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As the snow slopped off the warming land, survey parties hacked the bush. Army photo planes roared overhead. Soon the first few miles were laid out and the "cat company" bumbled on grinding treads up the road to Charlie's Lake, six miles from Fort St. John, and jumped off into the wilderness. The "cats" clawed at the soft soil, bogged down, sank almost to the driver's seats in the black muck. The engineers sweated and swore, dug out the cats, clawed on. Every day it rained. Every day they sweated and swore.
Gradually, steadily, doggedly, the snorting cats-drove the forest back. Woodsmen logged the spruce, pine and aspen for corduroy roads over the bogs. "Mister, I thought we'd never get through those first 15 miles. We'd get so damn tired we could hardly drag home, but every afternoon when we got to the store at Charlie's Lake, the lady there'd have a cake for us. Boy, those cakes were good."
When the rain retreated, there was the muskeg—spongy, orange-black decayed vegetation covering mudpits. Sometimes the road was detoured. Sometimes the corduroy planks were bridged across to support the traffic. On soldiers' pay (plus 20% for foreign duty) the men worked in two ten-hour shifts seven days a week. With no time to wait for steel or concrete, they built wood culverts, pushed ahead. Always they moved on.
The days got longer, the weather warmer. Now came the black flies, horse flies, deer flies, the tiny "no-see-ums" that announce themselves only by a sting, and the mosquitoes. ("Why, over at Watson Lake, a mosquito landed on the airport and they put 85 gallons of gas into it before they realized it wasn't a bomber.") The insects made sweating, swollen hands look like grey fur. The engineers slapped and cursed till they got head nets and gloves.
Captain Hampton Green's bog-busters chewed switchbacks down a steep hillside of ice-hard dirt in a day and a half, ferried a river, scratched up the other side. Right on their heels, Lieut. Colonel Heath Twichell set his Negro engineers to bridging the tumbling water, singing as they sawed. Wading waist deep in the fast icy stream, they put the bridge across in 36 hours, sang hymns at a Sunday service down by the riverside after the job was done.
Far to the north engineers, with equipment from the Alaska coast, hit troubles of their own. The cats, seeking a roadbed, tore off the top moss, exposed sheer blue ice. Sun-melted ice sucked down the roadway. The engineers scraped the moss back, over the ice, put a corduroy planking on top and let nature freeze a solid roadbed. Pushing out of Whitehorse and Slana, one group paused briefly one afternoon on the shore of Kluane Lake at the foot of 19,000-foot peaks. Beside the log cabin of Trapper Hayden and his half-breed Indian wife the Engineer band played. A young private rose and sang the marching song of the road: Squaws along the Yukon Are Good Enough for Me.