The Alaska Highway

There are roads that take you somewhere.

And then there are roads that become the destination.

Today, if you drive along the Alaska Highway, you might think about the mountains.

The wildlife.

The rivers.

The endless forests stretching away from the pavement.

You might stop for gas in a tiny northern community, take a photograph beside a sign marking another hundred kilometres, or pull over because there is a bear standing beside the road.

But before 1942, it didn’t exist.

There were only forests, muskeg and mountains.

It is astonishing when you think about it.

A 2,700-km long road, built through the bush of northern British Columbia, the Yukon and Alaska were built in only 10 months.

It may have not been perfect, yet it reshaped western Canada.

But the road to the Alaska Highway, pardon the pun, didn’t begin during the Second World War.

The first seeds go back to the Roaring 20s when governments had plenty of cash burning a hole in their pockets.

It was in the mind of Thomas MacDonald. He was the Chief of the Bureau of Public Roads in the United States.

Over the course of 34 years, he oversaw the construction of 5.6 million kilometres of highways.

A road connecting the continental US with Alaska was also top of mind for

British Columbia Premier Simon Fraser Tolmie.

He saw it as an opportunity to boost the provincial economy and he even met with Charles Stewart, then federal Minister of the Interior in September 1929, to discuss the project and said.

Quote

“It would give United States people an opportunity of visiting Alaska by road through the richest scenery in the world. It would give Canadians access to the Yukon without going through the United States.”

Tolmie personally led a 1,200 kilometres caravan from Vancouver north to Hazelton, to show that a highway was feasible.

When he arrived, he was met by then Alaska’s Governor George Parks.

At the time, it was estimated by the British Columbia government that 3,100 cars would use the road its first year of operation and 4,000 within five years.

That traffic would finance the construction through tolls.

Sounds pretty good right?

Well…The Leader of the Opposition, Thomas Dufferin Pattullo, mocked Tolmie but once he was in power, Pattulo passed it off as his own.

While a highway in British Columbia was under provincial jurisdiction, building into the Yukon territory needed federal support.

To avoid that, Pattulo wanted the Yukon to become part of British Columbia to build the entire highway to Alaska without federal permission.

That never happened.

But the International Highway Association of the Yukon worked with the international Highway Association of Fairbanks to help get the project off the ground.

Thomas Firth was so optimistic that he even proclaimed construction would start by the spring of 1930.

By then, even President Herbert Hoover was on board with the idea and created a joint Canadian American board to evaluate the project.

But then…. Fate, in the form of The Great Depression, had other plans.

The severe economic and social crisis lasted from 1929 to 1939.

And as Canada dealt with the devastation, progress on the road slowed down but didn’t stop all together. The board created by President Hoover released its report in 1931 and pointed to the economic benefits to building the highway.

Two years later, the board proposed the United States contribute $2 million, while Canada and British Columbia pitch in $12 million which seemed out of reach as a third of workers were unable to find work and a fifth of Canadians relied on government assistance to survive.

All of this was happening as the peace created after the First World War was beginning to unravel.

Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany in 1933 and rebuilt the German military.

Three years later his troops entered the Rhineland and by 1938, Germany had annexed Austria. Then Czechoslovakia.

In September 1938, Britain and France agreed to the Munich settlement, allowing Germany to take the Sudetenland in the hope that Hitler’s territorial ambitions could be contained.

They couldn’t.

Hitler continued to amass territory until September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland.

Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany.

The Second World War had begun in Europe.

Canada would follow shortly afterward and as the country looked east to Britain, to Europe, and to the Atlantic, the Pacific suddenly became more important.

Japan had become a major military power.

It had invaded Manchuria in 1931, expanded deeper into China, and increasingly challenged the European and American powers that dominated the region.

There was a concern that Japan could eventually go to war with the US.

That meant that Alaska was vulnerable.

And American President Franklin Roosevelt, knew it back in 1936 when he brought up the Alaska highway to Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, knowing it would be highly beneficial in a foreign crisis.

A year later when King visited Washington, Roosevelt mentioned it again.

At the time King was apprehensive.

