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In his little green-painted house Hoge likes to slump his square shoulders in a chair and sit with the wife he met in a Lexington, Mo. kindergarten—planning the week ahead. Pretty, brown-eyed Mrs. Hoge knows how to live the frontier life. As a general's lady she still does her cooking and washing. When the general is in town they take a short evening stroll on the board sidewalk with their fox terrier—Hoge puffing a favorite pipe. Nettie Hoge has led frontier life before. In the Philippines her husband built the main road on Bataan. But she has waited behind the lines, as when he won the D.S.C. for driving a bridge across the Meuse under fire in World War I.
When Hoge's party rode and mushed up to Fort Nelson in the winter snow the citizens wondered why he had come. After all, there was nothing to see but a trading post. But Hoge had other ideas. Alaska was a transportation island linked with the U.S. by a moving bridge of ships—ships now needed desperately elsewhere. Hoge knew that Fort Nelson could be one of a string of airports connecting Edmonton to the Aleutians. He knew that with such a string and with a road to supply them, Alaska could be held; knew also that with Jap islands blockading Vladivostok such a route might well be the only way to send adequate help to an attacked Siberia. The Army road would do for that and later the Public Roads Administration would grade and realign the rough highway. Then, after the war, the people would come. The small dirty towns would have a new reason for existence, and out of fabulous Alaska could come minerals by the truckload for the factories of the future.