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The Men. Not many soldiers have fewer comforts, less to do on Saturday night, less discipline from above than these bearded, weather-tanned engineers. There is little saluting. A worker accepts a captain's order with an "Okay, Ham." More than 40% of the engineer workers are Negro. As men on a battlefront, these engineers are challenged to fight it through or lose. Against the mountains they work too hard to be restless. There is little talk of women. "But," laughed a colonel, "I'm sorry for the first town they hit when they get away from here."
Out in the bush the only recreation is hunting and fishing—on special rights given them by the Yukon territorial government. Doughboys hunt to vary meals of corned beef, potatoes, lemonade, carrots, preserves and dried eggs, by adding moose and bear steaks, lake trout, spruce partridge, ptarm'gan, grouse, venison. At Swan Lake, for lack of regular tackle a Signal Corps man made a line from telephone wires, hammered a fishing spoon out of a tin can and brought in strings of fat trout over the side of an assault boat. Others knock the heads off the foolish spruce partridge (Yukon chicken) which doze on the lower tree limbs in the summer twilight.
Soldiers near enough to hit the few towns find expensive beer, and little else. In Fort St. John they mill around on the dusty or muddy main street with lumberjacks, trappers and "dirt stiffs" (construction workers), looking over the waitresses and dumpy Indian girls. Sometimes they get a haircut in Joe's tent barbershop, or go to the hospital, which has the only bath and running-water toilets in town. Average Saturday night consumption of 50¢-a-bottle beer is 3,500 bottles. At the Inn in Whitehorse the jampacked soldiers sometimes push the 11 o'clock curfew up to 2 a.m., ending with a mouth-organ duet and fine, boozy soldier harmony. Checks are cashed at the only bank for 460 miles around—the same one in which Poetaster Robert Service clerked in the gold-rush days.
The Boss. In a 26-foot square house at Whitehorse lives the boss of the road, quiet, firm William Morris Hoge, now a brigadier general. At 48 he has been engineering 26 years for the Army. But his biggest job began the day he stepped from the train at Dawson Creek on to the crunchy snow to start surveying the route. His was the big worry when scores of cats were bogged down in the slush, and the rains seemed never to stop. Impatient, Hoge steamboated up and down the road in Bush Pilot Les Cook's seaplane, watched the men slogging it through. He said little, eyeing the tremendous job, but every mucker and cat driver knew the general was on the job. "A tough guy, but square," they said. "A regular guy too. He sure likes that Yukon chicken."