STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

Alaska Nellie

Alaska Nellie took everything by storm. Born Nellie Trosper, she learned to take the woods that way on a farm near St. Joseph Missouri. She trapped and, a terrific shot, she hunted. In her spare time she helped her parents raise 11 younger siblings.

As soon as her parents could spare her, though, Nellie headed west in search of new things to take by storm. Barely five feet tall with her shoes on, she worked her way west to Colorado then to California then, finally, to Seward Alaska in 1915.

Link to another story “Ada Blackjack—The Toughest Woman You’ve Never Heard About”

Alaska Nellie never looked back.

The Alaska Road Commission hired her to run a roadhouse to feed and house workers on the new Alaska Railroad. Nellie filled out the menu with her rifle in the woods. She got herself a dog team. She collected an amazing array of hunting trophies. And her legendary gift for story telling entertained her customers.

During a blizzard, when the local mail carrier failed to arrive at the station on time, with his sacks and pouches full of valuable mail, Nellie hitched up the dogs, backtracked to find him stuck and freezing to death. She took him back to the roadhouse to warm up and then delivered his mail to the waiting train. That exploit earned Alaska Nellie a medal from the town of Seward.

Nellie found her final home in a roadhouse where the railroad ran next to the blue-green water of Kenai Lake. When She married Bill Lawing, the railroad named its stop there “Lawing”.

Tourists stopped in Lawing to laugh at Nellie’s hilarious stories and eat delicious food from the surrounding woods and the roadhouse garden. Celebrities came to Lawing to experience the place. According to Patricia A. Heim, in her book, Alaska Nellie, “Her guest register of over 15,000 read like the Who’s Who of the early twentieth century: two U.S. Presidents, the Prince of Bulgaria, Will Rogers, authors, generals and many silent-screen movie stars.”

In 1956 Alaska designated an “Alaska Nellie Day”.

But when her spectacular life finally ended, they laid her to rest under a tombstone that read simply “Lawing”.

Writer Helen Hegener who penned an article for the Anchorage Daily News in 2014 that provided much of the information in this post, wrote the article to publicize a fund-raising project to provide Alaska Nellie with a suitable tombstone.

Link to the Autobiography on Amazon

Ada Blackjack—The Toughest Woman You’ve Never Heard About

The lonely camp on Wrangell in late fall

Ada Blackjack travelled with four inexperienced young men on an ill-advised expedition to Wrangell Island in the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia. Stuck there for two years, the four young men died, leaving Ada to survive on her own.

Link to another story “Badass Women”

Ada, born Ada Deletuk, hailed from Spruce Creek just a few miles from Nome Alaska—far north of the Arctic Circle. Methodist missionaries raised Ada, and she studied the Bible in English, knew all about housekeeping, sewing, and cooking.

Ada in winter gear and at work clearing blubber from a seal

At 16 she made a tragic choice. She married Jack Blackjack. Ada Blackjack bore her husband three children, only one of whom lived, and Blackjack disappeared in 1921.

Ada’s surviving son, five years old, sick with tuberculosis, couldn’t walk so Ada carried him forty miles to Nome. With no money and no prospects, she couldn’t care for the boy. She placed him in an orphanage, promising him and herself she would earn some money and come get him.

And opportunity knocked—or seemed to.

An Arctic explorer named Stefansson, put together a breathtakingly ill-conceived expedition. He had attracted four inexperienced young men and he needed an English-speaking seamstress. Ada hesitated, but she desperately needed money to get her boy back.

Stefansson didn’t go with them, instead he dispatched the five of them to Wrangell Island north of Siberia in the Arctic Ocean to claim it for the British (not that the British particularly wanted it.) He equipped them with 6 months of supplies, assuring them that they could supplement those with game provided by the “friendly arctic” until a ship came to get them next year.

At first things worked pretty much like Stefansson predicted, but come winter and time to return to civilization, the Arctic Ocean and Wrangell returned to normal. Pack ice surrounded the island. The ship sent to get them, encountering the solid ice, turned back.

Scurvy sickened Knight, one of the four men, and the other three, facing a second year on Wrangell, elected to try to cross on the ice to Siberia for help. They simply disappeared.

For six months Ada struggled to care for and feed Knight. He died on June 23; left young Ada alone. Unable to bury him she left him in his sleeping bag and erected a barrier to keep wild animals away.

Ada adapted, taught herself to set traps, shoot birds. She even built herself a boat and experimented with the expedition’s photography equipment. Two pictures of Ada standing outside her camp have survived.

