The North-West Staging Route

(In Part Three the writer took us from Aishihik to Snag, then back, down the Alaska Highway to Whitehorse and further glimpses into Mr. MacBride’s unique scrap-~book.—Editor.)

From Whitehorse we drove south towards Teslin, our next stop along the Staging Route. On the way, we turned off to visit Carcross, a small town whose present name is a somewhat colourless abbreviation of its original one, Caribou Crossing. There I hoped to have a chat with George Simmons, a bush-pilot who has spent twenty years in the North and whose headquarters is an airstrip which he himself hewed out of the wilderness.

Although we learned, to my disappointment, that he had taken off for Skagway earlier that morning, the side-trip proved anything but unrewarding; for the vital old lady who serves as ticket-agent at the Carcross depot of the White Pass and Yukon Railway regaled me with several hair-raising stories of the past.

The most tragic of them concerned an American B-17 Flying Fortress which landed at Whitehorse one day in 1943 in order to carry out a few repairs. The work completed, the aircraft took off on a short test-flight, taking with it some eighteen R.C.A.F. personnel who had been invited to go along for a ride. Over Lake Bennett, beside which Carcross stands, one of the engines cut out and the ’plane crashed into the water. The pilot went down with his aircraft. Most of the others, who had managed to climb out on to the wings, clung there for the few moments until the ‘plane sank, when those of them who could swim struck out for the shore. “But”, as my old lady said, “very few people die from drowning in this country. Their hearts stop when they hit the icy water.” Only seven people were saved — by boats which, having been dry-docked all winter, took a long time to reach the swimmers. A Norseman flew into Lake Bennett with doctors and supplies, landing on George Simmons’ field. When it took off on the following morning, its wing hit the wind-tower and two more were killed. As my friend said: “The ironical thing about the whole incident was that a sand-bar was hidden under the water only a few feet in front of the wrecked aircraft, but the survivors didn’t swim in that direction.”

Leaving Carcross, we passed the night at Marsh Lake Lodge, a hunting and fishing lodge used extensively by those who can afford to pay fifty dollars a day. Mike Nolan, its guide and outfitter, is a veteran of the R.C.M.P. While we sat in the lounge of the two-storey log building, with the rain beating heavily upon the roof and the wind roaring around the chimney of the fireplace, Mike told us many tales of his days spent in the North as a Mountie. Among his stories was one concerning Pat Ivy, who flew with the R.C.A.F. on the Staging Route throughout the early war years and was later killed in Europe. When Aishihik was under construction, Pat flew in one day and pancaked his Dakota after taking the undercarriage off on the top of a bulldozer. “His entire load consisted of nails. You can find nails on the runway to this day — often when you least want to.”

“In the final years of the war,” Mike said, “when a quart of milk cost $1.50 — so you can imagine what a quart of whisky cost — a few of the R.C.A.F. and USAAF boys decided to go into business. They built three 75-gallon stills in the hills surrounding Whitehorse. They got away with it for many months, too, bringing their moonshine down to the thirsty thousands through a system of metal pipes rather like miniature Canol Pipelines. It was my unhappy duty to have to locate these installations and put an end to their flourishing distilleries.”

From Marsh Lake Lodge we drove on to Teslin, where I had an interesting conversation with Mrs. R. McCleery, the local postmistress. Her recently deceased husband, a member of the R.C.M.P., had made the original clearing at Teslin in 1940, some two years before the airport was actually built, in the hope of attracting aircraft to the little town. When construction began, the problem of bringing in supplies was solved in customary northern fashion. All materials came in on three stern-wheelers belonging to the White Pass and Yukon Company: the Nisutlin, the Keno, and the Whitehorse. The three vessels steamed down the Yukon River from Whitehorse, across Lake Laberge, and up the Teslin River. Each made one 240-mile trip a week, for two months. Bulldozers built a road from the warf to the airport site, where construction crews went to work under the direction of D.O.T. Several months later, when a section of the Alaska Highway was begun at Teslin, American negro soldiers and their equipment were brought in by the same means.

