Sleeping Standing on their Heads

Sleeping standing on their heads? That’s just one of the things the Tomlinson men hadn’t anticipated when they headed north.

Link to another story “Ft. Nelson, Chester Russell’s Passage”

At the beginning of World War II, officials in Washington and Ottawa developed a propensity for dispatching men deep into the subarctic north to accomplish all but impossible missions. Canada had entered the war alongside Great Britain in 1939 and young Canadians had been fighting and dying all over the world for two years. That made Canada more sensitive to North America’s strategic vulnerability in Alaska. So Ottawa moved first; sent contractors like Tomlinson north to build a string of airfields that would allow planes to fly to Alaska.

A Canadian bush pilot and entrepreneur named Grant McConachie who ran a small airline that delivered mail between Edmonton and Whitehorse, used a series of spots on the map to stop and refuel—Fort St. John, Fort Nelson and Watson Lake. He struggled to clear airstrips at each stop.

In early 1941 the Canadian Government, named his series of airfields the Northwest Staging Route and took over the effort to build and improve them. Tomlinson Construction Company took on the facility at Fort Nelson.

Tomlinson men and their equipment and supplies road the rails to Dawson Creek.  To get supplies and equipment, not to mention themselves, to Fort Nelson from there, Tomlinson put together a convoy of ten gigantic sleighs—five for freight and five for crew—to be towed five at a time by a D7 Caterpillar tractor.  D8 Cat’s would growl ahead along the old trail, gouging a path through the timber.

The Tomlinson men slept in a bunkhouse on a crew sleigh that more often than not rested on a steep mountainside, chained to a tree—leaving them to sleep standing on their heads.

The old trail north from Dawson Creek wound through heavily wooded mountains and across the Sikanni Chief River.  The D7 would tow five sleighs up to the advancing trailhead then go back for five more.  Progress through the frozen landscape was slow and incredibly difficult—but steady—until they reached Sikanni “Hill”—a steep drop down to the banks of the Sikanni Chief River.  That last mile to the river took three agonizing days.

And then there was the river itself. It was still frozen, thank God, so the D7 and its cargo could make their way across.  But the ice was rotten and fifty feet from the west bank, the tractor plunged through the ice to the bottom.  The crew spent three more days rigging a makeshift tripod of logs and cables to lift the tractor and get it to land where it could be dried out under a makeshift canopy and returned to service.

It took four months to get to Fort Nelson.

More on the Northwest Staging Route