Month: March 2023

The Beginning of Haines Junction

The highway and bridge construction site known as Camp Mile 108 that was established in 1943 beside the Dezadeash River at the junction of the Alaska Highway and Haines Road would gradually evolve to a permanent highway maintenance camp and ultimately a community.  This evolution, however, was not assured until July 1946 when restrictions placed on development along the Alaska Highway were lifted and an agreement was made between Canada and the US to maintain the Haines Road.  It would take a few more years after that for the Canadian government to implement its process to get land into the hands of people wanting to establish businesses and residences at the site.

Before the Second World War and the building of the Alaska and Haines Highways, the Canadian and American governments were already interested in setting aside the southwest Yukon and an adjacent area in Alaska for preservation and recreation.  For its part in this vision, the Canadian government set aside 10,160 square miles adjacent to the two highways, land that now constitutes Kluane National Park and the Kluane Game Sanctuary. 

In 1942 the Canadian government also placed a crown land reserve of one mile on either side of the Alaska Highway that prohibited any land development for townsites, private enterprises, and homesteading until at least after the end of the war.  People were therefore not able to stake land at the highway junction immediately after the highways were completed, but had to wait for the prohibition to be lifted.  This did not appear to apply to government functions, such as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Yukon Forest Service, and an Experimental Farm that was established near Haines Junction.  

For the first couple of years after the highway construction, the maintenance camp was all that was located at the highway junction.  After that other developments started to arrive, beginning with government services and followed by private enterprises, both commercial and residential.  This was the beginning of the community to be known first as Mile 1016 and then as Haines Junction, a place that became a home to people over the past 80 years.

The Junction at Mile 1016 (1944)

The northern wilderness wartime road project that had started out as the ‘pioneer road’ in March 1942 was officially named the Alaska Highway on July 19, 1943. It was a much different road by the end of 1943, and the two weeks needed to travel from Dawson Creek to Whitehorse a year previously was reduced to a few days.  An accurate mileage measurement was made along the highway from Mile 0 at Dawson Creek, BC to its end at Mile 1422 at Delta Junction, Alaska, and by March 1944 white mileposts had been placed at every mile along the length of the highway. 

In the Haines Junction area, the abandonment of the Bear Creek Cut-off route in mid-1943 had determined that the junction of the Alaska Highway and Haines Road would be where it is today.  The two highways and the remnant pioneer road (now called the Marshall Creek Road) formed a simple crossroad at the time, but the pioneer road arm is now somewhat smaller. 

From this intersection the nearest milepost was 1016, placed a little over a quarter-mile to the north in front of where Our Lady of the Way, the iconic Catholic Church made from a US Army quonset hut, would be located a decade later.  The construction camp at Mile 108 of the pioneer road was now a permanent maintenance camp at Mile 1016 of the Alaska Highway.

The Mile 1016 Army Camp (1943 – 1946)

By the end of 1943 the Alaska Highway and Haines Road were deemed to be completed, although they would require further construction and reconstruction to bring them to a final highway standard.  The end of the initial construction meant a transition to highway maintenance, which remained an American responsibility.  The agreement with Canada stated that the US would maintain the highway for the duration of the war and six months afterwards (this transfer date turned out to be April 1, 1946).

Most of the camps that had been built for the construction of the Alaska Highway transitioned to maintenance camps, with a reduction in personnel and some of the construction equipment moved out.   American firms were first contracted to do the maintenance work under the supervision of the US Army and using Army equipment. This function was later assumed by the Canadian Army, so this history resulted in many of the camps being referred to as ‘Army camps’.  At the future site of Haines Junction, the Alaska Highway Maintenance Camp at Milepost 1016 was locally referred to as the ‘Army camp’ for many years.

The wooden buildings shown in Glen Chapman’s 1943 photo below of Camp 108 appear to be the same buildings that are in a 1945 photo, also shown below, and they remained in use for many years after that.  The 1945 photo is labelled as ‘Mile 108’, indicating that this name still had some carry-over into the time that it was becoming more commonly known as Mile 1016. 

The typical construction camp buildings consisted of unpartitioned dormitory-style barracks, a combination kitchen and eating hall, an office building, a field shop (garage), a storage warehouse, a bathhouse, and a meat storage facility.  The buildings in the 1945 photo above remained as the permanent camp and can be matched up with those shown below in a preliminary survey field book from July 1949.  The two buildings cut off at the left edge of the photo are the long (121 feet) living quarters shown on the sketch. 