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From Teslin we proceeded south, through Seagull Creek, Rancheria, and Upper Liard River, to Watson Lake, our last stop in the Yukon before entering British Columbia. The name of Watson Lake will conjure up fond memories in the minds of many R.C.A.F. personnel. Situated on a peninsula which juts into the lake, and surrounded by tall pines, it is a place of rare beauty as well as a fisherman’s paradise. The flight sergeant who commanded the Detachment introduced me to Vic Johnson, a civilian who has fulfilled various functions around Watson since 1938.

The story of the building of this lovely, but lonely, northern airport is a good example of the courage and ingenuity which characterizes the development of flying in Canada’s North. “All the material”, Vic told me, “was assembled at Vancouver in the spring of 1941. The means of transportation also had to be constructed in Vancouver. One stern-wheel river-steamer, three shallow-draft power boats (called ‘tunnel-boats’)*, and twelve barges, were built. Then, dismantled for shipment, they weretaken to the port of Wrangell, Alaska, on coastal steamers.

“Meanwhile, a sawmill was flown in to the site. Logs for the buildings were cut in the Liard Valley, and brought by land five miles to a landing across the lake from the peninsula. The logs were boomed across the water, and there dressed by the sawmill for later use.

“At Wrangell, the craft I spoke of were reassembled and employed to freight the supplies up the Stikine River to Telegraph Creek, in B.C. From Telegraph Creek, the boats and the freight had to be portaged 72 miles to Dease Lake, one of the gold-rush centres of 1898. A trail already existed between Telegraph Creek and Dease Lake, but much work had to be done by ‘eats’ to make it into a road. The bridges especially had to be strengthened.”

I heard the rest of the story from Big Alex MacDonald, whom I met later at Lower Post. Big Alex, an immense Scot who still retains his burr after sixty years in the North, is now a trapper. At one time, during the Klondike Gold-Rush, he was so rich that he was able to afford a trip back to Europe, where he mixed with Royalty. Travelling in gold-inlaid coaches, however, and giving nuggets away to everyone he met, he soon lost his fortune. He returned to the North, where he was eventually to assist in the building of R.C.A.F. Detachment Watson Lake.

“From Dease Lake,” Big Alex told me, “supplies were transported down the Dease River into the Liard River at Lower Post, a famous old Hudson’s Bay trading-post. One of the river-boat pilots on the trip down the Dease was an Indian called ‘Captain Sandbar’. His real name was Ritchie, and he was skipper of a stern-wheeler which would haul two forty-ton barges of supplies. He owed his nickname to the fact that, at his previous job on the Fraser River, he always got stuck on the bars. He made a few successful trips down and up the Dease, and then his stern-wheeler hit a rock in the Two-Mile Rapids and sank.

“After this, the tunnel-boats pulled all of the freight on the Dease. They took two days to go down the rushing river, with its many rapids, and six days to make the return trip up it. The Cottonwood Rapids were so bad that a road had to be built around them for the freight, and a final 26-mile portage was necessary from Lower Post to Watson Lake. The road which was built for this portage was later to become a section of the Alaska Highway.”

To return to Vic Johnson at Watson Lake. He showed me Sandy’s Point, a point on the peninsula to which McConachie and Fields moved from Lower Post in 1938. There, Yukon Southern Airways set up a radio-station in a log cabin and another cabin for the pilots of their Wacos, Norsemen, Junkers, and Howards. I looked in at the war-time officers’ mess, long since locked up. Carved out in the log facing of the fireplace are hundreds of RCAF and USAAF pilots’ names. I recognized many of them, some as belonging to’ men who are now senior officers in the R.C.A.F., others as those of pilots who flew on to Europe or the Pacific, never to return.