On August 20, 1923, after nearly two years, a ship arrived to rescue her. According to Atlas Obscura, “As news of the expedition’s tragic end spread, Blackjack found herself at the epicenter of a flurry of press attention lauding her as a hero…” She shied away from the attention, wanting only to get home to her son.

(Much of the information about Ada and the public domain photos come from an article by Tessa Hulls on Atlas Obscura.) Click here for the full story

Highballing It At 60 Below

Highballing it at 60 below headlined an article in the November 27, 1943 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Captain Richard L. Neuberger who wrote it had watched the 770^th Railway Operating Battalion struggle to shove enough men and freight up and over White Pass to build Alaska Highway through Yukon. In truth they didn’t do much highballing.

Neuberger described what he saw in his Post article and the words that follow are his.

Link to Another Story “Russell Wesley on the WP& YR”

“…with the thermometer on the station platform at Whitehorse registering sixty-eight degrees below zero and the snow piled forty feet deep on the uplands at Fraser Loop, they scoffed no more. They had been sure that the aggregate of their careers included all there could be possibly to railroading. Now they knew what the old-timers and sourdoughs had meant who told them they were up against ‘the toughest 110 miles of track in the world.’…

“Up out of Skagway the White Pass and Yukon ascends 2900 feet in nineteen miles. Much of the grade is 4 per cent. The lead engine of a train is frequently thirty feet higher on the mountain wall than the caboose. Curves are so sharp that trains rounding them are curled up like a cowpuncher’s lariat. Overhanging precipices frown down on the thiry-six-inch tracks, and below the ties the cliff falls away 1200 sheer feet to the turbulent waters of the Skagway River. The railroad follows the heartbreaking trail of the ‘98ers over White Pass, a trail beset by blizzards, avalanches and incredible temperatures…

“When White Pass trains stopped to take on water, the locomotive wheels froze to the rails. Often they were not broken loose until another engine was summoned by wire to give the train a shattering bump. In the yards at Skagway, Whitehorse and Carcross—which Jack London shortened from Caribou Crossing—engines were moved every ten minutes to keep them from freezing to the track. Drifting, wind-blown snow plugged the line at innumerable points. Indians on snowshoes risked their lives to bring emergency rations to passengers in stalled trains.”

The Subarctic North Lay in Wait

The subarctic north lay in wait for the soldiers of the Corps of Engineers at the end of the 1940’s. A few daring men flew over it. A primitive system of primordial trails traversed it from the farming village of Dawson Creek through a string of tiny settlements to the almost city of Whitehorse and on to the hamlet of Delta.

Came the war, the Corps infuriated powerful men in Canada and the United States who had been debating and analyzing various routes for years by blithely ignoring their collective wisdom, pouring men and equipment into Dawson Creek, Skagway and Valdez before they’d even finished collecting maps or started surveying the route.

Link to another story “The Only Possible Route”

There was no other choice. The subarctic north offered but one possible path and it had come down to the Corps from prehistory.

The Northland offered the spectacle of a golden lavender sunset in the west and a rising moon, dusted with the same hue in the east. Oversized and spectacular, the land dwarfed every living thing in it—mosquitoes, moose, grizzlies and, very occasionally, men.

Winters surrounded everything in this country with temperatures that could freeze coffee between the pot and the cup. In spring red-purple fireweed blanketed the ground and, as the top layers of permafrost melted, stately spruce trees slowly leaned. Ice and snow melted into roaring rivers that scoured mountains down into flats and spread them in great alluvial fans of gravel and dirt. Water melted into the dirt and formed mud and, like lava, the mud slowly swallowed random logs. It would soon be swallowing the bulldozers of the Corps.

Paul Raso–Guest Post

Company B Specialized in Building Bridges

Paul Raso’s father served as a company commander in the 97^th Engineering Regiment—appears several times in our new book, A Different Race. And I posted a story about him and a pack mule here just a few days ago. Captain Paul Raso commanded a company of black soldiers who played a major part in constructing the northern end of the Alaska Highway in 1942.

Link to the story of Raso and the Mule

His son, Paul, helped us research our book. And a few days ago, we received this email.

Dear Christine and Dennis,
As soon as I received a letter regarding your book my wife Peg ordered it from Amazon. Once I started reading I had a hard time putting the book down and once I did I couldn’t wait to get back to it.

The story of the 97th Engineers in Alaska during the early part of the 1940s is very informative and interesting. Much of the hardships I was unaware of, my father did not talk about it often. He did say the men under his command worked hard and long to get the road built.