On the one hand was the cost, an estimated $30 million, and on the other hand was a fear that in a war between Japan and the United States, the road could not only threaten Canadian sovereignty but also draw the country into war.

Macleans Magazine wrote in 1939,

“King does not seem eager to solve the problem. He has been cool to the whole project from the first…Someday the Alaska Highway will be built. That the United States will get a road to its northern territory is inevitable in the nature of things. That it will be built soon is very doubtful.”

As I said earlier, Canada joined the war efforts in Europe that same year, all while the U.S remained neutral…. Well… sort of…

You can hear more about that on David Bory’s podcast Hostile History, but what you need to know for now is that the highway to Alaska would become a pressing matter thanks to what Japan did next.

Dec. 7, 1941.

It was a quiet Sunday morning in Hawaii.

The sun was rising over Oahu.

At Pearl Harbor, sailors were beginning their morning routines. Ships sat quietly at anchor in the harbor. Men were eating breakfast and they had no idea that, within minutes, everything would change.

Shortly after 8am 353 Japanese fighters were flying overhead as they attacked the United States Pacific Fleet.

The first bombs fell on the airfields as aircraft parked wingtip to wingtip erupted in flames.

Then came the torpedoes that struck the battleships anchored below.

A column of smoke rose above the harbor for nearly two hours, as Japanese aircraft swept across Oahu killing 2,403 Americans.

In Washington, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it a day that would live in infamy.

But as the United States had just suffered one of the most devastating attacks in its history there was something else happening far beyond Hawaii.

And across Canada, people were beginning to understand that the war had changed.

Until that morning, the Second World War had largely been understood as a war centered on Europe.

Now the Pacific had exploded into the conflict.

And the consequences would stretch thousands of kilometres north.

Because if Japan could strike Hawaii, American strategists had to ask a frightening question:

What else could Japan reach?

In response to the attack, Canada declared war on the Japanese Empire, becoming the first Western ally of the United States to do so.

Immediately, both countries worried about another possible attack, this time along the Pacific Coast.

That worry led to two things.

First, in the United States and Canada, people of Japanese-descent were sent to internment camps away from the Pacific Coast.

Over 20,000 Japanese Canadians were forced out of their homes, their property seized and sold off without their consent.

They were sent to the British Columbia interior t to work on road camps, while others worked on sugar beet farms.

Japanese Canadians lost an estimated $433 million during that time, and it took until 1988 for the government to officially apologize.

That’s the same year President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, admitting the U.S. government acted on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership” when it forcibly removed and incarcerated about 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens.

The second thing the attack on Pearl Harbor did was that it showed the immediate need for a quick route to Alaska.

At first, supplies and troops could be sent by air, but that idea came to a halt in January 1942.

That’s when 38 US warplanes left the continental United States but only 11 planes reached Alaska.

The rest crashed due to a combination of pilot error and weather conditions.

The tragedy showed that the US needed a more reliable route.

Prior to the Second World War, three routes had been considered.

Route A, which went north from Prince George, British Columbia to Whitehorse, Yukon and then west towards Fairbanks.

The problem with this option was that it hugged the coast and that made it vulnerable to Japanese attack.

Route B also started in Prince George but then followed the Rocky Mountain Trench to Dawson City and down the Yukon Valley to connect with Richardson Highway in Alaska.

The pros were that it was shorter than Route A, but it experienced higher snowfall in winter and heavy runoff in spring, which would make construction and eventual driving conditions difficult. Another drawback was that this option didn’t pass through Whitehorse, which was connected to the railroad, so it also had a supply chain problem.

Route C started somewhere other than Prince George, in Dawson Creek, British Columbia, on the edge of the Canadian Prairies. It would run Northwest through Fort Nelson to Dawson City and west to Fairbanks.

It did not connect with Whitehorse but had more favourable terrain and weather conditions and had no passes over 1,300 metres.

A fourth option, Route D, was briefly considered which went from near Great Slave Lake, Northwest Territories, through the oil rich fields of Norman Wells, then straight west to Alaska.

