The cold water closed around them chest-deep, and the men of the 95th Regiment did not hesitate. They waded into the fast, glacial current of the Sikanni Chief River, timber in hand, and began driving the trestles by muscle alone. The engineers back at headquarters had looked at that same water, measured the crossing at roughly three hundred feet, and estimated the bridge would take two weeks. The men in the river had just bet a month’s pay that they could beat that estimate, and they were not about to lose.
In about three days, the bridge stood complete, carrying the road across one of the meanest rivers on the entire route, built by the exact soldiers the army had decided were not up to skilled work. That was the heart of the Alaska Highway, and it was a story the army would spend decades trying not to tell. In the spring of 1942, the United States Army had looked at a map of the far northwest and set itself a task that sounded, said plainly, like something out of a fever dream. Punch a road 1,700 miles long from a railhead in northern British Columbia up to Alaska, through a country that had no road running through it at all.
No highway, no gravel line, nothing you could drive from one end to the other. Just muskeg and black spruce, mountain passes and rivers still frozen when the work started. And do it fast, because the war had just reached the top of the continent and nobody knew how much time there was. They gave themselves one building season.
They finished the pioneer road in about eight months. The thing that keeps stopping anyone who reads the engineer diaries and the regimental records is not that they set the goal. Armies set impossible goals all the time. It is that they actually hit it.
Eleven thousand soldiers and thousands of civilians on top of them, working from both ends toward a middle they could not see, cut a drivable line across some of the hardest ground on the continent in a single summer and fall. And the men handed the worst tools and sent to the worst stretches, three regiments of black engineers the army did not even think were up to the job, ended up outbuilding the very units that had the machines. For most of American history, Alaska was something you reached by boat. There was no land connection worth the name.
If you wanted to move people or freight up there, you loaded a ship on the west coast and sailed it up the inside passage and the open North Pacific. That was fine for a territory the rest of the country mostly wrote off as a frozen afterthought. It stopped being fine on December 7th, 1941. After Pearl Harbor, the whole Pacific coast of North America suddenly felt like a front line, and the sea route to Alaska felt like what it was: a long thin lifeline that a submarine could cut.
Then, in June of 1942, the fear stopped being theoretical. Japanese forces struck Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians and put troops ashore on two American islands, Attu and Kiska, out at the far end of that chain. It was the first enemy occupation of American soil in a very long time, and it landed like a shock. American forces would not pry those two islands back until 1943, and the fighting there turned out to be some of the only land combat of the entire war on North American soil.
In the summer of 1942, nobody knew yet how far it would go. All they knew was that the enemy was now on the map, up in the corner, and the only way in and out of Alaska ran across open water. If the sea lane went, Alaska could be cut off and starved of everything it needed to defend itself. Washington decided it could not gamble the whole territory on ships staying safe.
It needed a road, a land route up the spine of the northwest, back from the coast, out of easy reach of anything at sea. The decision came down in February of 1942, and it was the kind of decision that is easy to make with a pencil and nearly impossible to carry out with a bulldozer. Build an overland military highway from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, which at least had a railhead, up through the Yukon, all the way to Delta Junction in Alaska, where it could tie into the Richardson Highway, the one real road that already reached toward Fairbanks. About 1,700 miles of it, and build it now.
There was a second reason for that exact line on the map, one hardly anyone remembers now. Running up through the same wilderness was a string of airfields the two countries had been quietly building, called the Northwest Staging Route. It ran from Great Falls, Montana, up through western Canada to Fairbanks, and it existed to ferry warplanes north. Thousands of American aircraft were flown up that chain of fields, handed over to Soviet pilots in Alaska, and flown on across to fight the Germans on the Eastern Front.
Those airfields were scattered across country with almost no way to reach them on the ground, no way to truck in fuel or parts or a crew if a plane went down between them. The road was meant to do two jobs at once. It would be the safe overland lifeline to Alaska, and it would string those secret airfields together like beads on a wire. The route was not chosen for the scenery.
It was chosen to follow the planes. The Army Corps of Engineers got the job, and the plan they came up with was the only plan the ground would allow. They would not build the road neatly from one end to the other. They would leapfrog.
