew Watson’s general store, a small post office, the Caribou Hotel and Bar and, of course, the depot bordered the narrows at the end of Lake Bennet. Behind the depot towered the dry-docked old sternwheeler, Tutshi, easily the most impressive structure in town. Tiny St. Saviour’s Anglican Church stood behind the depot, the slopes of Nares and Caribou mountains dwarfing its steeple.

The little town existed to serve the tourists and hunters who bivouacked at the Caribou Hotel, the oldest operating hotel in the territory, during the short summers.

Outsiders came to experience the famous old gold rush town, to hunt the animals of the North Country, or both. At the Caribou, they slept, ate and enjoyed the talents of Polly the parrot who sang operatic arias and offered a running commentary in the form of truly colorful and creative profanity. Polly, “the oldest, meanest, ugliest, dirtiest bird north of the 60th parallel” had been in Carcross since Gold Rush days.

A local businessman named Simmons owned and operated Northern Airways out of Carcross and several bush pilots, including the famous Les Cook, based at his airstrip.

Larkins—Meeting Leonard, a Veteran of the Alaska Highway Project

Larkins, the name stood out in the roll of soldiers in the 93rd. Leonard Larkins’ son found us through our research site, contacted us and in short order we headed off to New Orleans to meet his dad. Leonard had served with the 93^rd Engineering Regiment on the Alaska Highway in 1942. Our Research Site

We have gathered in a large and comfortable room. On a big screen TV in front of us, Researcher Chris cycles through photos from the Highway. Mr. Larkins and I sit slightly apart and I struggle a bit to hear his quiet voice.

I tell him about interviewing Millie Jones in Carcross; tell him that 8-year-old Millie and her schoolmates had rushed, excited and thrilled, to the depot when the first soldiers arrived. That makes him grin.

The people in Carcross didn’t understand what race meant to the Americans. Didn’t understand why black soldiers couldn’t come into the hotel. But they came to the back door for water, and the cook, Millie’s mom, would sometimes hand out bread and cookies. Smiling and nodding, Leonard remembers, confirms that.

I tell him Millie’s story about the soldier who, spotting a piano, sat down and banged out “Pistol Packin’ Momma”. He laughs, delighted. Doesn’t remember that, but the story clearly rings true.

He also confirms that the men often sang spirituals while they worked. His sons and I, remembering marching and counting cadence during our days in the Army, try to convince him that’s what he remembers. It’s not. The men sang just like they did in the fields of the plantation back home. He seems surprised that we are surprised.

Out on the road, desperate to make progress, the Corps needed heavy equipment, especially the big D-8 bulldozers. Leonard volunteers that it took a long time to get equipment; confirms that when equipment finally came up to Carcross, they had the devil’s own time getting it through the woods to the road.

Link to another story “Carcross Met the Black Soldiers”

“They turned over easy. Two guys died.”

Chris puts up a photo from the road; a muddy gash through a hill, covered with slash and fallen trees, black soldiers working with axes and shovels to clear it up. Leonard Larkins reacts strongly. “That’s what I did.”

One of his sons asks about his specialty. He struggles to answer—didn’t have one. He painted numbers on mileposts, shoveled, swung an axe, dragged brush. He wrapped TNT in the form of primacord around difficult trees—to explode and drop them. His sons hadn’t heard about that. We hadn’t either.

He has a vague memory of crossing a big river on a ferry. That would have been the Tagish River. I mention Big Devil’s Swamp—Company B losing a bulldozer forever, deep in the muskeg. He grins, remembering hearing about that. “That was a bad place.”

The 93^rd’s most heroic moments came when Company A made a last desperate dash to the Teslin River with the white 340^th hot on their heels. Company A built the last 20 miles in just six days, and men from the two regiments reached the river together.

I ask him about that last 20 miles, and the question puzzles him. I describe the six days virtually without food or sleep, the white soldiers coming up with them and boarding boats… That he remembers.