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 made it imperative that Commander Paules find a way to close the gap, Richardson arrived just before that happened.
Paules cheated, of course.
The fifty miles ran over permafrost? No matter. With coming winter and cold weather it would remain frozen solid until spring. When it melted, somebody else could deal with it.
Link to another story “Two Bulldozers in the Same Place’
And Commander Paules dispatched no less than 12 bulldozers from the 18th across the White River north into that fifty-mile stretch. Just knock the trees out of the way, he ordered, plow north and get a bulldozer in contact with the 97th.
On October 25 Private Alfred Jalufka of the 18th piloted a D-8 north through the wood’s near Beaver Creek, thirty two miles south of the international border. Private Refines Sims of the 97th piloted one just like it going south. There in the woods they met. That should satisfy the press.
To the soldiers on the ground, of course, the event meant nothing. They knew what the press didn’t. They hadn’t completed the Alaska Highway. Two dozers had simply found a way to meet in the woods. The 12 dozers from the 18th would head back south to help complete the road to the White River from the south. The 97th would continue building to the White River from the north. In a few weeks the two regiments would meet and complete the Alaska Highway, not at Beaver Creek but at the White River.
. Captain Parsons wrote to his wife, Abbie on October 26. “A Mr. Richardson editor for Engineering News-Record was by here yesterday. I took him up the road to meet the 18th. He came back and stayed in my camp all night and I took him to HQ [Headquarters] in the a.m.”
After Parsons “dropped him [Richardson] at [97th] Headquarters the next morning” Richardson, who never went near Beaver Creek, posed Jalufka and Sims and their dozers, had them reach across to shake hands, and took the photo that endures as an icon in Alaska Highway history. And he filed the story his editor and the Army brass wanted.
In a murky arctic snowstorm at Beaver Creek… in the wilds of
the Yukon, the climax of building the Alcan Highway was reached at
four p.m. Sunday Oct. 25, when the advance tractor crews from east
and west came together, closing the last gap in the trail route.
After seeing trees fall away from him in weeks of swamping
out the advance cut, Corporal Refines Sims, Jr., negro, ‘catskinner’
of the crew working down from Alaska, frantically, retreated with his
diesel bulldozer as trees ahead started falling his way, not realizing
the meeting was imminent. In a few moments, the lead bulldozer of
the Yukon crew burst through the last patch of timber and brush,
piloted by Private Alfred Jalufka.