Twenty feet seems to have been a standard width for many buildings, perhaps sized to what the roof trusses could handle without requiring internal support.  A report in September 1944 showed that the Mile 1016 camp buildings had wiring and plumbing, stove oil space heaters, and water piped in from the river, but there was no phone service at the camp.

The configuration of buildings in the above sketch can be seen in an air photo from the previous year of 1948.  This air photo below shows the location of the Mile 1016 camp (formerly Camp 108) in relation to the Alaska Highway, Haines Road, pioneer road, and the Dezadeash River.

A March 1944 inspection of camp buildings along the highway described them to be “of a quite temporary nature”, perhaps built in a hurry with no thought of permanency.  However, in the case of Mile 1016 they ended up being used for about 15 more years.  This ‘temporary nature’ may be why a teacher living in one of the barracks buildings in the mid-1950s said that “with the freezing and thawing of the ground, the partitions would shift, leaving a space at the roof or floor”.  Charlie Eikland Sr., who lived in Haines Junction from 1949 to 1955 and sometimes cut firewood with his father Pete, said that many cords were hauled to the Army camp because the oil space heaters in the buildings could not keep up in the colder weather.

The Alaska Highway maintenance camps were on average about 40 miles apart with 11 employees.  Every second camp was a ‘hotel camp’ that provided room and meal services and a fuel dispensing facility to authorized travellers (at this time the highway was not yet open to the travelling public from the ‘outside’).  These camps had on average another eight employees for the accommodation and fuel service. Mile 1016 was a hotel camp, but one of the smaller ones, and in September 1944 it had a total of 16 people, comprised of 11 men, three women, and two boys aged nine and six.

By early 1944 the US Army had developed a plan for a smooth transition of the maintenance program to the Canadian government.  The plan had two primary personnel elements: recruiting Canadian workers to replace the American contractor employees to avoid a wholesale turnover in personnel; and establishing a stable and permanent workforce by encouraging and assisting married men with families to live at the camps. 

It was believed that remodeling the existing camp buildings and furnishing them to accommodate families would more than offset the expense incurred in personnel turnover. At Mile 1016, the barracks were partitioned off for living quarters and furnished, while other spaces served different purposes, including a school in 1949 that served the community for most of a decade.

At Mile 1016 on August 31, 1945, there were four families with a total of six children, four of whom were school-aged.  A school service was not provided there, but it was at larger camps such as Destruction Bay, which had 16 school-aged children.

The war officially ended on September 2, 1945, and on April 1, 1946 the control and maintenance of the Canadian portions of the Alaska Highway and Haines Road was transferred to the Canadian Army.  For the most part the maintenance camps were by then staffed with Canadian personnel and the transition was relatively seamless.

The Mile 1016 Army camp carried on its highway maintenance function for many more years.  The first foreman after the transfer of the highway to the Canadian Army was Al Bock and there were six equipment operators working under him.  From 1947 to 1952 the foreman was Ray Russell, who had his wife and three children living at the camp with him.

The first Haines Junction school opened in 1949 in one of the barracks buildings, as shown below in a 1950 survey plan.  At first it was a one-room school, with Alene Darnall as the first teacher.  She boarded in a hotel room at John and Sally Backe’s Haines Junction Inn until a section of the school building was renovated for teachers’ accommodations.  This created a two-room school, with grades 1-4 in one end and grades 5-8 in the other and the teacher accommodations in the middle.

Over the years the Army camp in its original location served more than just a highway maintenance role .   In addition to the first school space, it provided the first recreational facilities as the town started to develop, including a skating rink, curling rink, and a canteen and room for showing movies.  The camp was part of the community center for many years until it was relocated across the highway in 1960.  

Haines Junction Begins – Government Developments and Area Activities (1945-1950s)

There is no definitive moment in time when the name Mile 1016 changed to Haines Junction.  Previously, ‘Haines Road Junction’ and ‘Haines Cut-off Junction’ were commonly used, but ‘Haines Junction’ seemed to start standing on its own in the late summer of 1945.  However, it was used interchangeably with ‘Mile 1016’ for many years after that. 

Following the establishment of the Army camp in 1943, the next known developments in the Haines Junction townsite were governmental ones.  The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) set up a station in 1945 on the southwest corner of the highway junction.  By 1950 they had a 20’x40’ building on the site, with the back part of it possibly serving as quarters for the member(s), and a 22’x49’ garage.

