Temp.: 40 degrees
High temp: 60

Province
today: British Columbia

Accrued
miles to Date: 3212

Saying for
the day: Givers have to set limits because takers don't have any.

Another
lovely sunny day and a nice day of rest to enjoy it.

How long
staying: 2 more nights (found out today our next stop is snowed in)
Dawson Creek History

The area around British Columbia's Peace River Country remained largely unsettled by pioneers until 1912, when the Canadian government opened the land for homesteading. As settlers from North America and Europe arrived over the next decade, Dawson Creek became the area's main business centre. It remained a small community with a population numbering in the hundreds until 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour. Mindful of the need to protect North American sovereignty, the American and Canadian governments agreed to build a road linking northern Canada and Alaska. Dawson Creek was designated as "Mile Zero" for the Alaska Highway, and thousands of military and civilian workers poured into the village, turning it into a boomtown. During the 50s, after work on the Alaska Highway had been completed, the village experienced more growth. A railway and two more highways were built, linking Dawson Creek to other parts of BC. City status was achieved in 1958. Today, Dawson Creek is a city of 12,000 with an economy based on agriculture, forestry, oil & gas and tourism.

Alaska Highway: The Bigest and Hardest Job Since the Panama Canal

It's difficult to imagine road-building conditions any worse than those workers faced in 1942, when they began carving a supply route over the Canadian Rockies, through the Yukon Territory, all the way to remote military outposts in Alaska. 'Men hired for this job will be required to work and live under the most extreme conditions imaginable,' read one recruitment notice. 'Temperatures will range from 90 degrees above zero to 70 degrees below zero. Men will have to fight swamps, rivers, ice and cold. Mosquitoes, flies and gnats will not only be annoying but will cause bodily harm. If you are not prepared to work under these and similar conditions, do not apply.'

The idea of laying a roadway to connect the United States with the continent's 'far north' can be traced all the way back to the Yukon gold rushes of the 1890s. But it wasn't until the 1930s that Alaska's territorial legislature commissioned a study of possible routes — and it took the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to finally get the work started. Once drawn into World War II, the U.S. government worried that Japan would follow the destruction of the U.S. Pacific fleet in Hawaii with an invasion of Alaska. Within a few weeks of the Pearl Harbor attack, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided that plans for a highway to Alaska deserved re-examination.

This resolution became the first step in what one army colonel characterized as the Bigest and Hardest job since the Panama Canal.' Despite obstacles that might have doomed the project had it been undertaken in peacetime, in less than nine months a rapidly marshaled force of almost 16,000 soldiers and civilians forged 1,422 miles of roadway from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to Big Delta, Alaska. There the road joined the pre-existing Ric******* Highway (which originally began as a trail for gold stampeders in 1898) for the remaining 98 miles to Fairbanks.

The final cost of the Alaska Highway — or 'Alcan' as it is often called — was $138 million, although the War Department omitted from that figure the cost of paying and equipping the soldiers working on the highway.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers pushed for a choice, which sliced northwest across the Rockies, a distance of roughly 1,400 miles.

Although Ottawa insisted that the United States build and pay for the road — and turn over the Canadian section six months after the end of the war — Canada's government agreed to provide timber and gravel and waived import duties, sales and income taxes, and immigration regulations. With that settled, the Roosevelt administration gave the go-ahead, and the Army Corps of Engineers set about determining the best way to attack the project. Although it sounded like a phenomenal task, the Corps reached a preliminary solution within 48 hours. It called for the deployment of four 1,300-member Engineer construction regiments to begin gouging out a 'pioneer trail.' Two of these regiments — the 35th and the 341st — would start at two different points of the southern, Dawson Creek end of the route and work their way north and west. Meanwhile, the 18th and 340th Engineers would begin at Whitehorse, near the middle of the prospective highway, and begin cutting road both south toward Dawson Creek and northwest to Alaska. Finally, civilian contractors under the supervision of the U.S. Public Roads Administration (PRA) would work southeast from Alaska toward the Canadian border and link up with the 18th Engineers. Once the road builders had finished this pioneer trail, PRA contractors could use it as an access road into the wilderness and build — either on top of this road or, in some areas, parallel to it — a two-lane gravel-covered highway, complete with permanent bridges, which would serve both during and after the war.

American troops and civilians were already arriving for work in the far north by the spring of 1942. Coming by train and plane, they dropped into an area that boasted more caribou and moose than humans, and they arrived with what amounted to an armada of heavy equipment: 174 steam shovels, 374 blade graders, 904 tractors, and more than 5,000 trucks, as well as bulldozers, snowplows, cranes, and generators. Many Canadians were dubious about claims that the defense of Alaska meant the defense of Canada and they didn't trust the United States to give up its control of the highway even after World War II ended. They were less awed than shocked by this rapid buildup in British Columbia and the Yukon. A headline from British Columbia's Peace River Block News that spring revealed an uneasiness felt by many locals: 'United States Troops Invade Dawson Creek to Build Alaska Road.'

