Keeping the engineers healthy was no mean trick. Thousands of men worked through the remote wilderness of Northern Canada and Alaska in 1942. North America desperately needed a land route to Alaska and the soldiers worked desperately hard to get her one.
They worked incredibly hard in cold and then heat and in incessant rain. They powered over mountains, through and across streams, through deep woods with bulldozers, trucks, saws, axes… They got injured. A lot.
For a Specific Story–Creative Doctor
They lived in close quarters, especially when the weather turned cold. Illnesses ranging from flu and pneumonia to measles, if they got a foothold, spread quickly. Some contracted tuberculosis which was endemic among the natives.
God knows, mental stress was constant.
Almost certainly, the black troops were especially susceptible. The Deep South hadn’t offered black men health exams and screenings for conditions such as asthma, diabetes, hypertension, colitis, sickle cell anemia or chronic skin conditions. And the rapidly expanding army hadn’t gone out of its way to screen new recruits. Diseases and conditions came with some of the soldiers to the North Country; showed up only after they got there.
Doctors and dentists roamed through the field companies, spending a few days with one and then the next. Medics served more permanently with each company; first responders. The Army built a hospital in Whitehorse.
Sharron Chatterton in 2008 commissioned a study for the Teslin historical & Museum Society called “The History of the Construction of the Alcan Highway Near Teslin”. The study tells us that Carcross housed a small field hospital and dispensary. A medic working out of there toted a “large band aid box” with pain pills. He would clean and tape cuts and bruises, but he tended to miss more serious issues. A problem like appendicitis might require three trips to the medic—along with forceful yelling or screaming and loud cursing to attract his attention.
Once the medic made a serious diagnosis, the patient typically waited twelve to twenty hours for a long trip on a truck, accompanied by a wrecker, over rough, bumpy roads to a distant field facility or to the hospital in Whitehorse. Sometimes the more severely afflicted caught a ride to the hospital with a bush pilot.
We were stopped by a flag person one time & I took the opportunity to chat with her. She said that she was from California & that her husband was driving one of the cats that we were stopped for.
One of my favorite things along the Highway. The conversation and interaction at the construction stops.