Reinstalling a tread back onto its drive sprocket, relatively routine on flat ground, became something very different when doing it on a 23-ton machine that was teetering on the edge of a crumbling slope of glacial debris. That called for great skill and calm nerves. In a better world, the catskinners of the 97th wouldn’t have had to learn that skill.
Senior commanders, forced to use a segregated regiment to build the northernmost portion of the Alaska Highway, planned the construction of that portion around racist assumptions. And their plan made a difficult job infinitely more difficult.
The Alaska Highway would connect the railhead at Dawson Creek, British Columbia with a little Alaska community on the existing Richardson Highway known as Big Delta. At the northern end of the great Highway the soldiers of the 97th would build east through Alaska to the Canadian border where they would meet the soldiers of the 18th building west through Yukon.
The Richardson Highway passed through Big Delta on its way to Fairbanks, so the soldiers of the 97th could come in country at Valdez, move themselves and their equipment up the Richardson Highway to Big Delta and start building road east.
Except they didn’t…
The generals, determined to keep the black soldiers away from white and native Alaskans, sent civilian contractors to build the road east from Big Delta. The soldiers of the 97th would leave the Richardson well south of Big Delta on a spur road that served the Kennicott Copper Mine. From the end of that spur, at Slana, the soldiers of the 97th would build 70 miles of road to get themselves and their equipment to a spot on the route of the real Highway safely distant from Alaskans. There they would take over from the civilians and build on east to the Canadian border.
The 70 miles of road passed through sand hills, glacial moraine, and crossed the Continental Divide at the infamous Mentasta Pass. While working on the precipitous terminal moraine through the Pass, the lead bulldozers repeatedly slipped off the narrow trail and ‘threw a track.’”.
Eventually the 97th’s inexperienced operators became masters reinstalling them.