The Army occupies 212 U.S. hotels, a total of 30,000-odd rooms, 2% of all American hotel rooms. Its biggest hotel patronage is coastal: 150 hotels at Miami Beach, 29 at Atlantic City. Its biggest single concentration: in Chicago's 3,000-room Stevens (world's biggest hotel). More will be occupied.
Northwest Passage
"This is the Law of the Yukon, that only the Strong shall thrive; That surely the Weak shall perish, and only the Fit survive." —Robert W. Service.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had one of the biggest and toughest jobs last week since they built the Panama Canal. They were both surviving and thriving on it. There was no fanfare. Almost no outsiders had penetrated the vast, still, endless wilderness where the engineers are wrenching and hacking a great military road 1,500 miles from Fort St. John, B.C. to mid-Alaska.
This was a job for Paul Bunyan; to wrest an all-weather road from the jealous Northland between early spring and autumn; to span the fierce, death-cold rushing rivers, the black custard quagmires; to cut switchbacks across the Great Divide, to make the way between the Arctic and the U.S. for a highway which some day may be as common as the Boston Post Road.
In February the land was deep in snow. At the railhead three Americans swung off the twice-weekly train 500 miles up from Edmonton. They paused for hot coffee in one of the Chinese restaurants and headed north. They were Fred Capes, construction expert for the Public Roads Administration, and Colonels William Hoge and R.D. Ingalls. Jamming down fur caps, they slogged through snow drifts, checking grades, rivers, elevations. Rumors spread by the "moccasin vine" that at last the Americans were going to build the Alaska highway.
The Job. Then came the first Engineer troops. Their job was to drag supplies and equipment up the line to road depots before the thaw. On March 9, they tumbled off the train at dingy Dawson Creek station, staked stiff canvas tents under the northern lights. "Jeez, it was so cold," a Bronx private remarked, "that every time we had hot stew for chow, the goddam stuff froze before we could eat." Behind the troops came trucks, road machinery, supplies, gas, diesel fuel and planks from torn-down CCC camps.
Within a month the ice would break, the mighty Peace River, the Sikanni Chief, the Buckinghorse, the Fort Nelson would be crackling torrents. There were never enough trucks to move up the stuff. Farmers, garagemen, merchants, traders piled in with their own vehicles. All the short days and long nights the trucks mired down in slush, were dug out, pushed on.
In April the effort seemed not enough. A sudden thaw set the river ice groaning and cracking like pistol shots. Trucks crossed only in the middle hours of the night. Came a late hard freeze and the last truck was over. Weary drivers looked at the big Peace River and grunted: "Go ahead and bust wide open, you old bastard, we've licked you." The stuff to build the road was through to Fort St. John, to Fort Nelson. But the road was still to be built.