They cut the whole route into sections and dropped regiments in all along its length, some pushing north, some pushing south, each one responsible for closing its own stretch of the gap. Roughly 11,000 soldiers went in, spread across seven engineer regiments. Behind them and around them came the civilians. Counting the 16,000 or so American and Canadian contract workers and the Public Roads Administration crews, the total workforce climbed past 25,000 people, with something like 7,000 pieces of heavy equipment thrown in with them.
The final bill came to around $138 million, making it the most expensive construction project the United States built during the entire war. The plan was thinner than it looked. In a lot of places, nobody actually knew where the road should go because the country had never been properly mapped. Survey parties went out ahead of the machines on foot and by boat and by little bush planes, scouting a line through the trees and the swamp, maybe a few days in front of the bulldozers coming up behind them.
The road was being designed and built almost in the same motion. Getting the machines to the work was its own ordeal. Equipment came in by ship to the port of Valdez and then had to be hauled inland. Some of it was flown up to those staging route airfields and worked outward from there.
There was no supply chain waiting. They built the thing they needed while they were using it. When the first bulldozers rolled off the flat cars at Dawson Creek and met the ground they had been ordered to beat, the ground beat them first. That is the honest way to say it, because the enemy on this project was never a man.
It was the land, and the land had two weapons no one in a warm office in Washington had fully understood. The first was muskeg, the northern bog, a deep soft mat of half-rotted moss and peat sitting on top of waterlogged ground. It can look almost solid. Crews learned the hard way that it was not.
A bulldozer would start across a stretch of muskeg that held a walking man just fine, and the machine would simply go down, sinking into the bog until the tracks disappeared and sometimes until the whole thing had to be dragged out by another dozer that was in danger of sinking too. You could not fill it, and you could not easily go around it, because in a lot of that country the muskeg was everywhere. The engineers fell back on the oldest trick in the book. They cut down trees, thousands of them, and laid the trunks side by side straight across the bog like a raft, a corduroy road, and drove on top of that.
It shifted and buckled and heaved under every truck, but it floated the traffic across ground that would otherwise have swallowed it whole. The second weapon was worse, because it turned the crew’s own work against them: permafrost. Under a lot of that terrain, the ground a foot or two down was permanently frozen and had been for thousands of years. It was rock hard and it held.
The trouble was that what kept it frozen was the blanket of moss and brush and trees on the surface, shading it from the sun. The first thing a road crew does is strip that surface off to grade the roadbed. The moment they did, the sun got at the permafrost that had been sealed away for millennia, and it began to melt. Ground that had been solid enough to hold anything turned into a bottomless black soup of mud and meltwater.
Roads that crews had cut and thought they were finished with dissolved behind them into channels of sludge that no truck and sometimes no bulldozer could get through. They were, in the most literal way, thawing the trap they then had to drive across. On top of the muskeg and the melting ground came the weather, in two flavors, both cruel. In winter the temperature fell to forty and fifty degrees below zero, cold that seizes an engine and cracks steel and can kill a man who stops moving.
Machines had to be nursed through it, run and warmed and coaxed, because a bulldozer that froze solid overnight was a day of work lost that nobody could spare. In the short northern summer, when the ground finally softened enough to work, the air filled with insects. Clouds of mosquitoes and black flies and gnats so thick that men in the photographs wear nets over their faces, working through a haze of biting insects that never let up as long as the light lasted. And in that country in summer, the light barely quits at all.
That last part cut both ways. The endless daylight was miserable to sleep in, but it meant the crews could run almost around the clock, shift after shift, chasing the road forward under a sun that in June and July of that far north never really set. They worked seven days a week through both seasons. There was no pausing for the cold and no pausing for the bugs, because the whole thing was a race and everybody on it knew it.
The route crossed water constantly, and an army in a hurry cannot wait for permanent bridges. The engineers threw across whatever would carry a truck today. Pontoon bridges floated on the current for the crossings they had to make right now. Timber trestle bridges went up over the ones that would carry traffic for months, cut from the spruce standing right there on the bank.
