ALASKA HIGHWAY NEWS

By Karla MarshSpecial to the AHN Agnes Scheck remembers when the American soldiers came to town. Photo from North Peace Museum, supplied by the family. It was Good Friday, 1942, and there was a blizzard raging. No one seemed to know that an army was coming, they just blew in with the blizzard, unannounced. Agnes was working at the Providence Hospital in Fort St. John at the time. She was a nurse in the surgical ward and it was there that the Army doctors began to do the

By Karla MarshSpecial to the AHN After almost 50 years, Anne Callison still remembers the rough and tumble trip she made to Fort Nelson in January of 1943. She was a young girl of about 20, on her way to a job at the Trading Post at old Fort Nelson. (l-r) Frank Senz, Anne Callison and John Callison at a North Peace Pioneers event in 1975. Anne had arranged a ride up the recently constructed Alaska Highway with a Public Roads Administration truck. “We drove all night,” she rec

By Karla MarshSpecial to the AHN Before the surveyors and trailblazers could cut a line marking the right-of-way for the Alaska Highway, the road first needed to be “located.” The highway was to connect the existing airbases at Fort St. John, Fort Nelson, Watson Lake, Whitehorse, Big Delta and Fairbanks, known together as the Northwest Staging Route. However, although It was known which towns and villages the route would connect, the actual location of the road between th

By Karla Marsh Special to the AHN Photo of Bill McDonald supplied by the North Peace Museum Bill McDonald was just a boy of eight in the summer of 1942. His older brother had joined the army the summer before and he suspects his family was concerned about events overseas. But to Bill, “the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the war seemed like another world.” Bill’s mother had taught school at Moberly Lake that year and when she and young Bill returned to Fort St. John at the

By Karla Marsh Life could be pretty wild and woolly in the Peace Country in 1942 and 43, according to Ernie Jarvis. Ernie moved camps for the Public Road Administration and although he spent a lot of his time in the bush, he did have opportunities to travel the new Alaska Highway and to observe town busting at the seams with soldiers. This photo is of Ernie Jarvis, Clarence Crook and Julius Stokke when they came to the Peace Region in 1928. From what Ernie saw, things were

The building of dreams: By Karla Marsh In 1942, young Ernie Scanlon left his jos at an aircraft manufacturing plant in Ontario and signed on with a construction company contracted to work on the Alaska Highway. With the company paying the travel expenses, Ernie boarded a train for a long trip across Canada. He met other men on the train destined to labor on the great road and together they arrived at Dawson Creek, the end of the railhead, on July 8, 1942. Ernie was first

By Karla Marsh Ruby Schubert had one of the most interesting jobs a soldier could have on the Alaska Highway. He spent his days on the Trail of ’42 working as a photographer. Although born in Canada, Rudy travelled to the United States to join the U.S. Army. He had tried to enlist in the Canadian Army, but was refused by an officer who objected to Schubert’s German heritage. But it wasn’t long before Rudy returned to Canada. His regiment, the 341 st Engineers, received order