This route bypassed British Columbia altogether and so it was quickly dismissed.

In the end, a new option was found.

It followed Route C from Dawson Creek to Watson Lake, British Columbia, where it crossed the Rockies to Whitehorse and from there it picked up Route A to Alaska’s Richardson Highway.

And so, 60 days after Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, the Alaska Highway got its first stamp of approval.

On Feb. 6, 1942, the United States Army approved the construction of the Alaska Highway. Five days later, it received approval from the US Congress and President Roosevelt

A month later, the Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King said in a public statement,

“Canada will, of course, provide all necessary facilities. Meanwhile, American engineers have been authorized to commence work without delay.”

The two countries had finally come to an agreement where the United States would handle the construction and maintenance of the highway during the war while Canada granted the territory.

Once the war ended Canada would take over the road.

With an agreement in place, on paper, construction sounded simple.

In reality, it was almost absurd.

The proposed route would begin at Dawson Creek, in northeastern British Columbia, and run north through the wilderness of British Columbia and the Yukon before eventually reaching Alaska.

But keep this in mind, because this was a plan with no paved roads waiting for the construction crews.

At best there were trails, old wagon routes, telegraph lines and most importantly Indigenous travel routes going across enormous stretches of forest.

And now the United States Army was going to send thousands of men to build a highway through it.

On March 8, 1942, American troops began arriving at Dawson Creek, a quiet community close to the Alberta border.

Settlers had arrived in the early 1910s but prior to that it was Cree, Dane-Zaa and Salteau People territory and under Treaty 8.

As settlers continued to arrive, shops and hotels appeared and by 1920, Dawson Creek was a commercial hub.

On Dec. 29, 1930, Northern Alberta Railways arrived and Dawson Creek became the western terminus.

With that came grain elevators popped and a population boom…well… at least compared to what it had been.

By 1941, only 500 people lived in Dawson Creek, which means by Mar 9,1942 the population grew by over 25 percent when130 officers and men disembarked at the Dawson Creek station.

They were the first wave of thousands more, arriving to build the highway.

This initial contingent of men immediately got to work building a tent city next to the railroad station.

They soon discovered tent pegs were useless when the ground was frozen solid, so they secured their tents to trees and logs.

The next morning the troops awoke to mud and slush.

The same stoves that had kept them warm through the night had also melted the ground below them.

This meant that the Dawson Creek tent city had to be quickly moved to higher, and more importantly, drier ground before another 135 men arrived that day. Company B of the 35^th Engineers disembarked their train on March 10th and made their way to the frozen Peace River to lay down sawdust gathered from local sawmills over the river ice.

They needed to make a makeshift wooden deck overtop to insulate the ice and prevent it from breaking apart before they could get their heavy equipment across it.

Once that was done, the troops all gathered in the few bars in Dawson Creek.

By now the town had almost doubled in size so it was standing room only at most watering holes.

The next day, the troops began their long 450 km journey to Fort Nelson to begin their work in earnest.

Each army regiment was assigned a portion of the highway. Over 10,000 men, 30 percent of whom were Black soldiers, worked on the highway.

The scale of the operation was staggering.

They fought against the wilderness as 174 steam shovels dug into the earth while 374 blade graders leveled the ground and 904 tractors hauled the enormous loads.

More than 5,000 trucks rumbled back and forth, carrying materials wherever they were needed.

And that was only the beginning, the work was supported by countless cranes, snowplows, generators, and bulldozers, all working together in a vast, coordinated display of machinery and human effort.

And it was all done at a breakneck pace. Captain Eschbach served as a captain in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers described the process ahead of the construction crews as

“One man would set up with his compass on the staff and utilizing the chosen bearing, locate the second man who would proceed through the brush, waving a signal flag from the top of his staff as far as he could be seen. At that point, he would stick his staff in the ground, set up his compass, align it on the chosen bearing and a third man would then move ahead of him. Leapfrogging in this manner, the unit could make as much as eight or ten miles a day.”

Once the land was surveyed, it was cleared and occasionally, work crews were so close behind that they caught up while surveyors slept.