Betty Karman, an early and long-time resident of Haines Junction, said that the RCMP first had a metal building called a quonset hut as an office.  This would have been a US Army building that was moved to the site, and according to Betty it is now located behind the Source Motors garage on the Alaska Highway a mile west of Haines Junction.

A parcel of land on the Alaska Highway that was applied for in 1946 was described as being “directly across the highway from the present RCMP Checking Station”.  This is indicative of the role of the police in monitoring traffic on the Alaska Highway during the periods it was closed to public travel and permits were required.  There is also information indicating that the RCMP here issued permits for travel on the Haines Road in the later 1940s.

The first police officers were Corporal Russel (‘Rusty’) Martin and Constables Raymond Johnson and Joseph Romain.  They all started in 1945, with the first two staying until January 1949 and the third is uncertain.  Cpl. Martin was to have a somewhat deeper connection to the community, including a second posting.

In July 1949 Constable Bertram Arthur (“Art”) Deer was posted to Haines Junction and took a number of rare photos of the community in its infancy and of the area while on his patrols on the Alaska Highway.  These photos are contributions to the area’s historical record and some have been provided by his son Peter for this article.  Cst. Deer served in Haines Junction until being transferred to Watson Lake in 1951, and went on to become an accomplished photographer and instructor in photography.

Sometime in the latter 1940s, before the summer of 1949, the Yukon Forest Service also established a presence at Haines Junction in the same area as the RCMP.  At first there was a 20’x24’ patrol cabin and a small garage, but a larger house was built a few years later, with Joe Langevin becoming the first Forestry official to be stationed there.

A Government of Canada project that was exempted from the 1942 one-mile non-development reserve on either side of the Alaska Highway was the 800-acre Dominion Experimental Farm at mile 1019, three miles northwest of Haines Junction.   It had been identified in 1943 as a site for expanding the northern agricultural knowledge base, with the thought that the Yukon might be able to feed itself. 

In the summer of 1944 employees arrived to construct buildings and clear land, and a number of local people were also hired to work on the farm, some of them living and working there for many years.  The Experimental Farm became an important part of the Haines Junction community until its closure in 1970. 

There were other activities around Haines Junction, one of them a couple of miles to the north that is familiar to this area almost 80 years later.  A March 1944 highway inspection trip reported passing 21 trucks between Whitehorse and Kluane Lake, and 11 of them were hauling firewood to Whitehorse from “near the Haines Junction”.  This was fire-killed wood from a forest fire that went through the Haines Junction area in 1938, according to late long-time resident Ed Karman.  Charlie Eikland Sr. said that he sometimes worked with his father cutting wood near the airport for a man named Percy Thompson, who hauled a lot of wood to Whitehorse in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  The area it was harvested from is shown in a 1964 air photo below, where there is a multitude of what were undoubtedly woodcutting roads.

A short distance south from the woodcutting area, across the highway from the present Haines Junction landfill, is an old sawmill site where lumber was cut from the burned wood.  It was owned and operated by Mickey Blackmore, who advertised in 1946 that he was milling three-sided dry logs at Bear Creek (Mile 1022).  Either before or after this he had the mill set up at the site north of Mile 1016 (see location on air photo above).  Charlie Eikland Sr. said that his family lived in a shack at the sawmill site in 1949, but the mill was gone by then.

In July 1946 a 160-acre homestead 2½ miles east of Haines Junction along the pioneer road was staked by Harvey Brooks under the Veterans Land Act.  He established a small farm there and later developed another piece of land as a potato field about a mile west of Haines Junction along the Alaska Highway.   He sold hay and vegetables from these properties to Haines Junction residents and others for many years.

Land Staking and the 1949 & 1950 Land Surveys (1946 – 1950)

Interest in acquiring land at Haines Junction began in the summer of 1946 when the restrictions on development along the Alaska Highway were about to be lifted.  Six land parcels for business and residential purposes were staked out on the ground in the area of the highway junction that year, followed over the next three years by the staking of an additional 14 parcels for a variety of sizes, ranging from one acre to 160-acre homesteads.  Of these 20 total parcels staked, only eight amounted to anything and four of them were to cover existing developments, including the Army camp.

