Richardson’s road to Fairbanks replaced Abercrombie’s trail to Eagle on the Yukon, but nobody replaced the Richardson Highway until the US Army Corps of Engineers, in a feat many had considered impossible, installed a totally new way to get to Fairbanks—a land route from the railhead at Dawson Creek, British Columbia.
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The Corps used the Richardson. From Big Delta on the Tanana to Fairbanks the Richardson became part of the Alaska Highway. And to get to Big Delta, the Corps travelled over the Richardson.
But we already know that the Alaskan wilderness suffered no man to build an actual highway—even Wilds Richardson. The Richardson Highway the Corps and its thousands of civilian accomplices came to in 1942 had changed very little from the path of dirt and gravel, punctuated by rickety timber bridges, that Richardson had left behind. Thompson Pass still closed every winter except for the few brave and skilled enough to drive dog sleds over it.
Motor vehicles had arrived on the Richardson by 1942. In spring, summer and fall, trucks hauled freight and mail to Fairbanks. In spring when the Pass opened, a crew from Fairbanks would laboriously make their way south to Valdez in a car or station wagon to confirm the route. And then for a few months the trucks and fleets of small buses would make their way up and down the road.
If driving a team up Keystone Canyon had tested the nerve of the teamster, army and civilian dozer operators and truck drivers found it even hairier. Willie Comstock, a civilian trucker in 1942, called his first trip the most exciting and nerve-wracking of his life. “The road wound around ledges, through canyons, up steep grades, and over high suspension bridges…There were never any guardrails and, in many places, if you steered off 3 feet from the track your truck would fall…”
And the rickety bridges… If they posed a problem to the teamsters, truck drivers and dozer operators didn’t even try. A dozer would bypass the bridge, enter the stream at an upstream angle and hope. Soldiers and civilians got creative with tow chains and vehicles to pull stuck vehicles through.
Some of the roadhouses disappeared because motor vehicles extended the length of a day’s travel. But at ‘day’s travel intervals’ the remaining roadhouses got a bit bigger and more famous. The accommodations didn’t improve much. But the travelers still arrived cold and exhausted and found the meals and beds downright luxurious.
The young black soldiers of the 97th didn’t see much of the roadhouses. Their stopping points featured tents. But the civilian contractors used them extensively. One contractor leased the roadhouse at Gulkana; turned it into headquarters. Another leased a roadhouse at Big Delta.
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