One officer said, “It is a pleasure to see a half dozen of these machines, each plowing along with a huge scoopful of earth ahead of it.”

Muskegs slowed them down.

Their thick layers of decaying plant matter, act like a giant sponge and can hold up to 30 times its weight in water. That means when the soil freezes and it shifts in winter and thaws into deep mud in spring, which makes building roads or structures very difficult.

They’re common in the Arctic region and if they couldn’t be avoided, the troops had to build a road of logs over them only to watch the road slowly sink in front of their eyes.

They then would have to build another row of logs over top and repeated until the road stopped sinking.

One crew had to do this 15 times and a soldier said.

“To our eyes it is a very good road, although the critical may find fault with it. It is narrow and winding and has piles of trash…minor irregularities that our rough and ready methods result in. We will have to leave the correction of these defects to those who follow us, content to have opened up the way.”

The troops were supposed to be building permanent structures, but the fast pace of construction meant temporary low-level bridges made of timber were built instead and most wouldn’t stand to traffic.

But to keep plowing ahead, an initial crew built the low-level ones, kept moving and another crew came behind them and built more permanent bridges.

Materials for those larger structures had to be prefabricated in places like Dawson Creek, transported along the new road and put in place by a small crane.

The breakneck speed meant that no environmental assessments were made and ancient trees were bulldozed without care, waterways were blocked or diverted, and entire ecosystems were either changed forever or wiped off the map.

This carelessness was even more dire when it came to Indigenous people.

Treaties were ignored completely in the name of quote unquote progress and it came at a terrible cost.

At one Indigenous village known as Shadhala-la, work crews arrived and set up camp.

The village in the Yukon had been mainly isolated from the outside world and when the highway arrived it brought with it infectious diseases that spread through the community and killed nearly everyone. Those that didn’t die left the village and it was soon abandoned.

C.K. LeCapelain, a liaison officer with the Canadian Department of Mines and Resources, wrote,

“The band of Teslin suffered epidemics of measles and whooping cough, which in some cases developed into pneumonia…and are now plagued with an epidemic of meningitis.”

To the crew building the highway this was just another detour. The highway had to keep moving north.

And it was organized almost like a moving army, and the highway seemed to grow behind them as they advanced.

At times, crews were working simultaneously hundreds of kilometres apart.

One group might be clearing trees while another was building a bridge, and another was grading a section of road farther north.

The result was a constantly moving construction front.

One Canadian army member said.

“Those U.S. troops, I felt sorry for them to begin with, then was amazed at what they did. If you weren’t there, you just couldn’t understand it. I saw fellows so tired, they were ready to drop in their tracks. It was rush-rush-rush. Fellows were doing 18 to 20 hours a day on bulldozers. One was up to his neck in ice water repairing timbers in subzero weather. God, I admired them.”

That’s because the military understood that every day mattered.

After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had captured territory across the Pacific and soon would occupy the Aleutian Islands.

Alaska was vulnerable.

The highway wasn’t being built because someone thought it would be useful someday.

They needed it now.

And crews had it rough, they cleared land, pitched their tents and worked.

They slept up to seven in one tent and most hadn’t bathed in days or weeks.

Fred Rust, who worked on the highway in the Yukon, said,

“In the smaller camps, we took pail-baths, eventually developing skillful, acrobatic bathing techniques. We washed our own clothes, after a fashion. We could get clean, but we couldn’t stay clean. The roof of our mess halls was the sky. In the summer we scattered around on the ground and in the winter, we tried to get to a tent before our food froze.”

And if that doesn’t sound awful enough… you have to remember the mosquito and black flies.

Anyone who has been up north knows about the little blood suckers.

Rust called them storm troopers, and the only relief was bug repellent had to be reapplied every half hour.

Not that the repellent was much better.

It was made of harsh chemicals, which caused hives.

Some men were nearly driven mad.

And Rust described trying to sleep as.

“When you’re on your cot under a mosquito bar, they explore for hours until they find that one small opening you left when you tucked the net under your bedding.”

Men and their struggle are only part of the story.