By the time the Pioneer Road was done, they had put in about 133 bridges and several thousand culverts along the line. Most of them made of wood. Most of them built by hand in a hurry by men standing in cold water. On a road they had eight months to build, they also had to build 133 separate bridges, each one over a real river that did not care about the schedule.
When the army went looking for the manpower to build this road, it ran into a simple problem. Nearly every trained engineer regiment it had was already committed somewhere else in the war, mostly out in the Pacific. So the War Department did something it had been reluctant to do: it sent in its black engineer regiments. Three of them went north to the Alaska Highway, the 93rd, the 95th, and the 97th, along with a separate battalion.
By the count in the regimental records, about 3,695 of the roughly 11,000 soldiers on the whole project were black, better than one man in three. In 1942, the United States Army was segregated top to bottom, and a lot of the men running it flatly did not believe that black soldiers could do skilled engineering work. That belief shaped everything about how these three regiments were used. They were kept separate from the white regiments, camped apart, and given the worst of nearly everything.
The white regiments got the bulldozers and the heavy machinery. The black regiments, for long stretches, got hand tools: picks, shovels, axes, hand saws. They were expected to move a road across subarctic wilderness the way roads had been moved a hundred years earlier, by muscle. Where white soldiers had Quonset huts to sleep in, black soldiers were often in cloth tents in country that hit fifty below.
They were sent to some of the most remote and difficult stretches of the entire line and left there to get on with it. Think about what that actually meant on the ground. The 93rd Regiment, working with those hand tools, cut something like 240 miles of road between early June and the first of October that year. There is a stretch where they put down about 70 miles, from Carcross toward the Teslin River, in roughly six weeks, by hand, in that country.
When you strip away the assumption these men had been handed, that they were the second-string labor you gave the shovels to, and just look at the miles and the dates, you find some of the fastest road building on the entire project. The tools were meant to hold them back. The output says the opposite. The three regiments were scattered across the length of the line in some of the loneliest places on it.
The 97th had been shipped all the way up to the Alaska end and set to work coming south down through the mountains toward the crews grinding north to meet them. These were men who in a lot of cases had come from the American South and had never seen cold like the interior of Alaska and the Yukon. Dropped into it with tents and hand tools and told to move a road through it. They were kept away from the towns, kept away from the white camps, and for long stretches kept more or less out of the official story of the road entirely.
When the newspapers back home ran the triumphant pictures of the highway going through, the black regiments were mostly not in them. Their work was down in the ground they had moved, even when their names were nowhere in the coverage of it. Then there was the Sikanni Chief River and the bridge that should be a lot more famous than it is. The Sikanni Chief is a fast, cold, glacial river about three hundred feet across at the crossing, and the road had to get over it.
The engineering plans that came down from the desks estimated it would take around two weeks to bridge. The men who got the job were the 95th Regiment, one of the black regiments, and they had had just about enough of being told what they could not do. So they made a bet, a month’s pay, that they could put the bridge across faster than anyone upstairs believed possible. Then they went into that freezing glacial water, chest deep, to drive the timber trestles by hand in the current, in the cold, and they finished the whole bridge in about three days.
Three days against a plan that had allowed them two weeks. They won the bet and built a bridge that carried the road across one of its meanest rivers, with the exact crews the army had decided were not really up to skilled work. All summer and into the fall of 1942, the crews had been closing on each other from opposite directions, north toward south and south toward north, chewing through the last of the gap. On September 24th, 1942, two of those crews finally met.
It happened at a spot on the border between British Columbia and the Yukon, at what the maps had marked as mile 588, when the graders coming from one direction broke through the last screen of trees and found the graders coming from the other. There had been no road between those two points that morning. By that afternoon, there was. They named the place Contact Creek, because that is where contact was made, where the two ends of the thing first touched.
But that was not the last gap. The final connection, the one that closed the whole road end to end, came a month later on October 25th, 1942, far to the north near a place called Beaver Creek. Two bulldozers had been grinding toward each other for weeks, and when they were finally nose to nose with only a few feet of untouched ground between them, the men climbed down and the last of the dirt was cleared away by hand. The road became one continuous line for the first time.
