In May 1942 the men of the 93rd crammed into Yukon in enormous confusion. And the Yukon wilderness immediately fought back–with muskeg. Arriving at Crag Lake, a few miles out of Carcross, Captain Boyd, commander of Company C, ordered SSgt Dunn, his mess sergeant, to spud a hole through the ice to access water. An …
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In early May 1942 the black soldiers of the 93rd Engineers moved out of Carcross–most in total confusion. The first company out of town, Company A, worked well. Their two borrowed bulldozers cleared a right of way; laid down trees, pushed dirt and brush to the side. Soldiers with hand tools scrambled over it, shoveling …
For the last two days I’ve posted about Leonard Larkins who served with the 93rd Engineering Regiment in Yukon in 1942. Leonard Larkins and the 93rd Meeting Leonard Larkins Leonard Larkins on our Research Site We have gathered in a large and comfortable room. On a big screen TV in front of us, Researcher Chris …
So Hoge had cast the die. The 93rd would build the 70-mile supply road from Carcross to the Teslin River. And, ironically, Hoge’s racism handed the men of the 93rd an opportunity. The Army expected little of its black soldiers; typically gave them the least demanding jobs around. But Hoge had given the 93rd a …
A Gold Rush memory to the summer tourists and outsiders who heard its name, Skagway was home and community to the people who made their lives there. Verne Bookwalter, a renowned bush pilot, lived in Skagway. And in the 1930’s, the town decided to clear an airfield along the river, hoping to attract more pilots—and …
Even without the Corps of Engineers and the 1942 invasion, Skagway offers a fascinating story—a story few people outside Yukon know. The harbor and the railroad amounted to an economic reason to exist—if not much of one. Like the soldiers in ’42, Freight into Yukon came through Skagway. The railroad had to have engineers and …
The most dramatic, certainly the most romantic, event that ever occurred in the North Country, the great stampede to the gold fields of the Klondike, came down to tens of thousands of men and women facing the timeless challenge—the incredible difficulty of traveling through the subarctic north. Like all their historical predecessors, thousands of rowdy …