STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

Three Hundred Sixty-five Miles

Three hundred sixty-five miles of Richardson Highway, barren of towns or settlements lay between Valdez and Fairbanks when Richardson built it just after the turn of the century. For travelers, the rough road took a toll in exhaustion, and winter added snow and bitter cold. In summer people travelled it in wagons pulled by mules or horses. In winter they travelled by dogsled, most of them carrying mail to the interior.

Link to Another Post “Richardson and His Highway”

The three hundred sixty-five miles couldn’t remain barren, and roadhouses came to address the problem. They offered little in the way of luxury, but they offered warmth in winter, food, and a place to sleep.

Right out of Valdez the road presented the toughest challenges and roadhouses clustered there. The roadhouse named Camp Comfort appeared just ten miles out near the foot of Keystone Canyon. Camp Comfort let travelers stop and rest before taking on the frightening and dangerous road that threaded its way up and up along the wall of the Canyon.

A few miles on, at the top of Keystone the road started an especially steep climb to Thompson Pass. Bill Wortman built a roadhouse there, just a few miles from Camp Comfort, offering an opportunity to recover from Keystone and prepare for the climb to the pass.

Summit Roadhouse near the summit of Thompson Pass proposed to give travelers another rest stop after that climb. Summit’s location, though, led to special problems and it didn’t last long. Because a winter snowstorm could dump as much as 62 inches of snow in 24 hours, Summit included a unique emergency entrance. When snow blocked the door, a traveler climbed steps to a door in the roof.

Beyond the pass travelers could typically do about 20 miles a day, and roadhouses appeared at 20 mile intervals.

Then came the 1920’s and everything changed. Motorized vehicles came to the Richardson and airplanes came to Valdez. The airplane replaced the dog teams that had traversed the snowy pass carrying mail to the interior. Pilots didn’t need roadhouses.

Travelers in motorized vehicles didn’t need to stop and rest before attacking Keystone Canyon and Thompson Pass. And they could cover more than 20 miles a day. Many of the roadhouses, especially the ones close to Valdez shut down.

Richardson and His Highway

Richardson, Major Wilds Richardson, came to Alaska in 1906 to replace Abercrombie’s trail with an actual highway. Like Abercrombie Richardson started at the Port of Valdez, upgrading Abercrombie’s trail. But by 1906 the Klondike Gold Rush lay in the past. New gold fields lay close to Fairbanks. That and the city’s central location turned Fairbanks into early Alaska’s version of a bustling city. And Richardson built to Fairbanks, not to Eagle.

Abercrombie’s Trail.

He upgraded Abercrombie’s trail through Keystone Canyon and Thompson Pass and on to the little roadhouse at Galkona. But from there he veered left and built his road to the Tanana River. Travellers would cross the Tanana by Ferry and then follow Richardson’s new road on to Fairbanks. A little community—Big Delta—consisting mainly of two roadhouses grew near the Tanana Ferry.

Glaciers Define the Richardson Highway Even Today

Alaska named Richardson’s road the “Richardson Highway” in 1919 and Valdez officially became the “Gateway to the Richardson”.

For all of Richardson’s efforts, Alaskan Wilderness suffered no man to build an actual highway. Richardson built a two-lane path of dirt and gravel that crossed endless rickety timber bridges. Snow in Thompson Pass closed the road every winter to any traffic except dog sleds.

Freight wagons moved laboriously up the ‘Highway’ carrying material ordered by people in Fairbanks, carrying mail. Stages carried travelers. Everybody stopped at roadhouses, spaced at one day intervals (every fifteen or twenty miles) all along the way.

The Roadhouse at Tonsina

Luckily only a Few

Luckily few people had any reason to travel from the Port of Valdez into Alaska’s vast interior. Those who did faced a thoroughly daunting challenge. They faced subarctic weather; and, much worse, they faced range after range of virtually impassable glaciers and mountains.

But then came the gold strike on the Klondike. Luckily no longer applied.