Because then there’s the machines.

Building the highway wasn’t simply a matter of sending in bulldozers.

Getting the machines there, keeping them running, and moving them through the terrain was an enormous challenge in itself.

First, equipment had to travel by rail to Dawson Creek, then be pushed north over primitive trails and rough roads.

And from there, the crews faced a remarkable paradox:

They needed a road to move the machines that were building the road, and the machines were heavy which could be unforgiving in the northern landscape.

A bulldozer could sink into muskeg.

A truck could disappear axle-deep in mud.

Rain could turn a freshly cleared route into a swamp.

When that happened, the construction crews stopped building the highway and started rescuing their own equipment.

And if anything happened in cold weather, then ice would clog gears, engines and more.

That meant that crews had to build fires directly under frozen machinery and once equipment was running, it stayed running.

If it stopped at any point, even for a few seconds, ice would form causing breakages, and damages forcing crews to leave wrecked machinery on the side of the road, as fixing it would be almost impossible.

Mechanics had to keep the machines alive in the field, often improvising repairs and salvaging parts from equipment that had already failed.

And through it all they kept pushing into the unforgiving terrain.

It was industrial power being thrown against one of the most difficult landscapes on the continent.

And kilometre by kilometre, the machines and the men began to win.

While the construction in remote areas continued, places like Dawson Creek and Whitehorse were suddenly bursting at the seams.

Whitehorse was relatively isolated, the only way to reach it was by the railroad, on the river, or through the air.

When the Alaska Highway construction began, the small town had a population of around 700 people, but it soon became a center for Canadians and Americans and just two years later the population had exploded to 20,000 people.

There weren’t enough hotel rooms, houses, or cabins to shelter the construction crews.

At the Whitehorse Inn, the largest of three hotels in the city, soldiers slept in chairs in the lobbies, and on cots in the hallways.

It was common to have multiple cots in the room of a house and rent it out every 8hours.

A Macleans article from Sept. 1, 1942, described the scene.

“Stores, cafes and sidewalks swarmed with cigar-smoking men on ‘liberty’ enjoying a 20 percent addition to regular pay for foreign service, plus the usual 10 percent on US funds. Sun-scorched, fly-gnawed, some were in shirtsleeves, others wearing sheepskin coats.”

Every night, the Whitehorse movie theatre which sat 300 people was filled to capacity.

Maclean’s wrote,

“Even the one picture show the town has is always filled. The line-up is so long, you practically need a priority rating to get your nose inside the doors. You line up for your mail too. All day long there are three long queues of people waiting in lines to ask for mine and looked inside, I am sure there was half a ton of unsorted mail in great heaps on the floor.”

For anyone on the road or in town, mail day was the best day.

It offered a reprieve and letters were read and re-read repeatedly. Anyone who received a book or newspaper held onto it as if it was a sack of gold.

At first, it took two weeks to get mail to the troops but once the highway started to come together, that delay was reduced to three or four days.

The days were tough and to find joy, the men took to hunting.

In camps, it wasn’t uncommon for bears to get close while looking for food, so in that case it was less about joy than survival.

To escape troops often turned to alcohol and liquor sales went through the roof.

It wasn’t cheap either, and there was scarce supply.

. Soldiers stood in line for hours to get into the store where they bought the alcohol for three times the typical price.

In his book, Northwest Epic, Heath Twitchell wrote,

“Any GI looking for wine, women and song along the Alaska Highway usually had to settle for a disappointing two out of three: a couple of overpriced beers in some dingy, jam-packed bar and boozy, all-male harmony around a badly-tuned piano.”

Entertainment was hard to come by and anyone who had and could play an instrument immediately became popular.

While some troops were fighting in Europe,

On the Alaska Highway’s path there were weddings

One minister said he had married more couples from 1942 to 1943 than he would have done in a lifetime anywhere else.

Flowers were nearly impossible to find, and one woman made a good living making paper flowers for weddings.

And while Whitehorse and Dawson Creek tried to manage the influx of troops, the highway work continued.

And a large portion of the workforce was Black.