Although control of the Staging Route was handed over to the R.C.A.F. in September 1942, the first commanding officers of the various units arrived in July. They were chosen with two qualities in mind. The first was diplomacy: they had to be capable of ensuring friendly co-operation with the American forces (including the Engineer Corps engaged in construction of the Highway). The second was implied in Ted Holmes’ remark to me in Edmonton: “Someone in Ottawa must have run his pencil down a list of R.C.A.F. pilots until he found six former bush-pilots. You’ll notice he didn’t get past ‘H’.

• Wing Commander C.M.G. (Con) Farrell went to Edmonton, and
• Squadron Leaders:
  • J.F. Bythell to Grande Prairie,
  • E.S. Holmes to Fort St. John,
  • A.C. Heaven to Fort Nelson,
  • G. W. du Temple to Watson Lake, and
  • J. Hone to Whitehorse.

In addition, Flight Lieutenant D. M. Shields, an experienced airways traffic Control officer, was sent to Edmonton to direct the establishment of a general control over the Route.

Vic Johnson told me about one of the first things done by Sqn. Ldr. du Temple and his airmen. “They scrounged some wood and built a flat-bottomed boat. Then they went to a U.S. Army maintenance camp on the Alaska Highway and scrounged a washing-machine engine to propel it. In those early days, the men at the Staging Route units were often forced to eat their emergency rations for want of supplies. The fish they caught from their boat. were sometimes actually necessary for survival.”

On my tour of the lake with Vic in the crash-and-rescue launch, he pointed out several spots where tragedies had occurred in the past. We saw the wreckage of a Sea Fury, two Airacobras, a Dakota, and a Lincoln. The Dakota, which belonged to the U.S.A.A.F., had forced-landed on a deserted bridge several miles west of Watson, killing the pilot and co-pilot. The two remaining members of the crew sat in sight (from the air) of the airport runway for eleven days while aircraft from No. 2 Air Observer School in Edmonton, as well as many others, searched for them. On the eleventh day, each of them with a broken leg, they began to crawl towards Watson Lake. For eight days they crawled through the waist-deep snow which buried that frigid and mountainous terrain, using sections of engine-cowlings as sleighs, and surviving om emergency rations. They were finally spotted by an R.C.M.P. constable who had followed their tracks in the snow. The two men crawled almost to the end of the runway.

From this incident came a realization of the necessity of training pararescue Crews to operate throughout the North. No. 2 A.O.S. constantly received calls to search for lost crews, men who were not trained to take care of themselves in the wilderness. The American flyers especially, many of whom had never seen snow before, did not know how to cope with extreme cold, icing, and other conditions which were commonplace in northern bush-flying.

Eventually, a school to train pararescue personnel was organized in Edmonton, under North-West Air Command. The School was under the direction of Wing Commanders H. J. Winny and H. L. Watson, Flight Lieutenant S. Knapp, and Sergeant O. Hargraves. Volunteers were called for from the trades of Hospital Assistants (Male), Aero-engine Mechanics, Airframe Mechanics, and Electricians. Twelve of the hundreds of volunteers were chosen to take the first course which began in December 1944 and continued for fourteen weeks.

The course included such subjects as first aid, parachute theory, signals equipment, supply-dropping, bush lore, codes (W/T, helio, and lamp), and physical fitness. In addition, the students made twelve practice jumps and spent a week in the bush putting their woodcraft theory into practice.

Two courses were trained, providing the R.C.AF. with twenty-seven para-rescuers. The graduates were awarded a special emblem, to be worn on the sleeve, bearing a Crown and parachute and the words “RESCUE — R.C.A.F.” A measure of the value derived from such training — quite apart from the number of pilots who owe their lives to pararescue — is the fact that the R.A.F. requested all details of the school and its training, with a view to adopting a similar procedure for use in the Far East.

