Whitehorse, the legendary town of the Klondike gold rush, boomed again in 1942. During that year twenty thousand military and civilian workers, tasked to build the Alaska Highway, invaded and surrounded the small town. The ‘tote road stampede’ brought more money to Whitehorse than the Gold Rush.
Northern Sector Commander, General Hoge, headquartered in Whitehorse. Like any major command, Hoge’s teemed with staff and support units. In addition, the civilians of the Public Road Administration and their contractors occupied every available vacant building or lot.
The little city offered limited space, so carpenters swarmed the outskirts, building work camps, warehouses, barracks, mess halls and offices. With only three hotels and two restaurants, Whitehorse offered little in the way of public services – even bathrooms.
Bearded and booted civilians from the PRA and clean shaven soldiers jammed the Whitehorse Inn Café. The menu offered whatever you wanted – as long as it was steak. If you couldn’t afford steak, the Whitehorse Grill made a mean hamburger. Men stood in line for everything – to mail a letter, to buy a stamp, to buy movie tickets. The longest line of all ended at the liquor store.
Invariably forced to share a tiny room, men routinely fell asleep with one roommate and woke up with another. Often a sleeping bag in the lobby was all the hotel could offer. Civilian construction camps scattered about the area offered more permanent if no more luxurious accommodations. Residents of Whitehorse were used to shortages. There was, for example, no milk. The Yukon climate didn’t support green pastures and there were no telephones. Why would you need a telephone went you could walk down the street and talk to a person.
More demanding, the newcomers, expected groceries, hardware and dry goods – and telephones to be readily available. Those expectations could only be met by the Quartermaster Corps. The Quartermaster took up a lot of precious space in and around Whitehorse.
Whitehorse offered nothing in the way of recreation facilities. A ball park sprouted in the middle of town, but equipment, vehicles and machinery surrounded it. The impact of the highway builders could be striking. Interviewed many years after the fact, Lt. Mortimer Squires recalled watching a D8 bulldozer tow a plane down the middle of Main Street.