 Despite the fact there were no official segregation laws in Canada, African American troops were treated differently than white soldiers.

They ate, worked and slept in separate areas.

They received the poorest equipment and often had to do the work by hand instead of machinery.

In Dawson Creek, it was against the law to sell liquor to African Americans, and most had trouble getting service in the town.

Black troops and soldiers could risk their lives and put their bodies on the lines, but racism kept them from being treated the same as their white counterparts.

Not that they had it easy, but in comparison, Black soldiers had it much, much, worse.

And through it all they worked side by side as the cold winter of 1942-43, into the wet spring caused huge tracts of road to be repaired.

Sections of permafrost made some areas completely impassable, finishing the highway felt out of reach.

But then as spring became summer, there was real progress.

On Sept. 24, 1943, at 5 p.m., the link between Dawson Creek and Whitehorse was completed at Mile 558, now called Contact Creek.

Two bulldozers, coming from opposite directions, touched blades to signify the completion of the link.

As they did, a regimental band began to play while the workers cheered the important milestone.

From March 09, 1942, to Sept 24, 1943, troops had laid down 1,403 km of highway…

They had 795 km more to go.

From Whitehorse, the war machine pushed west and north toward the Alaska border.

This was some of the most remote country the troops had encountered.

The road followed valleys, climbed through mountain passes, crossed rivers, and disappeared into forests that seemed to stretch forever.

And the farther north they went, the more the territory tested them.

The Yukon was vast and they had to carve out every kilometre before them.

Then came the final push toward Alaska.

Construction crews worked from both directions, men building north from the Yukon while American crews pushed east from Alaska.

At the centre of that effort was Delta Junction.

For the men coming south from Fairbanks, Delta Junction was the gateway to the new highway.

For those coming north through Canada, it was the point where the road finally connected with the existing Richardson Highway.

Just over one month later, on Oct. 28, 1942, they met.

And suddenly, Alaska was connected by land to the rest of North America.

What had taken generations to imagine had taken the crews only eight months to build.

But it wasn’t cheap.

It cost $138 million, $2.1 billion today.

The highway was officially dedicated on Nov. 20, 1942, in a radio broadcast that was sent across the continent.

On hand were representatives for Prime Minister King and President Roosevelt.

A ribbon was cut with gold engraved scissors, and the two parts of the scissors were separated and later gifted to the president and prime minister.

Canada’s Minister of Pensions and National Health said…

“Canada provided the soil; the United States provided the toil.”

While the highway was finished, there was still a lot of work to be done and that led to one of Dawson Creek’s darkest days.

Dawson Creek had been transformed from a small village into a wartime boomtown with 11,000 troops in British Columbia and the Yukon for the remainder of the war.

By February 13, 1943, it was barely recognizable.

In just one year it went from being a small northern community to becoming the southern gateway to one of the largest construction projects in North American history.

Soldiers filled the streets.

While everyone went about their day, a fire broke out in a small building which quickly spread to a nearby stable.

The stable housed everything from telephone wires, tools, kegs of nails, wooden crossbar arms and tires for the US Army.

But there was also a vehicle that had been loaded with dynamite.

At first, it had been just a fire, so people had gathered to watch as smoke rose into the winter sky.

But when the realization spread that there were about 60 cases of dynamite inside, the area had to be cleared.

The nearby cinema stopped the movie and evacuated the building but there was only so much time.

The fire kept advancing.

It didn’t help that some men in the crowd said that the dynamite would only burn, not explode.

What they didn’t know was that percussion caps were stored with dynamite, which was a major safety violation.

As the train arrived, several people got off to watch and then…

The explosion ripped through Dawson Creek.

The blast shook the town.

Windows shattered.

Buildings were damaged.

Burning debris rained down on streets below and for a brief moment, the center of town disappeared behind smoke and flames.

Dorothea Calverley saw the explosion and said,

“The burning building and its contents, completely red hot, went hundreds of feet in the air. Where the brightness of flames had been a second before, there was momentary blackness as the fire was snuffed out like a candle, but a few minutes later there were hundreds of small fires as debris came down over a block away in all directions. Worse was the thousands of miles of copper wire which unrolled from its reels and tied everything in its tangled coils. Over a block away, a school nurse, driving her car, was startled by a flaming auto tire descending on her car’s radiator to hang and flame on.”