Outsiders flooded into the Subarctic North through Skagway and up over the Chilkoot or White Pass to Canada and on to the Klondike via the Yukon River–difficult and dangerous enough. Then it occurred to steamship companies to promote the “All American Trail” (absurd on the face of it since the Klondike lay safely across the border in Canada) An increasing flood of outsiders found their way to the Port of Valdez via Prince William Sound, planning to make their way north over the Valdez Glacier.

Good luck with that.

The Valdez Glacier

Those who came to try that route suffered unimaginably, died in droves.

Captain W. R. Abercrombie of the United States Army had experience in Alaska; knew exactly what the Valdez Glacier Route meant; reported what he knew to his superiors. In 1899 the Army dispatched him to Valdez to construct a “Trans-Alaskan Military Road” from there north to Eagle on the Yukon River—just a few miles from the Canadian border and the Klondike. In that first year, Abercrombie’s small command scouted their route around the glacier and built 93 miles of trail out of Valdez.

The trail, suitable only for men on foot and pack animals, didn’t amount to much, but it proved vastly better than the route over the glacier and traffic flowed right behind Abercrombie’s soldiers.

Through Keystone Canyon, right out of Valdez. They build a series of switchbacks up the wall of the Canyon 700 feet above the Lowe River on the Canyon floor then followed a ‘bench’ to the end of the canyon at Thompson Pass.

Towering rock cliffs punctuated at intervals by cascading waterfalls, Bridal Veil and Horsetail, closed in on them from both sides as they cut into the cliff. Along the ‘bench’ nature helpfully provided thick brush—Alder and a tree the men called “devil’s clubs”, bristling with sharp spines. The snow bent the trees down all winter and when the snow melted, they remained bent, projecting out from the cliff wall. The men struggled for footing on crumbling dirt, hundreds of feet above the canyon floor, cutting away brush to clear a path.

Three years after Abercrombie, 1906, Worman’s Roadhouse at the Entrance to Keystone

Abercrombie and his men completed their trail to Eagle in 1901.

A Copy of Abercrombie’s Report

Grievous Error–Mine

Unknown artist’s portrait of Carcross’s leading citizen.

Grievous errors, I commit them all too often. Here’s my latest. I’ve told you stories about Carcross Yukon many times, it’s a fascinating place. But until now I’ve completely ignored the town’s most famous and important citizen–Polly the Foul Mouthed Parrot. I apologize, and I am here tonight to correct that error or at least make it a bit less grievous.

Polly came over the Chilkoot Pass with the gold stampeders in 1898; wound up, post stampede, living with the mine manager at the Engineer Mine on Tagish Lake. But in 1918, the mine manager and his wife sank with the Princess Sofia to a watery grave in the Lynn Canal, and Polly spent the rest of her life at the Caribou Hotel in Carcross.

Link to another story “Ghosts Haunt the Caribou Hotel.”

Or, maybe, that should be the rest of “his” life. Those who reported on Polly over the years agreed on many things, but they had trouble with the ‘he or she’ question.

Reporter Dennis Bell who interviewed Polly in the 1970’s, declared ‘him’ “probably the oldest, meanest, ugliest, dirtiest bird north of the 60^th parallel. He hates everybody.”

Polly had spent her formative years with miners; mastered all the miners’ ‘arts’. Spitting, swearing, and biting through life—regularly sucking up free booze and falling in a stupor from a precarious perch. Polly’s last owner, Dorothy McLennan, admitted that ‘she’ liked to bite customers—especially miners. Dorothy claimed, though, that Polly also had a sweeter, gentler side–sang songs that charmed the kids who came to eat in the hotel restaurant.

Polly lived a very long time. Tourists and hunters enjoyed Polly’s music, wit and vast reservoir of imaginative cuss words through the 20’s and 30’s. Polly amazed and delighted all comers, in fact, until 1972 when she died at 126.

Polly, you see, was a parrot. And apparently parrots live very long lives.