After taking over control and maintenance of the Alaska Highway on April 1, 1946, the Canadian government lifted the prohibition on land development along the highway two months later so that private enterprise would invest in establishment of facilities.  However, the highway was still closed to unauthorized public travel, so it was a Catch-22 situation.  Part of the reasoning for restricting travel was the scarce accommodation and repair services in place to look after the safety and well-being of travellers, but entrepreneurs were reluctant to establish these services with few potential customers. 

At Haines Junction, there had been an additional uncertainty that would further hinder land acquisition and development.  This was to do with the future of the Haines Road because of ambivalence by both the American and Canadian governments about maintaining it.  In August 1944, the US Army announced that it was abandoning its interest in the road, and as late as January 1947 the Canadian government was waffling about keeping the road open at all. 

These positions were not sustained and the road continued to open every summer, at first only for relatively short periods, and it was not until 1963 that it became a year-round highway.  However, the uncertainty during those first few years kept the Yukon land management process from effectively dealing with the demand for land.  In the meantime a few land applicants forged ahead with their developments, despite having no tenure to the land nor certainty about how much business might come their way.

In January 1947 a government land official stated that “development at this site is entirely dependent upon whether or not the Haines Road will be maintained and operated.  There would appear to be every likelihood that the Canadian government will not maintain [it] … even during the summer months”.  He went on to say that without the Haines Road, Mile 1016 would be just another spot along the Alaska Highway.

Continued internal discussion led to the determination that as an interim measure, applicants could be granted land of appropriate sizes for their needs on a ‘permission to occupy’ basis, but not to purchase.  The government’s hesitancy to release land due to the uncertainty about the Haines Road continued into 1948, when in January it stated that “the Department … is not at present favorably inclined towards a subdivision of land adjacent to Mile 1016, Haines Road junction”.

It was not until the end of 1948 that the Canadian government finally came to the conclusion that “in view of the interest displayed in the acquisition of lands … it will be advisable to have the lots properly laid out by a surveyor as a subdivision”.  It was stated that this survey would be included in the 1949 Yukon survey program, which would have come as the second piece of good news that year to the business hopefuls.  On February 25, 1948 the Canadian Army had been ordered “to tear down the huge gate … at Blueberry [in BC at Mile 100 of the Alaska Highway] so traffic may flow freely”.

The 1949 survey was intended to produce a subdivision of legally surveyed lots, but only a preliminary survey was undertaken.  A surveyor from Ottawa spent 10 days with a crew in July 1949 measuring and mapping the relative locations of all the land applicants’ stakes and recording the data written on them.  This data included the name, date of staking, distance and direction to the next stakes, and proposed purpose for the property. 

The surveyor and his crew returned in September and October of the following year to lay out a townsite of 13 blocks containing 258 lots, the vast majority of them 50’x100’ in size.  He also surveyed out two large lots totalling 11.5 acres that covered the Army camp area beside the Dezadeash River. 

Both the 1949 preliminary survey and the 1950 final survey produced fieldbooks that are very valuable for documenting the early history of developments at Haines Junction.  They contain information about the locations, sizes and ownership of the buildings that were in place by the fall of 1950. 

The small (50’x100’) Haines Junction lots, though surveyed in the fall of 1950, did not become available for sale to individuals or businesses until 1952, six years after the staking of land began.  By that time, the government had a list of 18 land applications, some of them from people who had already put up buildings, and some by people who had since left the area.  The government’s direction was that “all the above applications should be resubmitted to conform to the approved and confirmed plan of survey”. 

When the lot sale finally happened, the applicants who had come in the latter 1940s to stake land and erect buildings were rewarded for their risk and faith that the community held a future for them and their families.  Three of the entrepreneurs proved this correct and were successful, but one was not, and another who started out at the junction relocated after a year to Canyon Creek to build a business there. 

A Haines Junction voters list for the 1949 federal election provides information about the early residents of the community, at least those eligible to vote.  There are 42 names on the list, but the 11 married couples and another known married man whose wife is not included would have added a number of children to the population figure. 

The list shows 12 names that are associated with the highway maintenance operation and up to seven more that may also be.  There are three businessmen, three Experimental Farm employees, two placer miners, two RCMP members, and others such as students and a farmer.  There is no employment shown for the women, but three were known to be involved in businesses, two of them alongside their husbands and one a widow. 

Building a Community – the First Private Developments (1946-1950)

The following sections profile the first businesses along with the first private residences at Haines Junction.  After the town lots were released for sale, the community started to grow with gradually more residential, commercial and institutional developments.

