Having now driven the majority of the fabled Alaska Highway, beginning at ‘Mile 0’ at Dawson Creek, BC, I’ve gained an appreciation for the massive feat of engineering and just sheer human toughness it represents. When Melanie found an old battered copy of ‘Webster’s Historical Notes - The Alaska Highway (1999)’ in a free library in Whitehorse I kept it around with a plan to get to reading it eventually. I just devoured the 78 page historical reference book in a single sitting while in Tombstone Territorial Park. Fascinating.
I’ve always been interested by stories at the edge of the human experience, things that are just unbelievable by today’s standards. Usually these are tales of people taking on the kind of personal risk and sacrifice that we just don’t understand in today’s modern societies. If you haven’t listened to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History Podcast, you should. They are mostly the retelling of events (often wars) in vivid detail, and from the perspective of those living those experiences. The episodes don’t glorify the reasons for the wars, but instead give you an appreciation for the scope and scale of the human experience of those involved. Putting yourself in the shoes of others that have gone before, and trying to understand what it must have taken to make them take on these immense challenges just blows my mind.
I came to the Alaska Highway with little in the way of back-story on in, or much appreciation for Yukon/Alaska geography, it’s people, and it’s history. I’ve picked up bits and pieces in the last three weeks in the Yukon.
For this post, I’ll fast forward through the really interesting and mind-boggling feats which occurred during the Yukon gold rush. Over those few years from ~1896-1902, tens of thousands of people headed to one of the least hospitable places on earth for the minuscule (with retrospective knowledge) chance of striking it rich. Far more likely they would turn back or die in the process. There were some hard men and women in this mass, willing to risk it all.
I’m struggling for a good modern-day analogy, but here’s an attempt.
An asteroid is found in near earth orbit which is made up of precious metals and gems. Thousands of random individuals all sell everything they own and start building rockets out of whatever they can scrounge, mostly by watching Youtube videos, and start trying to launch themselves into orbit to get in on the action. The world looks on with curiosity and thousands die, and a few get rich.
Actually, that would probably get snapped up as a reality show..
Anyway, that was 1900. Since then, several attempts had been made to survey potential overland routes to the Klondike region - none were financially tenable, and the idea faded along with the relatively quick bust of the gold rush. A network of riverboats were in place, and rapidly expanded following the gold rush. These provided some cargo capability from Whitehorse to Dawson and other places - but only in the very short summer.
The 1920s brought airplanes, and US and Canadian government funding for a string of remote airstrips to allow a few rudimentary planes to make the transit. Eventually, aircraft range and reliability allowed them to replace sled-dog teams as the primary means for getting mail and other small stuff in and out of the region.
It was only the Pearl Harbor attack and the subsequent war with Japan that motivated the US to build the Alaska Highway. They saw Alaska as being an undefendable piece of the US; one likely to be invaded by the Japanese who had already made military moves in the Aleutian Islands.
This is where it starts getting hard to comprehend for someone who (fortunately) hasn’t lived in a state of ‘total war’, where a country’s entire economic output is being funnelled to the war effort. Within three weeks of the US president signing off on the Highway, troops had arrived at what would be ‘Mile 0’ in Dawson Creek, BC. A week later, in March 1942, the Canadian Government got around to approving the US action of constructing one of the world’s most significant engineering projects on its territory.
On November 20, 1942, the highway was officially opened.
Wait. What?
A 1,672 mile road cut through some of the world’s least forgiving terrain. Over 300 bridges. Hundreds of miles over muskeg (which is basically mossy quicksand). Permafrost. And the cold. The Cold.
9 months? Insane.
A monumental feat of engineering which involved over 11,000 troops and civilians - the vast majority of which were recently enrolled, and were neither trained soldiers, nor had any construction expereince.
This would today be like taking 10 engineers, a random hockey stadium-full of people, and a billion dollars of equipment, and telling them to build the Golden Gate Bridge in 4 months.
Back to the cold. Here’s a quote by US Army Captain Richard Neuberger:
“In the winter of 1942, at Whitehorse the temperature dropped to 63C below. It was 69C below at the Donjek river on the Alaska Highway. The cold clawed at you with steel like talons”
Supply-chain logistics alone were worthy of amazement. Trying to keep 11,000 people in the most remote place on the continent fed and supplied with vehicles, fuel and everything required for this monumental task was a monumental task onto itself. Hundreds of miles of separate access roads had to be built, just to expedite the movement of material to points on the Highway.
Crews worked in teams of 6 bulldozers. 3 mowing down the forests and 3 more to push all the fallen trees to the side. Trains of dozens of loaders, trucks, and graders would follow, along with teams to install culverts and bridges.
Sometimes entire bulldozers would be swallowed up by seemingly bottomless muskeg. No time to try to recover these, logs and other debris would be thrown in until the bog stopped sinking, and another bulldozer was brought up. Onward.
Tens of thousands of empty fuel drums were dumped along the road.
At last, in November, the crews working from both ends met up, linking the road’s entire length.
Estimate cost of construction was $135,000,000, or $66k/mile which works out to $2 billion in 2020 dollars.
For every year since, crews have braved the world’s harshest climate to continually improve the road, and by proxy, the living conditions of those depending on it as their lifeline.
It’s a wonderful story, but as we travelled the highway and stopped at various historic points, it became clear that (as is often the case) stories of great achievement can cast dark shadows. Much of the hardest work on the road was completed by African-American US Army battalions, and these troops were treated more like slaves then anyone would care to remember. Many go these men were from the American south, and had never seen snow, yet were sent to this deep freeze for negligible pay, and treatment far worse than their white brother in arms working the same project.
The second dark shadow is the impact the Road had on the First Nations who lived (and live) on it’s path. Many communities were nearly wiped out by diseases such as smallpox. Others, such as the Kluane First Nation, were evicted from their lands and left to fend for themselves on unfamiliar territory. Some of these injustices have been formally reconciled - but combined with decades of residential schooling and other injustices cast on these communities, it’s important to take a lesson away that with any massive human accomplishment, there are potential impacts for groups who may not have the resources or ability to make their opposing views heard.