Johnny Johns, the famous outfitter and guide gave the eulogy at Polly’s funeral; sang some verses of “I Love You Truly”, Polly’s favorite song.

Polly’s Memorial in the Carcross Graveyard

A trainload of dignitaries had come up on the WP&YR for the occasion; and, after the tuneful eulogy, they repaired with Johns to the Caribou Hotel Bar where they honored the dear departed in the most appropriate possible way—by drinking themselves into an honorary stupor.

Under this sod lies a sourdough parrot.

Its heart was gold, pure 14 carat.

Polly now can spread her wings,

Leaving behind all earthly things.

She ranks in fame as our dear departed,

A just reward for being good hearted.

McGee, Sam McGee, and the 18th Engineers

The 18th’s version of a completed bridge over the Aishihik

McGee, Sam McGee, probably a name familiar to you, couldn’t know he crossed paths, albeit a half century ahead of them in time, with the soldiers of the 18th Engineering Regiment. The soldiers, building Alaska Highway through Yukon, certainly didn’t know they’d crossed paths with him.

Sam McGee, the real Sam McGee, not the one in Robert Service’s imagination, followed the lure of gold to Skagway and up the Chilkoot Pass, but in Yukon Territory he stopped in Whitehorse. He would prospect there instead of going on to the Klondike.

Good choice.

His War Eagle copper mine made him a wealthy man—and a leading citizen of Whitehorse. When Robert Service filched Sam’s name and wrote a poem about cremating him, Sam didn’t even know it. Sam moved south with his family before the poem made him famous.

Robert Service, Poet of the Gold Rush

The Poem

The real Sam McGee at his Whitehorse home

In Yukon Territory the real Sam McGee turned to building roads. He built a wagon road from Whitehorse to Carcross. He built a road from Conrad to Carcross. He built a road to War Eagle. And he built a section of the road from Whitehorse to Kluane.

On that section between Whitehorse and Kluane, Sam’s road had to bridge the Aishihik River, and his bridge over the Aishihik served travelers for decades.

When Sam McGee died in 1940, nobody cremated him. He lies in a cemetery in Beiseker, Alberta. But two years postmortem, his bridge connected him to the soldiers of the 18^th Engineering regiment.

The men of the 18^th built road as far as the Aishihik—the soldiers called it Canyon Creek—and the river presented a problem. Sam McGee’s timber bridge would no way hold up under trucks and D8 Bulldozers. To replace the old bridge the soldiers had…

Timbers.

The engineers got creative, and the design they came up with became famous within the Corps of Engineers for its ingenuity.

Notice the angled timbers driven into the opposite banks.

The soldiers of the 18^th certainly knew of Sam McGee—the cremated one. They didn’t know they rebuilt Sam McGee’s bridge.

The Swamp Claimed a Dozer

Big Devil Swamp immortalized Captain Pollock, Company B commander, in June 1942.

Racing to the Teslin River early in the month, the soldiers of the 93^rd had passed Summit Lake and plunged through the swamp—left a barely passable trail. The soldiers of the 340^th had worked through and around, got to the Teslin, boarded boats and rafts and moved on. Now Captain Pollock’s Company B turned back to deal with the swamp more permanently.

Days of heavy rain beset the 93^rd all along the route. One young officer wrote to his girlfriend, “It has rained here for three days and man you never saw such mud in your life. Seemed like it was miles thick.” The rain primed the swamp for Company B’s arrival and set its soldiers up for an event immortal in the history of the 93^rd.

Long stretches of road turned to the consistency of wet concrete. Entire sections simply slid away. One by one the swamp immobilized Company B’s trucks, stranding them on the side of the road.

Finally, one of the B Company’s precious bulldozers, growling through the muck, eased over into a muskeg bog. The operator threw his machine into reverse and accelerated, trying desperately to back away from the sucking mud. The great treads spun and slung mud defiantly toward the bog—to no avail. Capt. Pollock hurriedly dispatched another dozer to pull it out–too late. Big Devil’s Swamp swallowed the D8 whole. Prodding deep into the mud with a ten-foot pole, a soldier tried to locate the machine by feel—no luck. The North Country swamp holds its giant mechanical hostage to this day.

