1945 Yukon Nuggets

The British Yukon Navigation Company

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The British Yukon Navigation Company, a division of the White Pass and Yukon Route, operates busses from Whitehorse to Dawson Creek. The White Pass manages the train, the riverboats to Dawson City and Mayo, and the SS Tutshi out of Carcross. The company also has an air service and a highway freight line. White Pass is also the Standard Oil fuel distributors throughout the Yukon.

Greyhound – Alaska Highway 1944

My first trip on the Alaska Highway was on a Greyhound Bus in September 1944. Then a 2 1/2-year old, I have no memory of it, but I know that my sister Margaret was charged with the task of protecting the bus driver from me. Or so she says.

Our family was heading to the tiny town of Whitehorse, and needed a pass from the American military to make the trip. So much for sovereignty.

A by-product of the Second World War was the world famous Alaska Highway. The American military began construction in April 1942 and by September, with the pioneer road nearly finished, the United States military created “Northwest Service Command.” It had complete authority over all U.S. military operations in B.C., Alberta, the Yukon and Alaska, including the highway

A primitive trail north to Alaska was punched through in nine months, but the job of building an all-weather highway that could cope with real traffic was far from finished. Military and civilian contractors, in a race to fix the road, needed to move workers north in a hurry.

To do this, on June 21, 1943, Western Canadian Greyhound Ltd. entered into a bussing contract with the Northwest Service Command.

Greyhound would carry personnel of the United States military, civilian workers and others employed by the United States and its contractors. The company would receive fifty cents per mile per bus, with a minimum of $80.00 per day guaranteed for each of the twelve, 37-passenger busses it supplied.

In addition, the U.S. Government would provide housing and mess facilities for Greyhound. The company, which was nearly on the brink of collapse a few months earlier, was now back in business.

Greyhound’s Superintendent of Maintenance, Lorne Frizzell, recalled that on the first trip, the road was littered with trucks stuck in ditches, where their drivers had bailed out after losing control.

At one spot, he said there were as many as seven hundred wrecked vehicles in a yard. Passengers on that first trip had to push the busses up slippery hills and chopped grooves in the ice at river crossings.

 

Since the service was primarily designed to transport soldiers and civilian workers from the south, very few regular passengers travelled on this bus route.

 

There were still no roadside lodges. The U.S. military supplied gasoline, siphoned into the tanks with a toggle pump from forty-five gallon drums stashed in some road-side stockpiles.

February and March presented the worst road conditions, as water seeped from the hillsides and covered the surface with a blanket of ice. It was a time to tread lightly and prepare the passengers for pushing.

By 1944, very little work was being done on the road. The Greyhound contract ended and the U.S. army operated the bus service for a few months.

In early 1945, as the war was winding down and the highway was seldom used, the British Yukon Navigation Company (BYN), a White Pass subsidiary, began a twice-weekly bus service.

On August 5, 1965, the White Pass sold the operation to Canadian Coachways.

Today, there are a lot of bus companies operating especially during the tourist season, but as if coming full circle, Greyhound is once again the company that provides regularly scheduled service on the Alaska Highway. I wonder if the driver remembers me?

 

A CKRW Yukon Nugget by Les McLaughlin.