‘Miles and miles of miles and miles” is how one of the men who helped construct the Alaska Highway described it. It’s a sentiment most anyone who has driven that seemingly endless road will echo as they count mileposts while traveling through some of the most rugged and sparsely populated lands in North America, lands that witness some of the continent’s most severe weather.
The Alcan, as it is colloquially known, traverses mountains, bogs, prairies, and more, challenging drivers for 1,387 miles with cliffside curves, endless straightaways, bridges over dozens of rivers, dust in summer, ice and snow in winter, occasional small settlements becoming fewer and fewer as one drives northwestward, only a handful of traffic signals, and one international border crossing. We can forgive a traveler for asking, “how long did this take to build?”
The long answer is, it’s never fully built. The short answer is, one extended season.
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Most Alaskans know the lone highway reaching into our state is a product of World War II. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and longstanding fears of Alaska’s vulnerability were realized when Dutch Harbor was also bombed and two Aleutian islands were seized. The remote territory, then still nearly two decades from statehood, could only be reached by sea or air, and ships and planes could be intercepted by Japanese forces patrolling the North Pacific.
The only reasonably secure means of keeping Alaska and its growing military bases supplied was through Canada. Planes could never meet the military’s freight demands, and putting in a railroad would take a decade. A gravel road, however, could conceivably be built in one year. And so it was.
This is the story that the late military historian and West Point instructor Heath Twichell told in his account of the highway’s construction, “Northwest Epic.” Originally published in 1992, the 50th anniversary of the Alcan’s opening, it’s recently been reissued by Epicenter Press, bringing an invaluable work of Alaska’s history back into print.
Twichell begins with chapters discussing conditions in prewar Alaska and the access difficulties that bedeviled it. Several road routes were proposed by various parties, each reflecting their own interests, but in the Depression, there was little capital to be had.
When war broke out, America faced a diplomatic challenge: convince Canada that the United States needed a road on Canadian soil. The solution was to call it a wartime necessity, put the Army Corps of Engineers in charge, and pay for most of it. Canada agreed, and by March 1942, less than three months after the U.S. entered the war, a route was chosen and troops and equipment began streaming north.
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Twichell had a deep personal connection to all of this through his father, Col. Heath Twichell, Sr., who was involved in the military command and direction of the project (the civilian Public Roads Administration constructed a significant share as well). The elder Twichell’s voice is one of many often evoked in this book, adding to a sense, for the reader, of having been on-hand for the event.
Twichell, Jr., tells a gripping tale of the challenges that faced Army crews as they pushed through little-traveled territory that was often unmapped. Regiments were deployed to locations along the route, and from there began blazing a path toward the next crew, which was coming their way. Twichell details daily life, where hunting and fishing were among the permitted diversions. This had the added advantage of providing camp cooks with something other than canned and dried goods to create meals from. Gambling was the only accessible vice, and troops were generally too exhausted after a day’s work to become discipline problems. Then, as now, wildfires and their accompanying smoke were ever-present.
One cannot explore the history of the building of this road without recognizing the complex dynamics of race. Black soldiers were crucial to its construction, but they were strictly segregated and, especially early on, poorly treated. Twichell documents their path into the Yukon, enduring hardships both natural and imposed, but also moments of humor, such as an Indigenous man’s first sighting of a Black man.
Twichell’s father took command of the demoralized 95th Engineers. The Black regiment had been stripped of most of its heavy equipment by white crews and had been forced to do most of its work by hand. The elder Twichell tasked them with bridge construction instead, and soon they were hopscotching from one river or creek to the next, spanning them with bridges capable of handling the Army’s load sizes. Morale improved.
Twichell, Jr., was a strong proponent of civil rights, and honest about his father’s shortcomings on racial issues. Though never hateful, he could be highly patronizing, especially regarding Indigenous peoples. Twichell neither attacks his dad nor makes excuses for his views. He simply offers his father as a complex product of the times and places he lived through. And through that, he offers this history as complex and human. It’s an important thing to remember as we try to understand the past and those who impacted it (and an important understanding for modern readers to lend Twichell; he doesn’t capitalize Black or Native because this was not common practice in the early nineties).
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Twichell painstakingly details the feuds, turf wars, promotions, and transfers (sometimes forced) of the assorted military brass who oversaw the project. His father was one of the few officers to last the duration. Politicians got involved as well, including a rising Missouri senator with a reformist bent, Harry Truman. He went after the CANOL oil project, affiliated with the highway, and called a boondoggle for good reasons.