No more comfortable, though, were the Americans assigned to road construction. One oft-repeated tale concerns a staff sergeant who, arriving in Dawson Creek during a blizzard, asked his superior officer, 'Major, where do I sleep?' The grinning major replied, as he put down his own bag, 'Take any snowdrift you like. This one is mine!'

Living arrangements weren't quite that harsh (there were at least tents and a mess hall for the road builders), but working conditions left much to be desired. After arriving at their destinations, troops cooled their heels for weeks, until spring thaws made it possible to begin construction, and more had to wait for their equipment to catch up with them. The cold and the exhausting pace of the work proved ******* the men, causing a few to pitch face-first into campfires as they warmed their hands above the flames. Lack of sleep took its toll in other ways. Wrecked vehicles became a common sight on the sides of the lengthening road. The supply of spare parts couldn't keep up with the demand. According to Ken Rust, the 18th Engineer's historian, the men worked 'in coolie fashion, bending pick points in frozen ground and mucking around in rivers of mud, getting nowhere.'

Warmer weather only brought new hardships. Rivers flooded. Truck wheels were trapped in dense, grasping mud. Equipment became caught in forest fires. And Alaskan mosquitoes — 'bush bombers,' as the soldiers nicknamed them — proved far more troublesome to the men than the Japanese Zeros they'd been warned might breech the Pacific coastline at any moment. 'You had to eat with your head net on,' Hoge recalled, 'you would raise the head net, and by the time you got food on the spoon up to your mouth it would be covered with mosquitoes.'

In June 1942 the Japanese attacked Alaska's Aleutian Islands, adding increased pressure to the fast pace of road building. Troops worked long hours in shifts, without a day off. Some companies used what they called a 'train system' of construction, with all units moving forward simultaneously — the heavy bulldozers in front, knocking down or uprooting trees, followed by other 'dozers that pushed the debris to the sides of the road, and then work parties corduroying over soft spots, creating permanent bridges and culverts, and eventually giving consistent shape and borders to the roadway. In other places, companies of men labored in what can only be described as a leap-frog method: each crew took responsibility for a 5-to-10-mile stretch of road, and when a crew finished a section, it skipped to the front of the line and began work on another. As the summer of 1942 ended, Hoge's reports to his superiors grew more optimistic.

The changes the road building brought to the region baffled the few isolated native and white trappers living there. 'We were taking goods into the north by horse and dog sleighs the way our fathers and grandfathers had done,' recalled one trader about his first encounter with the road builders, 'when we met . . . a great fleet of trucks as far as the eye could see . . . . [T]ime went ahead more in a few minutes than it had in a whole lifetime. Like the snap of your fingers, we changed from the old to the new.'

An advance clearing crew of the 340th Engineers finally met the 35th Engineers on September 24, 1942, on a tributary of the Liard River — thereafter known as Contact Creek — to open the pioneer trail from Dawson Creek to Whitehorse. A month later the 18th and 97th Engineers encountered one another near Beaver Creek in the Yukon Territory. In just over six months soldiers and civilian contractors had laid down a supply road that many thought could never be built — certainly not so quickly. A statement from Secretary Stimson's office praised the men who 'pushed forward at the rate of eight miles a day, bridged 200 streams, laid a roadway 24 feet between ditches, [and] at the highest point, between Fort Nelson and Watson Lake, reached an altitude of 4,212 feet.' But the exhaustive work caused one sergeant with poetic tendencies to write, 'The Alaska Highway winding in and winding out fills my mind with serious doubt as to whether 'the lout' who planned this route was going to hell or coming out!'

At the highway's official opening at Soldier's Summit on November 20, 1942, General O'Connor speculated that the building of this road might someday 'become an American saga ranking with the epics of Frmont and Lewis and Clark.' Yet the story wasn't over. As late as the close of 1943 some 11,000 military men were still assigned to the region, under the direction of the PRA, and progress on the road continued until well after the war, as workers replaced temporary bridges with steel spans and relocated some sections to improve the army's two-lane track.

Thanks to that probe and others like it, Truman earned national renown and the nod to become Roosevelt's last vice president. After the war, Truman saw the U.S. government sell off or dismantle CANOL's components. But the highway persisted. It opened to tourist traffic in 1948, and over the following decades, Alaska and British Columbia refined their respective sections. Now completely paved, the road offers an extraordinary (and often extraordinarily lonely) journey into the northern wilds. Built to speed supplies north, it is now a road over which to linger and enjoy one of the twentieth century's great engineering marvels.

This article was written by J. Kingston Pierce and originally published in the January 2001 issue of American History Magazine.