length is an elastic number that hovers around 1,387 miles. At the Alaska-Yukon border, distance markers challenge the driver, as there is a 35-mile difference between the actual distance from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, and the number on mileposts. Although the official end point is Mile 1422 Delta Junction, Alaska, the common misperception is that the end lies 96 miles farther northwest, at Fairbanks.
While reading this book, if you are able, suspend your belief in the superiority of the metric system and the simple power of dividing by ten, as well as even a need for accurate measurement. And, for those of you who have a hard time thinking in miles, just remember: 1 mile is equal to 1.6 kilometres.
The original Mile 0 milepost stands proudly in the middle of a major intersection in the centre of Dawson Creek, British Columbia.
Yukon Archives, Rolf and Margaret Hougen fonds. 2010/91, #1005. Photo by Rolf Hougen, 1946.
Cook’s Koidern, pictured, was operated by Jim and Dorothy Cook for decades and has been closed since 2015.
“till the heart stops beating / say the names”
Al Purdy
Silver Tip, Rocky Mountain, Swift River, Silver Dollar, Pink Mountain, Steamboat, Prophet River, Toad River, Krak-a-Krik—the names of lodges along the Alaska Highway read like a list of fairy tale place names. As you drive from Mile Zero at Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to the northern terminus at Mile 1,422 Delta Junction, Alaska, you can see many of these lodges—unofficial monuments to road travel—some of which evolved from the camps for the US Army crews who built the highway in 1942 or the camps that remained for road maintenance into the 1960s, and beyond.
However, sometimes you have to pull over and stop the car, open the door, and walk past the trees and shrubs that creep toward the soft shoulder and border the ditch. What hides from view is the slow degeneration of the lodge community that in its heyday was known as “the longest Main Street in North America.” Off the side of the highway, in the woods or in plain sight, will lie a log or frame structure partially demolished, with paint peeling from the walls, the vinyl seating and the wood panelling of sixties or seventies decor. Exterior and interior walls painted Caribbean blue or Smartie purple or seafoam green. Sloppy and expanding smears of garbage. Long gone are the Saturday night dances, the curling bonspiels that livened up the winter days, the miles-long drives to drop in for a cup of coffee. The busy sounds of an entrepreneurial community that began more than seventy years ago are now barely a hum on the landscape.
Building the Highway
In the early 1940s, most of the world was deeply entrenched in the manoeuvres of World War II. The eastern shores of North America were endangered by secretive German U-boats gliding stealthily through and by open navy battles on the Atlantic Ocean. From across the Pacific, Japan threatened from the west; it trounced its adversaries in the South Pacific and, in June 1942, overtook the Attu and Kiska Islands in the Aleutians, an Alaskan archipelago that gently curves across the Bering Sea toward Asia. The Americans supposed that this string of islands presented an easy route by which the Japanese might choose to invade Alaska and gain access to the continent.
Ultimately, it was the attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, that set in motion one of the greatest highway construction challenges of the twentieth century. It was in this military theatre—North America facing adversaries on both coasts—that the Alaska Military Highway was built to facilitate the movement of troops to the undefended and sparsely populated northwestern frontier of the United States: Alaska. In March 1942, US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) troops from the “lower forty-eight” states started arriving in northern Canada and Alaska to build a winding pioneer road; it was surveyed from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, north through the Yukon Territory, and then northwest, ending in Big Delta at the confluence of the Tanana and Delta Rivers in Alaska.
In 1942, very few people lived along what would become the Alaska Highway corridor. The area of British Columbia from Dawson Creek to the Yukon border was sparsely populated, with a concentration of about five hundred in Dawson Creek. The Yukon counted just shy of five thousand people living within the territory’s borders, and Alaska had a population of seventy-four thousand, mostly found along the coast. Local people were hired for the construction, but the bulk of the work fell to a workforce that included ten thousand–plus American soldiers and six thousand civilians.
Mile 1061 Soldier’s Summit celebrates the end of the construction of the Alaska Highway in October 1942 when the last two sections were joined. However, the celebratory plaque is far from the location where the completion actually took place, which is closer to Mile 1202 Beaver Creek, Yukon.
“Alaska Highway” © Government of Canada, reproduced with permission of Library and Archives Canada (2016). Library and Archives Canada / Department of National Defence fonds / e010781534.
Until the construction of the Alaska Highway, the US Army did not allow racially segregated units to work alongside non-segregated units, and with the latter engaged in the war effort outside of the United States, the army was forced to change its policy if it wanted to complete this gargantuan project. The construction of the Alaska Highway became an equalizing event for the US Army as that country was heading toward the 1950s and 1960s, decades that would see the civil rights movement finally bring an end to government-sanctioned segregation policies. As John Virtue explains in his book The Black Soldiers Who Built the Alaska Highway, the construction of the highway would be the first time that US Army soldiers worked together no matter the colour of their skin. Despite collaborating on the project as a whole, the army units worked independently of one another on their respective sections of the highway, and there is much anecdotal evidence that segregated units were provided with inferior supplies and charged with developing the more difficult sections of the highway.
Mile 1306 Forty-Mile Lodge was built in the 1940s and was a going concern according to Jo Ann Henry (née Scoby), whose parents Ray and Mabel Scoby along with Clarence (“Red”) and Freida Post built and ran the lodge.
University of Alaska Fairbanks Archive, UAF-2006-131-30-2.
Initial construction of the highway was completed in late October 1942, when Private Alfred Jalufka of Kennedy, Texas, of the USACE 18th Regiment, driving a bulldozer northwest, and Corporal Refines Sims Jr., from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, of the USACE 97th (a segregated regiment), driving a bulldozer southeast from Alaska, met in the middle of a dense spruce forest near Beaver Creek, on the Canadian side of the border.
The original highway was called a “corduroy” road, referring to the way the road surface was constructed: tree trunks were laid down and covered with earth. This type of road made for a reverberating driving experience. However, when the route was finished, it was barely drivable in some sections and contractors working for the US Bureau of Public Roads had to regrade, reroute and redo the highway. Although the highway has been paved and chip-sealed from end to end, there are sections that continue to be improved—curves straightened, narrow sections widened, bulging frost heaves flattened out—even to this day.
The Alaska section of the highway was handed over to the Alaska Road Commission in 1944, but the US Army remained in charge of the Canadian part until April 1, 1946, when it was handed over to the Royal Canadian Engineers (RCE).
