(From Don Whitington, member Australian Press delegation visiting Canada)
Allied bombers and military road convoys are thundering northward today over routes that took the gold miners months to walk in the rush of '98. The Alaska Highway and the Northwest Staging Route of the Allied Air Forces are resurrecting the north, and transforming the hamlets that Robert W. Service immortalised in his poems of the Yukon.
Service could still say of the Yukon:
"It's the cussedest land that I know,
From the big dizzy mountains that screen it,
To the deep, death like valleys below.
Some say God was tired when he made it;
Some say it's a fine land to shun".
American and Canadian pilots punching the planes through from Edmonton to Fairbanks would bear him out as they leave the quiet of the Peace River Valley at Fort St. John and swing out over the forbidding peaks of the Rockies for Fort Nelson, Watson Lake and Whitehorse. They would echo Service's curses as they landed in a vicious 40-mile an hour cross-wind on the dusty drome at Whitehorse, straggling its ugliness along the banks of the Lewes River. Most of the thousands of Allied troops and civilians, who are making a major base of this mining town that Service knew, would agree, too. For times have changed since Service worked in the Canadian Bank of Commerce, which still stands on the corner
of Main Street. Whitehorse - named after an Indian chief drowned in the rapids near the town - is a vital cog in the United Nations war machine today, and a constant stream of road and air traffic floods nearby military depots.
"A bunch of the boys were whooping it up
in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music box
was hitting a jag time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game,
sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o'-love,
the lady that's known as Lou."
That was Robert Service's description of a Yukon town, probably Whitehorse, 40 years ago. But there are no solo games these days, no saloons, very few ladies. Inspector Cronkhite, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, bars guns for civilians. There has been only one consignment of liquor in the town since last January, crime is early non-existent and most of the women in town, among thousands of men, are army nurses and some public service stenographers.
TROOPS REPLACE MINERS.
Whitehorse is still a town of wooden shacks and false fronted shops, wooden sidewalks and flat bottomed stern wheelers that lie on the bank for months in winter while the river is frozen solid.
But the rip roaring miners have been replaced by thousands of American and Canadian troops and workmen who are moulding roads and bridges, aerodromes and workshops, on country that was a wilderness before. There is an oil refinery here that makes high octane spirit, motor spirit, and diesel oil from the crude oil that is pumped through four inch pipes from Norman Wells, 600 miles to the north-east. The pipeline runs
over ranges 6000 feet high. The oil is of high quality, and, after special treatment, it still flows at temperatures up to 70 below. Allied Air Forces will refuel here on the way north when the big push against Japan begins, and oil from here will be transported also to bases farther north.
Whitehorse is 900 miles from Dawson Creek, in the south, where the Alaska Highway begins, and 600 miles from its terminal, Fairbanks. Flying over the country between, the only signs of life today are the occasional military convoys on the brown ribbon of road, and sometimes a Greyhound coach taking military personnel through to Alaska. The Yukon Trail is still extant, but it's like the old grey mare, it ain't what it used to be. It is a steel trail today, trodden and flown over by men in olive drab and the grey blue of the Royal Canadian Air Force. It is a dusty, dirty, noisy chasm filled with bulldezers, tractors, jeeps, trucks and transports. Dog sleds and snow shoes are almost things of the past, as far as the fighting forces are concerned.
Yet side by side with all this evidence of a new world that Whitehorse had never heard of are landmarks of the gold rush days, the day» of ‘98, the roaring Yukon
Trail days, the days when men were men and women were scarce. They are still scarce, so scarce that the local Saturday night dance charges a special high price for men without partners - stags, in local parlance. Prices at the dance hall are three dollars stags,
two dollars for couples, and a special concession price of one dollar for stag girls.
Up the hill on the way to the airport are Indian graves, with little wooden houses the Indians build above their graves to permit the spirit to come up to have a look at the world outside. The spirits aren't supposed to leave the locality, however, so the little houses have only windows no doors. The Indians in Whitehorse today are cashing in on the boom, working for the contractors, selling furs at inflated prices, buying motor cars and radios.
STILL A DEAD LAND.
Still working in his law office on Main Street is W. L. Phelps, who came here in '98, and is the Deacon of some of Service's poems. The Bank of Commerce, where
Service was a teller, still stands, and there are many men in the town who remember him. They don't approve of all he wrote, but admit he put the Yukon on the map. Dan McGrew, alas, was never shot, so they say, or certainly not in Whitehorse, while Sam MrGee was not cremated, because he lived in Whitehorse until about five years ago. His original thatched cottage is still in use. In the town, too, is one of the original stage coaches that ran north to Dawson City. Men stride the board walks in trousers tucked in to high laced hob
nailed boots; they still wear heavy lumber jackets and wind-breakers, some still have hair reaching to their shoulders. The twisted, buckled rails of the three-foot gauge railway still writhe up into the hills and down to Skagway, 110 miles south on the Gulf of Alaska. The land is still frozen for six months of the year; you can read the paper at midnight without artificial lighting in any of these towns. It is still a dead land, almost devoid of vegetation, unable to run cows or pigs or sheep in any worthwhile numbers.
But the tough guys eat ice cream and hot cakes with maple syrup in restaurants that are shabby outside but warm and modern within. You can have bacon and eggs for breakfast. steaks and vegetables for lunch, friend chicken and chocolate sundaes. A modern dance band, made up of men from the forces, plays in the dark and smoky dance hall where they rubber stamp the word "paid" on the backs of patrons' hands. Canned milk goes in the coffee, and the town turns out to watch a game of soft hall - a speeded-up baseball - on Sunday afternoons, The railway still hauls the wooden seated "parlor cars" that brought in the miners of ‘98, hut its main freight is war machinery so big that exact full size replicas made of wood are taken through on the freight cars first to make certain they will negotiate the hairpin bends.
The North-west Staging Route and the Alaska Highway are pumping the life blood of a new civilisation into the Arctic, and the townspeople say, half regretfully, that the old days will never return. The Yukon will have some big and busy towns after
the war.