O’Harra Bus Lines

The first known private entity to use, stake and apply for land at the junction of the highways was the Alaska-based O’Harra Bus Lines, owned by Kenneth O’Harra.  On May 6, 1946 the company wrote to the Canadian government that for the bus service it had been running between Whitehorse and Fairbanks since August 1945, it wanted to establish “proper overnight stopping places” along the highway.  One of these locations was at the junction of the Alaska Highway and Haines Road, where three to five acres of land on the northwest corner of the highway intersection across from the RCMP station were requested to establish facilities for accommodation, food, and bus maintenance.

On June 20, 1946, land was staked by O’Harra employee Harvey Perrin for a “bus depot and maintenance camp” at this location, but he staked a much larger parcel of 12.4 acres.  Perrin and his wife Lillian were living in tents on this land and were serving lunch to the O’Harra bus passengers.

On the Labor Day weekend, O’Harra initiated a weekly Haines Road service with an inaugural trip to Haines, and on September 12 extended it to Juneau by connecting with a boat service from Haines.  O’Harra made its last trip in mid-October before the Haines Road was closed for the season, and it turned out to be the company’s final trip on that road.

The name ‘Kuskanaw’ began to appear in connection with O’Harra Bus Lines’ business at Haines Junction.  A tariff sheet produced by the company for its Haines Road operation showed ‘Kuskanaw’as its name for Haines Junction.  It also appeared on a map in a New York newspaper article showing the bus lines’ routes in Alaska and the Yukon.  The Kuskanaw name appears to derive from a word in the Koyukon language of western Alaska that means ‘community dance hall’. 

After submitting its application for land, O’Harra was advised that it could not erect permanent buildings at the site, but by late October it had some in place that the government accepted as “temporary occupancy” because they were on skids.  They were 28’x52’ and 24’x28’ in size, built of logs that Kenneth O’Harra said he helped to cut himself, and were evidently put together into a U-shape at some point.  They appear to have been milled on three sides, so it is probable they were produced by Mickey Blackmore’s sawmill north of town. 

The building was called Kuskanaw Lodge, and in a government report of early January 1947 it was referred to as a “small hotel”.  By March it was reported that meals were obtainable there, but no accommodations were being offered until a regular bus service on the Haines Road was established.  At some point an 11,000-gallon fuel tank was installed on the property, presumably underground as it does not appear in photos of the site.

Along with the name Kuskanaw for his lodge, Kenneth O’Harra’s tariff sheet and the map in the New York newspaper showing Haines Junction as Kuskanaw give the impression that he hoped to influence the naming of the tiny place that still had no firm name in 1946.  The Kuskanaw name did not last because neither did his company, but one can wonder what might have happened had he established a foothold and become an economic player early in Haines Junction’s history.

O’Harra’s land file in the national archives indicates that communication with the government ceased for almost all of 1947 and into 1948.  The company had continued its Whitehorse-Fairbanks bus service, but its last advertisement in the Whitehorse Star was in late August 1947, and a year later the company filed for bankruptcy. 

Kenneth O’Harra acted as receiver for his company and had not surrendered his holdings at Haines Junction, at least in his mind.  In April 1949 he wrote to the magistrate in Whitehorse to express his dismay upon learning that “action had been taken to dispose of the O’Harra Bus Lines property known as Kuskanaw Lodge”.  The details of this are not known, and the last mention of O’Harra in the Yukon was in March 1950, when he was in Whitehorse to clear up aspects of his bus operation and to withdraw his land application at Haines Junction. 

John and Sally Backe

A few of the people who staked and applied for land at Haines Junction followed through on building and operating businesses in the new community.  The first were John and Sally Backe, who had immigrated to Canada in the 1920s from Norway and Russia, respectively.  John came to placer mine in the Mayo area in the 1930s before marrying Sally Bergen in Vancouver and bringing her to the Yukon in March 1942.  After a couple of years they moved from Mayo to Whitehorse and in 1946, with their two young daughters Rosemary and Sally Jr. in tow, they set their sights on an opportunity at Haines Junction.

According to Backe family lore, John and Sally entered into an arrangement with O’Harra Bus Lines to operate a fuel station and rest stop for the bus passengers.  John was said to have conducted business on conversations and handshakes, and it is believed that this was a ‘grubstake’ arrangement made with O’Harra to develop and operate its facility.  