In the end Companies B and C ganged up on the stretch through the swamp.

In addition to the D8, it swallowed over 8,000 trees for corduroy. And the men carried these logs on their shoulders lest the swamp swallow more precious trucks and equipment. At one point, they had dumped three feet of gravel and dirt over a layer of corduroy and it seemed solid. In a few days under heavy truck traffic, the roadbed began to undulate. The swamp took a second and a third layer of gravel, each two feet thick over the corduroy, before it could base a suitable road.

On an old Army map of the area, one spot in the middle of Big Devil Swamp is labelled, “Pollock’s Graveyard”.

Another Site with Stories and Photos

We Fought the Road and A Different Race

We Fought the Road and now A Different Race tell an important and fascinating story that too many people don’t know.

In early 1942 the rampaging Empire of Japan advanced on America through the Aleutian Islands and Alaska. America couldn’t get enough men and material to Alaska to defend it without a land route from the lower 48.

A Different Race

Eight thousand soldiers struggled, suffered and even died gouging that route out of the vast subarctic wilderness, over mountains through deep forest over muskeg and permafrost, in summer heat and bitter winter cold… Sixteen hundred miles they gouged—in just eight months.

Books and articles and films about the Epic project, offer the generals and colonels, their plans and strategies. Few of them offered the privates and sergeants who fought to implement those plans and strategies and who suffered when they went tragically wrong.

We wrote about the men, not the colonels and generals. We wrote about how it felt to be them in that time and that place. We wrote about their misery, their fear, their patriotism and their triumph. We wanted our readers to live the adventure of these ordinary men who stepped up and built the extraordinary Alaska Highway.

Nearly half of those men served in segregated regiments, black men. The Army determined to keep them in the deep woods away from the civilian population. The black soldiers lived and worked in isolation. The Army expected little of them, but the Army got as expert a crew of determined catskinners and road builders as ever existed.

All the men who worked on the Alcan were heroes, but the black men worked in isolation. Reporters, photographers and newsreel cameras followed the white regiments, the black soldiers became ghosts in history, gave their all for a country that couldn’t bring itself to thank them or even remember them.

A Different Race on Amazon

A Different Race on Barnes and Noble

We Fought the Road on Barnes and Noble

We Fought the Road on Amazon

Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way

Lead, follow or get out of the way. The first weeks in March 1942, before work on the Alaska Highway even started, set the tone for the whole eight-month project. March saw the enormous effort to get the Corps’ juggernaut in place and making road. Some of the regiments in that juggernaut didn’t even exist on March 1, and no soldier engineers had come anywhere near the subarctic north.

The ‘very highest authority’ had ordered the Corps to build the highway and do it immediately, and the Corps had leaped into action. The Corps built things fast under difficult circumstances. They existed for that purpose.

Link to another story “Wartime Government in Action”

Asked for a plan, General C. L. Sturdevant had submitted one in two days, knowing as he did so, that it was at best an outline of a plan. Even as he wrote it, he set the bureaucratic machinery of the Corps in motion.

He had already made his most important choice–his commander on the ground, the man in the lead, would be Colonel William Hoge. From 1935 through 1937 Hoge, a West Pointer with an advanced engineering degree from MIT, had commanded the 14^th Engineers in the construction of the Bataan Highway through the Philippine jungles, reporting directly to Sturdevant.

The two men met on 12 February 1942 to consider their most urgent task—turning Sturdevant’s outline into a real plan. Because they were both Army Engineers, they understood one thing that civilian engineers would have considered absurd—they did not have the luxury of time to complete the plan before they started to implement it.

A week after that February 12 meeting, Colonel Hoge’s boots were “on the ground” in Edmonton. With him were Fred Capes, a construction engineer from the Public Roads Administration (PRA); Lt. Col. Edward Mueller of the Quartermaster Corps; and Lt. Col. Robert Ingalls, Commander of the 35^th Engineering Regiment. Twenty-four hours later they climbed off a train in Dawson Creek, British Columbia to meet Homer Keith, the Canadian assigned to ‘liase’ with them.

