Soapy Smith came to Skagway to get rich—like everybody else in the Gold Rush years. But Jefferson Randolph Smith had no intention of mining gold. Soapy came to mine miners. Link to another story “Fascinating Skagway” A confidence man up from Georgia, dressing and presenting like a southern gentleman, Soapy took his name from one …
Tag Archives: Yukon
Frank Hinkel’s Adventure
Frank Hinkel, T4 bulldozer operator, pushing dirt over the wall of a canyon, got too close to the edge. His dozer followed the dirt over. Hinkel tried to jump but banged his head and sat back down; rode his steel mount down to the floor of the canyon. Luckily, the dozer landed on its tracks. …
Tiny Teslin Post
Tiny Teslin Post never saw it coming. In July 1942, the soldiers of the 93rd Engineers, with their bulldozers and trucks and graders suddenly roared out of the woods beside Teslin Lake. The soldiers bulldozed at and around the tiny village and its 130 citizens, dropping trees in every direction. Link to another post …
Motor Pool
Motor Pool–the soldiers of the 93rd Engineers needed one desperately. And locating one and getting heavy equipment to it presented a problem. In May 1942 the black soldiers of the 93rd Engineers plunged through Yukon’s forbidding wilderness working with a couple of borrowed bulldozers and hand tools. But Ships carrying their heavy equipment steamed out …
Burwash Bounce
Burwash Bounce didn’t mean a thing to the Army, but it meant everything to Willis and his fourteen fellow surveyors. Link to Part 1 “Willis Grafe, Civilian Roadbuilder” Needing surveyors for the Alaska Highway Project, the Army blithely ignored the fact that most of Willis’s group of fifteen had exactly zero experience as surveyors. In …
The Press and Beaver Creek
The press, in the person of Harold W. Richardson of the Engineering News-Record, came to the Alaska/Canada border in the nick of time. American and Canadian newspapers had kept their readers focused on the last fifty miles of the Alaska Highway. That meant the Army’s publicity machine focused on the last fifty miles. And that …
Kate Rockwell–Klondike Kate
Kate Rockwell found a special way to make a fortune in the Klondike. A gorgeous, red-haired chorus girl from New York, Kate heard about the Klondike in 1899, three years after the famous gold strike. She headed north, determined to become the “Belle of the Yukon”. Link to another story “The Bride of the Klondike” …
The Bride of the Klondike
The bride of the Klondike, Ethel Berry arrived in Seattle from Alaska in July 1897. She wore ragged men’s clothing but she had $100,000 in her bedroll. News of the gold Ethel and her husband Clarence had brought back from the Klondike helped set off the great Klondike Gold Rush in 1898. Link to another …
Going about Their Business
Going about their business the 130 citizens of Teslin Post heard strange noises in the woods, noises that grew louder, and then soldiers and trucks and bulldozers poured and roared down along the river out of the woods. Little Dolly Porter hid in panic from the massive machines pitching trees in every direction through …
Every Bit of the Alaska Highway
Every bit of the Alaska Highway ran through as rugged a wilderness as exists anywhere. Through the spring and early summer of 1942 over 8,000 soldiers of the Corps of Engineers struggled against overwhelming odds to get themselves and their machines into that wilderness to the path of the Highway. Right behind the soldiers came …