Rugged, remote, austere, breathtakingly beautiful and viciously inhospitable, the area spanned by the route of the Alcan Highway is unique in the world. Nature is a dictator, not a ‘mother’ in the North Country.
The Highway threads through a vast expanse of raw nature with virtually no population. Alaska, alone, encompasses 663,267 square miles. Moose outnumber people and probably always will.
Men had come to and lived in these regions long before the corps. And their lives and works had shaped the environment the Corps would face in 1942. Few in number they had scattered along the length of the proposed Highway; had created tiny and tenuous bits of civilization, an important part of the environment that awaited the soldiers of the Corps of Engineers.
The people American’s call Indians and Canadian’s call First Nations came first. They survived for thousands of years in the harsh environment by treading lightly on the land—accepting at the very core of their culture and way of life the absolute dominion of nature. Generations of First Nations people considered themselves, like every other living organism, a guest not a conqueror.
They lived in small, very mobile family groups, moving constantly to eke subsistence from the environment. They sheltered in huts and teepees made of tanned animal hides and wood, brush or bark that could be taken down, moved and reconstructed easily. Their trails and paths curled like very slender ribbons over the mountains and through the forests.
The migratory patterns of animals and fish determined those of the First Nations. The spring salmon run found them camped near streams and rivers. At other times of the year, they settled near the paths of migrating moose and caribou.
The environment dictated the direction and timing of their constant travel. Their ephemeral trails ribboned through the wilderness. Paths over muskeg and permafrost served only in winter—the rains and thawing temperatures of spring and summer turned them into bogs of bottomless mud and muck.
Frozen lakes and streams offered easy passage in winter and the Indians used canoes to travel on them in summer. The spring thaw, though, transformed even the smallest streams into raging cataracts.