The Backes set up a hard-walled tent in the summer of 1946 to live in while they helped to build the Kuskanaw Lodge.  John also pumped fuel and repaired tires while Sally sold canned goods and made meals.   A newspaper article indicates the Backe family may have moved back into Whitehorse for that first winter or part of it.

A list of services along the Alaska Highway put out in March 1947 showed that Haines Junction had a store, meals, and gas and oil, but no beds.  This would have been the Kuskanaw service, being provided by this time by John and Sally Backe because O’Harra had no need of this facility for its Whitehorse-Fairbanks service.  It had been planned as accommodation for a bus service to Haines and Juneau that was not destined to happen.

The Kuskanaw building became the Backe family’s home for a year or two while they were building a new place for themselves across the highway, where in April 1947 John had staked an acre and a half parcel for a “gas filling station and auto camp”.  A spring 1948 photo shows army buildings on this property being put together to form what would become the Haines Junction Inn.  The photo indicates that the Haines Junction Inn would not have been ready in time to conduct business during that first summer that the Alaska Highway was opened to tourist traffic.

A government report of April 1, 1948 showed the available tourist services at Mile 1016 as being a restaurant and gas and oil, which the Backes would have still been providing at the Kuskanaw site.  The next year, on March 1, 1949, a government report listed a restaurant, a store, gas and oil, vehicle repairs, and 26 beds for accommodations in Haines Junction, most of which would have been provided by the Backes at their new Inn.

The July 1949 preliminary land survey shows their development to be a 48’x70’ hotel and store building, along with two 20’x20’ garages in the back and three small ‘tourist cabins’.  By the following year (1950), when the area was legally surveyed into lots, the Haines Junction Inn was shown to consist of hotel, café, and tavern sections.

In June 1949, with O’Harra Bus Lines having gone bankrupt, Sally Backe staked an acre and a half of the O’Harra land for a “roadhouse”.  The staked land included the Kuskanaw building, which is understood to have been turned over to John and Sally as wage compensation for their role in developing and operating the O’Harra business there.   When they moved into their new Inn across the highway, they leased out the Kuskanaw building to Bill and Frances Theriault to operate as a store.  The proposed roadhouse on the property Sally staked never happened, but in later years she and John operated a gas station and garage on it.

John and Sally Backe did not wait for things to be done for them to advance their business.  In addition to investing time, energy, and money into buildings on land that they did not yet have tenure for, John installed services for the business that also benefitted his neighbors.  One was the purchase of two large generators for the Inn, and the excess power was provided to the nearby private residents. 

In 1955 John along with Ed Karman, who operated the neighboring Wayside Garage, undertook to dig a sewer line of more than half a kilometer from their businesses to a lagoon of sorts constructed near a wetland area beside the Dezadeash River.  This was done with the assistance of an engineer who was working on the Haines-Fairbanks pipeline that was being built through the area.  The installation of a private sewer line like this could obviously not happen now, but at the time it served the businesses as well as a number of residences along the route that were able to connect into it.

John and Sally Backe were true entrepreneurs, risking a move from the security of Whitehorse to a tiny spot on the Alaska Highway with an uncertain future.  After having two more children, John Jr. and Margaret, when they were living in Haines Junction, John and Sally remained in the community running their businesses for almost all the rest of their lives.  Their children continued the enterprise for varying lengths of time for years afterwards.

John died suddenly in Vancouver in 1970 and Sally died in Whitehorse in 1977.  Their many community contributions were honored by the naming of Backe Glacier on the east side of Mt. Wood in the St. Elias Mountains, Backe Street in Haines Junction, and the John Backe curling rink in Haines Junction that was built on land he and Sally donated to the town for recreational purposes.

Harvey and Lillian Perrin

Employment on the Alaska Highway brought Harvard (‘Harvey’) Perrin and his wife Lillian north in 1943, and in 1944 twin sons were born to them.  At some point they came to the Mile 1016 highway maintenance camp, where Harvey may have been a mechanic.  In June 1946 as previously noted, he was an employee of O’Harra Bus Lines, staking the 12.4-acre parcel of land for the company and, along with Lillian, providing meals to the bus passengers. 

In September of that year they both staked two 160-acre homesteads to the west of the O’Harra site, but did not follow through with land applications.  In the end they did not develop anything more than a tent restaurant in Haines Junction, but must be regarded as early entrepreneurs in the area. .