Murder on the Yukon

Murder? The last thing on the minds of Fred Clayson, Lynn Relfe, and Lawrence Olson as they spent Christmas morning walking down the bank of the Yukon. A couple of hours later and a few kilometers away, their nude corpses floated under the Yukon ice.

Information included came from Michael Gates’ book

The link will take you to it on Amazon.

The three had left the little roadhouse at Minto in the morning, headed south to a small RCMP post to share Christmas dinner with their friend, Corporal Ryan. As they walked, two men, hiding in the brush along their path, shot all three. O’brien and Graves then stepped out to finish the job, put a bullet in each victim’s head and collected any items of value the men had carried with them. Chopping a hole in the Yukon ice, they stripped the three and pushed them through the hole into the water.

Clothing and items they didn’t want, they scattered to be covered by Yukon snow. And then O’brien shot his partner Graves, put his corpse in the river with the others and headed off along the river toward Tagish.

Authorities in Tagish knew nothing of the murders, of course, but apparently they did know that O’brien had been raiding miner’s caches. They arrested him and locked him up.

The story of the murders came together very slowly. Three men had disappeared. Telegrams, exchanging ideas and suspicions flew between RCMP posts. And Fred Clayson’s brother hired an American private detective, Phillip McGuire. Who came to the Yukon and teamed up with an English Mountie named Alexander Pennycrick.

Explore North’s Take on Mounties in early Yukon

Knowing the area the missing men had walked through they searched it until they found the remains of O’brien’s last camp. They also sifted the snow and found pools of frozen blood, a key that turned out to open a safe in the Clayton’s business in Skagway, a receipt with Lawrence Olson’s name on it… And they found shell casings of the same calibre as O’brien’s rifle.

When the Yukon melted and yielded up the victim’s bodies in June, the investigators had turned up enough evidence to charge O’brien with murder. At his trial in Dawson City the Crown got him convicted and on the morning of August 23, 1901 his neck snapped at the end of a rope.

The Courthouse where the Crown got O’brien convicted.

Sometimes Funny

Sometimes funny, the exploits of bush pilot Les Cook on the Alaska Highway Project make great stories. Most stories portray Les as a hero. Cook flew when no one else could or would. He and his plane saved lives. Cook’s plane brought food, mail, emergency equipment and doctors to places no other mode of transportation could access.

Flying with his spare can of gas, his axe, his rifle, his sleeping bag and a bit of extra food, Cook made himself an indispensable part of the project. He flew to all the regiments and to PRA contractors, but his efforts concentrated in Yukon Territory and the soldiers of the 18^th the 93^rd and 340^th regiments thought of him as one of their own.

Cook not only flew when and where no one else could, he also always got the job done—one way or another. But, because he often flew to places where he couldn’t land the plane, his methods yielded sometimes funny results instead of the results he hoped for.

Link to another story “Gillam Weather and a Legendary Bush Pilot”

Delivering a D8 transfer pump, he found the target dozer deep in the wilderness. He put the pump in the mail bag and dropped it. The bag hit the road then bounced and rolled several feet before coming to rest. The pump survived the drop, but it turned the mail into confetti.

Leonard Cox of the 340^th remembered Cook’s delivery of, “… a quarter of fresh beef. Now just imagine throwing a beef quarter out the door of a plane which is going 100 miles an hour. After bouncing several times, the beef was in bad shape. The cooks were lucky to salvage half of it.”

One day Cook set out to deliver several cases of steel drift pins along with several cases of canned beets. It took several passes to push all those cases out the door of the plane. He didn’t even know that every single case burst open as it descended through the trees. The result? Drift pins penetrated the trees everywhere and blood red beet juice dripped around the penetrations Observers described the combined effect as the perfect set for a deep woods horror movie.