On Nov. 20, 1942, two converging bulldozers met near Beaver Creek, close to the border, and the Alaska Highway was open, six months and 1,570 miles after it began. It “was really only an emergency supply route — particularly northwest of Whitehorse — and a very tenuous one at that,” Twichell writes. Yet from that came one of the world’s great drives. A “Northwest Epic” indeed.
David James is a freelance writer who lives in Fairbanks. He can be emailed at nobugsinak@gmail.com.
A snowmachine carrying two juveniles on the Kuskokwim River drove into an open hole Saturday, resulting in the death of a 15-year-old, Alaska State Troopers said Sunday.
Troopers said in an online update that they were notified of the incident, which happened about 8 miles upriver from Kalskag, just after 6 p.m. Saturday. One boy was able to get out of the river to safety but Cole Gilila, 15, “disappeared under the ice,” troopers said.
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Volunteers with search and rescue came from Kalskag and Aniak to help find Gilila, and searchers recovered his body from the river around 8 p.m., according to troopers.
A truck driving on the ice road took the other snowmachine rider to the clinic in Kalskag, and the boy was reportedly in cold but uninjured condition, troopers said.
Gilila’s remains were being taken to Aniak, then on to the State Medical Examiner for an autopsy, according to troopers, who also said Gilila’s next of kin had been notified.
Part of a continuing weekly series on Alaska history by local historian David Reamer. Have a question about Anchorage or Alaska history or an idea for a future article? Go to the form at the bottom of this story.
For more modern historians, newspapers are one of the best resources, the most thorough and accessible surviving accounts of what daily life was once like. Flaws and all. Looking back at any given newspaper, it is essential to remember that everything printed was then considered important in one way or another. Certainly, some topics were more serious, but every story was written for a reason: to educate, elucidate or entertain. Still, some stories have longer lifespans than others. Values and perspectives evolve. With that said, let’s see what was on the front page of the Daily News 20, 40 and 60 years ago.
The front page of the Anchorage Daily News from Jan. 5, 2005.
Jan. 5, 2005. Most of the stories on this front page either remain relevant or are too serious to forget. The title of an article about AIDS, “Americans with AIDS survive longer, but lives remain a struggle,” could be reused today. The biggest story on the front page was ongoing relief efforts in Indonesia after the Dec. 26, 2004, 9.2-9.4M Sumatra-Andaman earthquake. An estimated 227,898 people died in the ensuing tsunami, which reached 100 feet high.
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Concerns about the nomination of Alberto Gonzales for attorney general, from the article on the lower left, proved prescient. The Texan lawyer’s tenure as attorney general was marked by controversy over his support for interrogation techniques previously and subsequently considered illegal torture, including waterboarding. He resigned two years later “in the best interests of the department.”
On the other hand, there is the article about Holland America parking unused McKinley Explorer railcars outside Anchorage, a ploy to avoid higher taxes within the municipality. With all due respect to property taxes and the prominent cruise line, few locals have likely thought of this intersection in the years since.
Perhaps the most interesting article here is about a proposed extension of the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail from Elderberry Park to Ship Creek. Twenty years later, there’s still no connection. Prolonged, heated battles mark the entire history of the Coastal Trail. In the 1980s, property owners along the water, notably including Anchorage Daily Times owner Bob Atwood, loudly protested the creation of the trail. Likewise, fevered opposition by South Anchorage homeowners in the 1990s and early 2000s scuttled attempts to extend the trail to Potter Marsh. Maybe one day.
There were also teases for interior articles: Ryne Sandberg and Wade Boggs were enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame. The University of Southern California football team, in its Pete Carroll-led golden years, beat Oklahoma. And down in the lower right corner, Sen. Lisa Murkowski was sworn in for her second term as U.S. senator, the first after being elected to the office. As every good Alaskan already knows, her father, Gov. Frank Murkowski, appointed her to his vacant seat in 2002.
The front page of the Anchorage Daily News from Jan. 5, 1985.
Jan. 5, 1985. If you were alive then, you are at least 40 years old today. Consider what happened 40 years before that, including the last year of World War II, the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the creation of the United Nations. In other words, FDR’s death was as recent for people in 1985 as “Careless Whisper” by Wham! is to people today.
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The passing of longtime Alaska Teamsters boss Jesse Carr, once the most powerful political force in the state, dominated the front page. Carr moved to Anchorage in 1951 and, by 1956, was leading the Teamsters Local 959, which became a statewide union the next year. During their mid-1970s pipeline construction heyday, there were about 28,000 dues-paying members, and the union possessed implicit control over Alaska. With their control over transportation and communication centers, Carr and the Teamsters could effectively shut down the state with a strike or other maneuvers. For example, in February 1975, he ordered safety meetings that closed the Elliott Highway supply line to pipeline construction camps.