There is one story he told me in his later years, his men in company B were the best and fastest bridge builders in the entire 97th and this includes the civilian contractors. The company had limited tools and equipment to erect a new or repair a damaged bridge but the men got the job done. My father did say the unit never got its just due and that annoyed him to no end, even later on in his life it bothered him.

After Alaska I am not sure if my father remained with the 97th, you remarked in the book the regiment was shipped to Australia. I remember my father said he was there, also New Guinea, Leyte Gulf and the Philippines. The command he served with mostly built air fields cleared beach obstacles and unexploded munitions.
I was stationed in Alaska at Fort Greely just south of Big Delta on the Richardson Hwy. and at Black Rapids Alpine Training facility and am aware of the conditions found. My wife and I vacationed in Alaska and she could not get over the beauty and the grandeur of the place. Its hard to see it when the temperature is minus 35 degrees with a wind of 20 mph gusting to 55 mph. or the mosquitos eating you alive in 90-degree heat and mud up to your knees as did the 97th Engineers. Fort Greely
Thank you for including my father in your book, we both enjoyed the book immensely.
Paul Raso

The Fairbanks Freight

They had made it from Dawson creek to Whitehorse, now it was on to Alaska

The Fairbanks Freight would, if senior officers had anything to say about it, make scheduled runs north to Fairbanks from the Dawson Creek railhead through the winter of 1942/43. Convoys making their way over the brand new road that winter traversed a very rough draft of a Highway.

Link to another story, “Awards, Celebrations and Giving a Damn”

Soldiers camped all along the way struggling to keep the “rough draft” road passable and the Fairbanks Freight rolling. Lieutenant Mac McGara and his platoon, part of Company D of the 340^th Engineers spent the winter on the shore of Teslin Lake. Enlisted men slept in tents, McGara slept in a tar paper shack. RHIP (rank has its privileges)

Sometimes and in some places they rolled just fine.

Donna Blasor-Bernardt recorded McGara’s memories of that winter in her Pioneer Road.

A small glacier south of camp took the road out every single night and McGara and his men kept it open with jackhammers and dynamite.

The trucks of the Fairbanks Freight crossed Nisutlin Bay, that first winter, on the ice. Its thickness varied constantly, and to keep it thick enough to support heavy trucks, the soldiers laid slabs and pumped water. They tried not to shut their equipment down but if something quit running, they had to heat it to start it. A GI coffee can with burning 100 octane gasoline did the trick. Eighty octane didn’t burn hot enough.

A soldier and a stove sat in a tar paper shack on the ice of the Bay. The soldier kept a hole open in the ice and other soldiers would periodically pull up in a Dodge pickup, dip water into milk cans and then speed back to their various camps. “The water would splash and the truck looked like a flying iceberg running down the road.”

On New Years Eve a platoon of soldiers camped at the river crossing at Little Rancho Rio. A D-8 cat had dropped through the ice and they struggled to recover it. They set fires, they dynamited, they brought two other D-8’s to pull it. But the ice refroze as fast as they could break it up.

Finally came a Yukon spring. The first time the temperature got up to fifteen degrees, they “rigged a platform with a fire under a fifty gallon barrel for an open air shower. That was the first shower we’d had in months. How great it felt!’

Trucking to Alaska Today

Michael Gates Yukon News Review of Our New Book

Michael Gates, a Yukon based historian and writer, recently wrote a review of our A Different Race in his column “History Hunter” in the Yukon News.

The link below will share his thoughts with you.

Michael Gates In Yukon News on Our Newest Book

Bitter Cold Could Kill a Man

Bitter cold could kill a man–softly, even kindly, but very, very quickly. Most of the soldiers who wintered on the Alaska Highway in 1942/43 survived, but the survivors would never forget the miserable experience. Reading their memories today still produces involuntary shudders.

A soldier named Boos spent evenings with his four tent mates huddled next to a little homemade barrel stove that struggled gamely to warm the tent, turning their bodies at frequent intervals because the stove could warm but one side of a man at a time. The outside, and sometimes even the inside walls of the tent sparkled with frost.

Link to another story “What Extreme Cold Does to Equipment—and Beer”

Another soldier named Mouton got his foot stuck in deep permafrost. When, with the help of his friends, he managed to free it, he had to immerse the frozen foot in a bucket of snow to slow the thawing process and avoid permanent damage.

Billy Connor, a civil engineer, remembered the greatest danger—traveling the pioneer road. “If your vehicle breaks down, walking a few miles can actually cost you your life”. And the bitter cold increased the probability of a breakdown.

Traveling the winding, twisting, often single lane, road, drivers faced constant blind curves; preferred to drive at night when oncoming lights would reveal the presence of opposing traffic. But at night, temperatures fell. And a truck that failed its driver in the dark put him in serious jeopardy.

