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 soldiers bulldozing at and around them through the woods, they marveled at the transformed landscape.
They also recoiled from “hordes of men, overturned trees, mud strips and massive machinery churning through bush land south of Morley”. When the bulldozers pushed through to Fox Point and roared into Teslin, little Dolly Porter hid in panic from the massive machines pitching trees in every direction through her world.
A few curious, and brave, Teslin people tried to walk the road or even hitch rides. The Army had issued strict orders to the black soldiers not to mingle, but they couldn’t keep the citizens from gathering in their boats along the lake to keep an eye on progress.
Captain Boyd of Company C remembered a white Scot named McGregor who ran the trading post. He also remembered two officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who lived at the “Mountie Station”. McGregor welcomed the black men to his store. Not as accommodating, the RCMP Sergeant ordered him to keep his black soldiers out of the settlement altogether. Boyd complied and instructed his Non-Commissioned officers to keep the Indians away from their bivouac. But he, “was sure there was some commingling of the soldiers and the Indian bellies.”
The engineers pressed local river boats into service wherever feasible, hiring paddle and steam boats to carry gear from Johnsons Crossing and Timber Point to Morley Bay. The sternwheelers and barges steamed constantly up Teslin Lake delivering equipment, and some villagers in small boats or canoes, traveled down Teslin Lake, to monitor the action. Tom (Bosum) Smith remembered that the rumbling power of the dozers disturbed and upset the adults in his village.