Carr decided election outcomes. He won higher wages and extensive “womb to tomb” medical coverage for union membership. Friends prospered, and enemies tended to disappear. Consider Prinz Brau, the beer brand brewed in Anchorage from 1976 to 1979. They made an enemy of Carr, hence their short run. Once and future Alaska Gov. Wally Hickel declared, “Jesse Carr believed that by taking care of Alaska’s working men and women, Alaska itself would be built and bettered. That’s what he fought for and won, and that’s his legacy.”
The late Howard Weaver wrote the cover article and knew Carr as well as any journalist. In December 1975, Weaver, Bob Porterfield and Jim Babb published several articles collectively titled “Empire: The Alaska Teamsters Story.” This series dissected the Alaska Teamsters empire, their political power, and their impact on Alaska society down to the grocery store receipts. The reporters were awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the newspaper’s first.
After the pipeline was completed, the Local 959′s membership and influence began to wane. A lengthy strike against the Anchorage Cold Storage Co. in the early 1980s exposed the union’s dwindling power, including several lost decertification elections by units at Cold Storage. In 1986, just a year after Carr’s death, Local 959 filed for bankruptcy protection.
The other front-page articles are a wide-ranging assortment. A new state law went into effect raising the minimum automobile insurance, which naturally meant busy days for insurance agents. A research analyst revealed that special operations forces were being trained to carry lightweight nuclear bombs behind enemy lines. And a new World Health Organization statistical yearbook revealed varying death rates around the world. The featured bit of trivia was in the article title, that a French person was statistically safer in a car than on a ladder.
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The front page of the Anchorage Daily News from Jan. 5, 1965.
Jan. 5, 1965. In 2025, we are as far from 1965 as the people in 1965 were from 1905, from President Joe Biden to President Lyndon B. Johnson to President Teddy Roosevelt. From Taylor Swift to the Beatles to Claude Debussy. Or perhaps readers are more familiar with other 1905 musical luminaries, like Billy Murray, Byron G. Harlan or the Haydn Quartet.
The lead story was a tragic fire at the Willow Park Apartments, what is now the eastern and southern strips of the downtown Anchorage Memorial Cemetery. Pearl Lockhart was forced to watch from outside as her three children — Leonard III, Barnetta and Lawrence — died in the blaze. Investigators later concluded the fire began while one or more of the children were playing with matches, which ignited a toy box and, from there, spread up the walls. Anchorage in the mid-1960s was rocked by a series of deadly fires partially attributable to aging building stock of questionable quality, generous grandfather clauses and inconsistent code policing within city limits. Other notable fires in this era include the Sept. 12, 1966 Lane Hotel arson with 14 deaths and a Dec. 26, 1966 fire on East 14th Avenue that killed Bennie Harrison, his fiancée Alanna Jeanine Shull and her four children.
Another article notes ongoing debate on a proposed downtown parking garage. Many modern urban planners, with cause, deride expansive parking lots and towering parking garages as a form of urban blight, choking more pleasant developments. However, Anchorage residents by the mid-1960s had been demanding increased downtown parking for two decades, as evidenced in polls, multiple studies, letters and newspaper comments. Still, the issue of this particular parking garage became heavily politicized, with extensive public campaigning by both advocates and naysayers before the proposal was defeated in an election later that year. Construction began on Anchorage’s first multistory parking garage next to JC Penney in 1966 and finished in 1967.
In other news, President Johnson invited Soviet leaders to visit the United States, another small moment in the lengthy back-and-forth of the Cold War. A Viet Cong attack at Binh Gia. A Greater Anchorage Area Borough Assembly meeting. And author T. S. Eliot died in London. His best-known works include the poems “The Wasteland,” “The Hollow Men” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the latter a personal favorite.
How many of these events do you remember? How many of these events have you ever heard of? It is something to consider. What events of today will be remembered 20, 40 or 60 years from now?
ELLENSBURG, Wash. (Jan. 4) – Senior guard Jazzpher Evans delivered 13 points and six assists to power a balanced attack Saturday for the Alaska Anchorage women’s basketball team in a 68-61 victory over Central Washington at Nicholson Pavilion. The Seawolves (13-2, 4-0 Great Northwest Athletic Conference) also got 11 points, five rebounds and three steals from senior point guard Emilia Long as they outshot the hosts .518 (29-56) to .327 (18-55). The Wildcats (9-3, 2-1) were led by 22 points, five rebounds and four assists from guard Asher Cai in a battle of teams receiving votes in the NCAA Div.…
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