The soldiers of Company A, finally gouging a road out of the wilderness powered through Yukon in May. The soldiers of Company B came right behind.
On May 19th the North Country threw a curve at Company B when a forest fire flared about seven and a half miles from Carcross. In the North Country woods forest fires spread rapidly. The dense growth made it easy for fire to climb to the dry tree tops, where it moved with breathtaking speed and proved almost impossible to extinguish.
John Bollin of the 93rd remembered, “The propaganda was the Japs were letting off fire balloons to deter what we were doing”.
The men of Company B brushed it off and kept going, keeping up with Company A.
Commander Johnson called it a train. Company A knocked down and cleared trees. Company B came right behind, grading the path into a semblance of road. Company C came next, laying corduroy and building culverts.
The train moved. Then it moved faster. And as they raced toward Tagish and the Tagish River, Commander Johnson faced the problem of getting them across.
General Hoge dispatched the 73rd Pontoon Company.
The 73rd fought their own battle with the North Country wilderness. They carried a very large ferry and a lot of equipment; fought to move it over the rough road Johnson’s companies left in their wake. The 73rd won the battle; reached Tagish with the lead companies and immediately set about creating their temporary 1,275 foot ‘bridge’ over the Tagish River.
The ferry consisted of a large flat platform, fourteen feet wide by forty feet long, fastened to the top of five 4 x 24 pontoons. The outermost pontoons mounted twenty horsepower outboard motors. The center pontoon mounted a larger motor for emergency use.
Not a bridge, but a heck of a substitute, the monster ferry could carry one D8 bulldozer, or two large trucks. The ferry could also haul a large crane-shovel—minus its boom. At the end of May this mattered relatively little because the three companies to be ferried across had but little heavy equipment. Hoge expected the first heavy equipment to arrive in Skagway in June and the ferry would remain in place to bring it over when it came out from Carcross.
Bridging the Tagish would have to wait.
Company B’s position in the train changed at the last minute when Company
C passed them. Company A crossed the River on the 29th and 30th and kept going. Company C crossed right behind them on the 30th. Company B crossed on June 1.