There is a photograph of that moment. Two soldiers reaching across the joint to shake hands. One of them is Corporal Refines Sims, Jr. , from Philadelphia, of the 97th, one of the black regiments.
The other is Private Alfred Jalufka, from Kennedy, Texas, a white bulldozer operator from the 18th. A black soldier and a white soldier from two regiments the army had gone out of its way to keep apart, shaking hands over the seam where their two roads had finally become one road. Nobody staged it as a statement. It just happened, because those were the two men who happened to be driving the last two machines.
The Pioneer Road, the rough military track that a truck could actually drive, was declared complete on October 28th, 1942. On November 20th, they held a dedication out at a spot called Soldier’s Summit, up above the ice-blue sweep of Kluane Lake in the Yukon. A ribbon cut in the cold, a few speeches, a band playing with the war still on, and the temperature well below freezing. At the Alaska end, the new road ran into the old Richardson Highway near Delta Junction and finally gave the territory what it had never had: a way to drive north from the rest of the continent.
From the first bulldozer in March to a drivable line clear across that wilderness, they had taken about eight months. It was not free, and the achievement should not paper over that. The conditions that made the road so hard to build were conditions that hurt and killed people. About thirty men died over the course of the construction, in accidents and drownings and the ordinary lethal arithmetic of heavy work in a deadly climate.
A lot of that dying happened at exactly the places that made the road so hard, the rivers. The same fast, cold, glacial water that the bridge crews had to wade into to set their trestles is water that will pull a man off his feet and take him under in seconds, and it did. Frostbite took fingers and toes in the winter camps. Broken bones and sickness ran through the tents, and the nearest real hospital could be hundreds of miles of half-built road away, and not everyone who needed one got there in time.
When the soldiers moved on, the road they had punched through was still only a rough beginning. That first winter and the following year, the permafrost kept melting out from under it, and the muskeg kept swallowing it. It took the civilian crews of the Public Roads Administration another year and more to turn the pioneer track into a real all-weather highway, straightening the worst of it and shortening the whole thing by hundreds of miles as they found better lines. Decade after decade of that straightening has since trimmed the route down to something closer to 1,400 miles than the full length of that first pioneer road.
The military kept it closed to ordinary travelers all through the war. It did not open to the general public until 1948. And 1948 is a year worth pausing on for one more reason. That same year, the President of the United States ordered the desegregation of the entire American military.
There were many forces behind that order, but the men who had gone north to build this road were part of the evidence. Three regiments that the army had assumed could not do the work had gone into the worst country on the continent with hand tools and outpaced the crews who had the bulldozers. The record they left was very hard to argue with. It took the country far too long to say so out loud.
There is now a black veterans memorial bridge on the highway, dedicated in 1993, half a century after the fact, to the soldiers whose part in it had been quietly left out of the story for most of a lifetime. The road did something else, too, something nobody had quite intended. It cracked the far northwest open for good. The rough camps where the regiments had wintered turned into towns.
Places that had been reachable only by riverboat or bush plane suddenly had a gravel line running to them, and fuel and mail and people started moving along it, and they never stopped. A route thrown down in a panic to move soldiers and warplanes quietly became the permanent backbone of a whole region, the thing that tied the Yukon interior and a good part of Alaska to the rest of the continent by land for the first time in history. The war that caused it ended, and the road stayed, and it changed the map for good. We remember the Alaska Highway, when we remember it at all, as a map line and a road trip, a long drive to Alaska with good scenery.
What it actually is is a monument. Every one of those 1,700 miles was cut in a single hard year by men racing the winter and the thaw and each other. The meanest miles of it, over and over, were cut by soldiers who had been handed shovels and told they were not good enough, and who answered by building the road faster than anyone above them believed they could. The permafrost is still trying to eat that highway.
The crews who maintain it are still fighting the same black sludge the first bulldozers sank into in 1942. And the road is still there, still open, still carrying trucks north every single day.
