Soldiers liked riding horses

By Karla MarshAlaska Highway News

Lucy Laboucane first crossed the Peace River in 1921. She crossed in a row boat and she remembers that there was still ice on the water.

Twenty years later, thousands of American soldiers would also cross the Peace River, by rowboat, by ferry and, after several years of construction, by bridge.

Lucy and her husband settled in Fort St. John where they raised a family of 17 children. Although she was busy and didn't have much time to socialize, Lucy remembers the soldiers.

“I remember the boys. They made the road. They used to come around and ride the horses. My husband was good for that. He said, ‘If you want a horse, go catch it. If you can’t catch it, you can’t ride it.’ Our horses were good, you could catch them anywhere.”

“I was scared of the soldiers at first, but I got used to them. They used to say, ‘Do you have any buttermilk or homemade bread?’ They used to like homemade bread.”

The Laboucane children found the soldiers’ visits very exciting.

Lucy recalls, “My youngest kid, he would dress up like a soldier. I had to make him pants. Then I got him a cap like a soldier’s. He used to run around going, ‘Bang, Bang.’”

“The kids liked the soldiers. They used to bring the kids things. They were good to the kids.”

Fresh food was hard to come by for the soldiers working on the Alaska Highway in 1942, so efforts were made to purchase some food from the local settlers.

Lucy says, “I would milk cows and make butter. I would sell it to the soldiers. Sometimes they would tell me when to bring the stuff. My husband would drive me to where they were stationed. We would go down to the camp at the other side of the Peace River to sell butter to the army. That brought me a little bit of money, just enough to buy some clothes for the kids.”