Lillian was said to be running the restaurant in a large army tent on the western edge of Haines Junction in 1945 and perhaps even 1944, and a story recorded in 1991 establishes that she also did this in the winter of 1946-47.  The story was told to the MacBride Museum in Whitehorse by Bonnie Piper, who was staying alone at Mackintosh Lodge while Dorothy Mackintosh was away.  The weather had turned very cold, and when it got to -58°C she decided she had to leave, and walked with her dog the six miles to Haines Junction.  She stopped at a restaurant in a tent with wooden walls and floor that was being run by Lillian Perrin, where on fancy English china Bonnie was served the best restaurant meal she had ever eaten. 

Lillian’s tent restaurant business came to an end in 1947 when she and Harvey and their young sons moved 20 miles east to establish the Canyon Creek Lodge.  Tragically, Lillian was killed on Christmas Eve 1955 on her way home from Whitehorse when her car hit a horse near the Takhini River.  In 1958 Harvey Perrin sold the lodge to Bob and Emma MacKinnon and lived the rest of his life in Whitehorse, passing away in 1987.

Bill and Bertha Scott

Bill and Bertha Scott were living in Haines Junction by 1945, where Bill was a mechanic at the highway maintenance camp. On April 7, the same day that John Backe staked his land, Bill Scott staked one acre next to him, near the northeast corner of the highway junction.  On August 8, he submitted an application for ‘Permission to Occupy’ the land for the purpose of erecting a garage.

More than a year later, while the government was pondering what to do with such applications, an inspection of the land Scott had staked was carried out on September 16, 1948.  The land inspector noted that it had no timber because it had been cleared by highway workers for a ball park, and that a small store had been erected and a rough lumber building moved onto the area. 

A month and a half later the land supervisor in Whitehorse stated that Scott’s application for Permission to Occupy would be recommended pending a survey of a subdivision there.  Bill Scott was already occupying without permission, so it appears that like others, he was not going to let the bureaucratic process hold him up.  When the preliminary survey of the Haines Junction townsite was conducted in July 1949, Scott had a 20’x41’ garage erected on the property.  By the following fall of 1950 he had a 19’x32’ house built, a 14’x16’ addition on the garage, and two small sheds.

Bill and Bertha Scott sold their garage and house to Ed and Betty Karman and moved to Edmonton.  In May 1953 he wrote to the government that he wished to withdraw the land application he had made in August 1947.  Further information in his land file states that he had sold his rights to the land to William Theriault and Edward Karman, both of whom went on to own the surveyed lots that covered their respective developments. 

Ed Karman operated the Scotts’ Wayside garage until it burned down in 1954, but he and Betty remained to spend the rest of their lives at Haines Junction and area.  Karman Street in Haines Junction is named in their honor.

Bill and Frances Theriault

Bill and Frances Theriault were in Haines Junction by at least the summer of 1949, when they were operating the general store in the Kuskanaw building under an arrangement with John and Sally Backe.  At Christmas of 1949, the store caught fire and Bill and Frances had to carry their two young sons across the highway to the Backes’ lodge.  There was no fire department, so the available people in town formed a bucket brigade, but the store burned down and the Theriault family had to stay for a time with the Backes. 

By June 1950 Bill and Frances had a new 20’x48’store building in place next door to Bill Scott’s garage, on the northeast corner of the highway junction on land that Scott had staked.  The Theriaults had enlisted the help of Bun Beloud, who had a highway lodge at Dezadeash Lake on the Haines Road, to haul in old army buildings to create the store.    

The Theriaults named their business the Fairdale Store and it included a post office, with Frances becoming Haines Junction’s first postmaster in July 1950, and living quarters in the back. The Theriaults operated the store for another eight years before selling it in 1958 to Al and Gloria Allison and moving to Vancouver Island.

The Fairdale Store, the Scotts’ house and garage, and a bit of the Backes’ lodge were captured in June 1950 photographs taken by RCMP Cst. Art Deer when he was stationed at Haines Junction.  The photos of a group of people from Juneau at the highway intersection provide a rare view of some of these early business-related buildings that had been erected or placed there within the previous two years.  The details of these photos are provided in the captions.

Rusty and Genevieve Martin

Royal Canadian Mounted Police members are generally transient in small communities, but Cpl. Rusty Martin seemed to have a little more attachment to Haines Junction.  He was posted to the community in 1945, where in 1947 he married Genevieve Kenny.  By the summer of 1949 they had put up a 25’x32’ house and 12’x14’ garage beside the Haines Road, about 600 feet south of the highway intersection.