One woman who lived nearby was making supper when the front and back doors of her house were blown off.

In a restaurant, a woman sat with her baby on her lap. When the explosion happened, her baby was thrown into the lap of a man sitting five metres away. Thankfully the baby was unharmed.

But the same couldn’t be said for the entire block that was destroyed in minutes.

And there was another problem…

There was no proper municipal water system capable of dealing with a disaster of this scale.

So, fires continued to burn.

The town needed help and it came from an unexpected place.

Black engineers serving in segregated units had been kept from the community.

They weren’t supposed to be part of Dawson Creek.

But they worked through the night alongside other soldiers and civilians, fighting fires and helping bring the situation under control.

By morning, the flames had been extinguished.

The Red Cross set up an emergency hospital ward in its club house to treat the 120 people injured.

Sadly, five lost their lives, a few months later, a reporter for Maclean’s wrote,

“I walked the blackened, blistered sidewalks and along streets that had burned away entirely, looking into huge craters and cellars now filled with scum-covered water. At the corner where a fine hotel had stood, there was only rubble. Where the barber shop had been, only a steel chair was left, slanted a bit and twisted out of shape. A typewriter lay keys down in the gutter. Twisted water pipes, bed springs, a pair of scales and most pitiful of all, the harp-like structure of a grand piano was sitting bravely in the ruins.”

The cause of the fire was never discovered but it served as a brutal reminder that the highway project came with risks.

Because the Alaska Highway wasn’t being built in some distant, empty wilderness where danger came only from mountains and rivers.

The danger could follow the workers right back into town.

And driving the road wasn’t without peril.

Located 233 kilometres west of Dawson Creek there was a hill with an incredible 20 percent grade, which made it almost impossible to stop when coming down it.

A sign for trucks heading up the hill read,

“Prepare to meet thy maker”.

There were many accidents and at least one death before what was known as Suicide Hill was rerouted in 1944.

Then as the Japanese threat faded, and the war ended, the US Army transferred control of the highway to the Canadians on April 1, 1946.Immediately, work began to improve the road for public use including upgrading bridges to handle more traffic and larger loads, among other improvements, and in the process, it became about 400 kilometres shorter than it had been during the war.

In 1948, it opened to the public but for the most part it remained a gravel road except for the 100 kilometres closest to the Alaska border.

It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that the entire highway was finally paved, and by then one section of the highway had become famous.

For that story we have to travel back to 1942

Private Carl K. Lindley was working with the 341^st Engineers when he severely injured his foot near the border of British Columbia and the Yukon.

For three weeks he sat in the aid station while he was healing

Since he couldn’t do much, his commanding officer approached him and asked if he could repair a sign that had been accidentally smashed by bulldozers.

He said,

“From the nature of the sign, I was encouraged to add my own version, and I painted the name of my hometown, Danville, Illinois, on it and put it up along the road.”

That simple act sparked something in the other soldiers, and they started to nail signs with the names of their own hometowns to the pole.

When the highway opened to the public in 1948, tourists who passed through did the same and put up hometown signs and licence plates.

Lindley’s simple act of honouring his hometown snowballed and today, the Signpost Forest covers several acres of land and includes 100,000 street signs, welcome signs and licence plates from around the world.

*sources*

• Legion magazine: https://legionmagazine.com/builders-of-the-alaska-highway/
• Alaska Highway: A Historic Photographic Journey by Jane Haigh
• Government of Canada: https://www.canada.ca/en/public-services-procurement/services/infrastructure-buildings/bridges-docks-dams/alaska-highway/about.html
• Canadian Encyclopedia: https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/alaska-highway
• The Milepost: https://themilepost.com/articles/history-of-the-alaska-highway/
• Parks Canada: https://www.pc.gc.ca/apps/dfhd/page_nhs_eng.aspx?id=1677&i=53388