Ghosts haunt the Caribou. Fabled figures came to Yukon Territory with the rush to the Klondike gold fields. They created the famous Caribou Hotel that centered life in tiny Carcross. Apparently even death couldn’t make some of them leave its history behind. The story weaves its way through John Firth’s book, The Caribou Hotel. In …
Tag Archives: Whitehorse Yukon
Sister Kathy
Sister Kathy joined our Subarctic sojourn on July 24, 2013 and brought a new dimension to my developing obsession with the far north. I emailed the story of my reactions and developing obsession to my family subscribers regularly and on July 26 I emailed this. Aunt and sister Kathy and Andy joined us two days …
Hell Bent
Hell bent for their portion of the Alaska Highway, the lead company of Colonel Paules’ 18th Engineers left the opulent SS Aleutian; moved off the dock directly to the depot of the White Pass and Yukon Railroad. The 18th Comes to Skagway They climbed into the passenger cars of the narrow gauge train, settled themselves …
Ghosts at Morley Bay
Ghosts would surround us at Morley Bay, but first we had to find them. In late summer 1942 the 93rd Engineering Regiment maintained a motor pool and a supply dump at Morley Bay, Yukon. On a lazy afternoon in 2013 we had come to find it—and the ghosts of the hundreds of men who worked …
Irony and History
No irony accompanied the fact that in early 1942, the Aleutians offered the marauding Japanese a back door to America. America’s leaders decided she needed a road to Alaska to defend it, and some of them realized the road wouldn’t do a lot of good if convoys had to dedicate the bulk of their …
Gangplanks and Leonard Cox
Gangplanks punctuated Leonard Cox’s time with the 340th Engineers. A gangplank in Seattle carried him onto the ship that took him up the inside passage to Skagway. He didn’t know it, but his regiment would defend America by helping build the Alaska Highway through Northern Canada. More from the 340th The Army drafted Leonard …
Boyd and his “Grand Canyon”
Work on the culvert at Boyd Grand Canyon began on July 11 when the young black soldiers of Boyd’s Company C crossed the Teslin River and moved three miles south and east to the north wall. More on culverts This canyon needed a very long culvert and a very deep fill. In his memoir, …
Teslin Post
Teslin Post never saw it coming. In July the 93rd Engineers came out of the woods, and the sleepy frontier village with about 130 inhabitants, mostly Tlingit First Nations, found itself dead center in the action. They didn’t know quite what to make of it. Excited by the sudden appearance of a hundreds of …
Hoge’s Invasion
By the end of March Hoge’s headquarters in Whitehorse had geared up and was pushing hard, not just in the Southern Sector, but all along the route of the Highway. Hoge had long realized four regiments would not be enough. He needed seven. The Corps didn’t have enough white regiments, and the desperate need for …