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After we had left the airport site at Watson, I stopped off at the Watson Lake Hotel to talk to Dal Dalzel, more commonly known to students of northern flying as “The Flying Trapper”, and famous for his ability to get into places where no one else would. Dal told me about the aircraft that were flown to the Russians during the War. Lockheed Lightnings, Douglas Invaders, and other types of tricycle fighters and bombers passed along the Staging Route on their way to Fairbanks. Fighters were usually escorted by a mother-ship, such as a Liberator or Fortress, and it was not uncommon for forty or fifty to pass through every day. “The Russians,” he said, “preferred the P-36 — King Cobra — because the location of the cannon in the crankshaft was ideal for anti-tank work.”

I had heard it said and seen it written that Russian women piloted the aircraft from Fairbanks. “Actually,” Dal said, “there were few if any women pilots. The women were mostly lieutenants who acted as mechanics and translators. The Russians had their own mess in Fairbanks, and used to ship over their own vodka. Occasionally, when they could be persuaded to visit the American PX, they made their purchases with a called-in issue of very large orange-coloured American bills — bills hoarded by them since the time of an American occupation which had taken place during a Slight naval war between Russia and Japan.”

Dal knew a lot about Russian habits because, during the war, he had acted as a flying guide for the flights of aircraft destined for Europe. He told me of the time, early in the winter of 1944, when Molotov flew down the Staging Route to Edmonton. In Edmonton, the Russians asked the R.C.A.F. for six DC-3s and crews to fly them. Molotov’s departure-time was kept a big secret, and the crews waited for three days so that the element of surprise could be utilized. Since they would not tell which aircraft of the six Molotov would eventually use, five of the aircraft and their crews were, in actual fact, only decoys. While Molotov was in the city, the Russians requested that an entire H-building be given to him and his retinue. They also asked for a new car, a garage, and a new refrigerator; then, constantly surrounded by police guards, they proceeded to dismantle the car and the refrigerator, investigate their mechanical features, and put them back together.

Before 1939, Dal used to fly out of Telegraph Creek; after that, he operated from Sandy’s Point. In the winters of ’39 and ’40 he did a lot of aerial surveying for D.O.T. in his Curtiss Robin. He also carried out extensive aerial surveys for the Alaska Highway, and later “acted as a sky-guide and mother protector for the flights of Russian aircraft.”

Mike Nolan, at Marsh Lake Lodge, had already related to me an anecdote about him. Late in 1945, an aircraft piloted by a Colonel Fox made a forced landing on what later became known as Fox Lake, between Teslin and Whitehorse. A twenty-mile road was bulldozed into the lake from the Alaska Highway, Engineers, engines, and food for the 17 passengers and three crewmen, were brought in. The weather was icy cold, and the frozen legs of meat were cut with a cross-cut saw. Dal was requested to fly in with his Norseman. All arrangements went off smoothly, and Col. Fox’s ‘plane took off from the ice on wheels over a cleared runway of 1248 feet. Dal wished to be the first to report the Success of the operation, but so did a U.S.A.A.F. lieutenant. A heated argument ensued, and the short 135 lb. lieutenant managed to get into the Norseman. The Spectators, of whom Mike Nolan was one, started to make bets about who would give in first. Seemingly Dal did: for the aircraft began to take-off. The attempt, however, was unsuccessful. So were three more attempts. Finally the Norseman stopped, the door opened, and out stepped the lieutenant. “I”, he stated ruefully, “must have made the load too heavy.”

Several readers have drawn our attention to an error in Part One of the foregoing series. It was stated that, “of the six units (of the Route) now operated by the R.C.A.F., two more will be passed over to the Department of Transport before very long. At the present time, the responsibility for the various units is allocated as follows: etc. We then proceeded to show the responsibility for the various units as it has been allotted since Flying Officer French’s article was prepared. We apologize both to our puzzled readers and to the author. — Editor.

*A tunnel-boat has a shallow draft, and the propeller is positioned above the level of the bottom of the boat, thus being protected from submerged rocks. The water is “led” to the propeller through a “tunnel” built into the bottom.