On the way to Ft. Nelson, PRA trucker, Oscar Albanati ran into a convoy of Army trucks stopped along the road. He approached a stalled truck.

There was a black swamper in the cab. I thought he was sleeping.

The other [black soldier] had the hood up and was leaning against a

fender peering into the engine. I tapped the boy on the shoulder and

he fell over. He was dead, frozen stiff. He was trying to repair something. The man inside was so cold he couldn’t move, but he wasn’t dead.

Nisutlin Bay on Youtube

Pack Mule

Pack mule out front, soldiers of the 97^th Engineering Regiment started their road out of Slana, Alaska in 1942. Technically the mule didn’t lead them because a Lieutenant named Razo led him—but close enough. A few days into the woods, the Lieutenant made the mule extremely unhappy.

Link to another story “Blazing the Path of the Alcan”

Ordered to start building road at Slana, the soldiers of the regiment had the devil’s own time getting themselves and their equipment there, had struggled since early April. Finally, on May 26 soldiers of Company C got there. The soldiers of Company B joined them on June 8. And those of Company A arrived on June 12. A tent city ballooned at Slana filling with young soldiers—and, of course, at least one pack mule–ready to build road.

Ready to launch them, Colonel Whipple, their commander, dispatched Lieutenant Joseph Razo with a small survey party and the pack mule to stake a trail for the bulldozers to follow.

Razo and his party filled packs with food, camping gear and a few tools, draped them over the mule’s back and led it out along the Slana River, over the sand hills that border the little settlement and into the woods, following the remains of the old Valdez-Eagle trail toward Mentasta Lake.

Technically a “location party” they searched for the faint traces of the old abandoned trail and drove stakes along it. On June 12 Razo’s party and its mule reached Carlson Creek, eight miles out from Slana.

A few days later, working their way through the woods along the river, approaching Mentasta Lake, they came to a deep ravine. Luckily a tree had conveniently died and fallen across it. They ventured out to pick their way across on its trunk; good idea for the men, not so much for the mule.

Halfway across, the mule slipped, straddling the log, and dropped, hee-hawing at the top of its lungs, on its belly. Razo and his men had to remove the mule’s pack and then drag the very unhappy animal across to where it could stand up off the log.

The Alaska Highway required sacrifice from everyone.

The goat trail should have been called the mule trail.

Working with Mules

Mollie Walsh—Husband Picker

Mollie Walsh, a fixture in the great Klondike Gold Rush, came to Skagway in 1897. Five years later back in Seattle, her husband chased her down an alley and shot her dead. Good businesswoman–terrible husband picker.

In Skagway Mollie sized up the situation. Most of the gold rushers coming through moved out of Skagway to Dyea and climbed the infamous Chilkoot Pass into Canada. But an alternative route existed. The White Pass just barely accommodated horses–a lot of them died on the trail–but horses made a freight haulers life considerably easier.

Explore North.com on Mollie

Mollie moved up the White Pass into Canada and opened the “Grub Tent Café”. Passing freighters liked Mollie Walsh, they liked her food, and the Grub Tent did good business for a couple of years. But when the White Pass and Yukon Railroad came through, Mollie’s customers stopped coming.

She closed up shop and moved to Dawson where she opened another restaurant—and the husband picking started. Mollie caught the attention of both Packer Jack Newman and Mike Bartlett; and, in the end, Mollie Walsh became Mollie Bartlett. Oops.

The Bartletts moved back down to Seattle. They did ok financially and they had a baby boy. But Bartlett proved a hard man to live with. When Mollie left him for a new husband, John Lynch, she took their year-old son and all their money. But Lynch didn’t last long. When Bartlett came after them, he intimidated Lynch, and forced Mollie to come back to him. Oops again.

Link to another story “God Had Seeded the North Country with Gold”

The marriage to Bartlett didn’t work any better than it had the first time. Constantly drunk, he repeatedly threatened to kill her. Mollie finally had him arrested.

But a few days later Mollie committed the biggest oops of all. She dropped the charges. Released from jail, Bartlett found her, chased her down an alley and shot her in the back.

Remember Bartlett’s rival back in Dawson, Packer Jack Newman? He still loved Mollie—erected a statue in Skagway that still stands. The inscription on its base reads.

“Alone and with help, this courageous girl ran a grub tent near Log Cabin during the Gold Rush of 1897-1898. She fed and lodged the wildest gold-crazed men. Generations shall surely know this inspiring spirit. Murdered October 27, 1902.”

Much of the information for this story came from the U.S. National Park Service website.