A small building known as the ‘Rusty Martin cabin’, which was likely his garage, was moved next to the Fairdale Store sometime by 1956.  There it was used and looked after by all the store owners over the years, gradually becoming an unofficial heritage building until the Village of Haines Junction took over the property and removed it.  Martin Street in Haines Junction is named for Rusty Martin. 

Dave and Hazel Hume

Dave Hume and Hazel Pringle were born and raised in the Shäwshe (Dalton Post) area and married in 1939.  They had a large family by the time they, along with Dave’s father and Hazel’s mother, moved to the community of Haines Junction.  Dave had previously worked on the building of the Haines Road and then in the latter 1940s took employment as a heavy equipment operator at the Haines Junction highway maintenance camp.

The family established itself in an area on what was then the west edge of the town, to the west of the Kuskanaw Lodge site.  The 1950 survey shows that they had a 16’x20’ cabin on their property at that time, but more buildings were soon to follow to accommodate the family as well as the elderly parents.

Dave and Hazel Hume continued to live in Haines Junction until Hazel died in Whitehorse in 1968 after a lengthy illness.  Dave went on to have another family and passed away in Whitehorse in 1996.  Most of his and Hazel’s many descendants remain in the Haines Junction area.  Hume Street in the community is named for Dave and Hazel Hume.

Pete and Mary Eikland

Pete Eikland came from Norway as a teenager in the early 1900s and ended up in the Beaver Creek area.  He married  Mary, who was living in a First Nation village on the Yukon-Alaska border, and they had five children together.  Their son Charlie said that when they were living in Snag, Catholic Church officials would occasionally come and try to get the kids to go to residential school.  To avoid that possibility, Pete and Mary moved the family to Haines Junction in 1949 so the kids could go to school at the Army camp.

They first moved into what Charlie termed a shack at Mickey Blackmore’s sawmill site a mile and a half north of the community, from where he and his sister Nellie walked to school.  Pete staked land in Haines Junction along what had been the pioneer road, about 800 feet east of the highway intersection, and had an 11’x11’ building on it at the time of the 1950 survey.  He later built a log house that the family lived in until 1955, when they moved back to Beaver Creek.  Most of Pete and Mary’s descendants still live in the southern Yukon, some in Haines Junction.

Haines Junction Milestone Developments after 1950

A number of events at various times after the first town lots became available for purchase influenced the growth and development of Haines Junction.  There were many that could be listed, but the more significant ones were:

• 1954 – the Haines – Fairbanks pipeline, including the Mile 1026 pump station
• 1960 – the resettlement of First Nation people to new housing on the east side of Haines Junction
• 1972 – the establishment of Kluane National Park & Reserve
• 1995 – the Champagne & Aishihik First Nations Final and Self-Government Agreements

Ending

Haines Junction was not at a natural place for a Yukon community to develop.  It is not at a strategic point on a waterway or in a mineral-rich area, but a number of factors related to roads fell into place for it to happen.  The summer route of the Kluane Wagon Road through the site determined the route of the pioneer road, which determined the route of the Alaska Highway.  The spot that became Haines Junction resulted from two highway routing decisions, the location of the Haines Road crossing of the Dezadeash River and the abandonment of the Bear Creek Cut-off that would have bypassed the site of the future town.

The highway junction that resulted led to the founding of the community, and the economic opportunities, particularly in the travel, tourism, and service sectors, kept it growing.  Once firmly established, the natural beauty and recreational values of the area along with the spirit, volunteerism, and hard work of early residents to make it a good place to live attracted others to come and do the same.  The result has been 80 years so far of a place where people have chosen to live some or all of their lives.

Acknowledgements

Many people who were involved in the early development of Haines Junction still have a presence in the community in terms of descendants who are either still here or retain a sentimental connection to this place, even from afar. A number of people in both categories have contributed to this article.

I would like to thank Sally Hogan, Rosemary Gute-Greuning, John Backe, Charlie Eikland, Tom Eikland, Carol Buzzell, and Nora Martin for their family information.  Bill Karman, Phil Bastien, Brad MacKinnon, and Rod Watson also contributed knowledge and information about early Haines Junction. The Backe family, Tom Buman, Mark McPherson, Peter Deer, Nora Martin, and Brian Langevin contributed photos.

Previous work has recorded some of the history and stories of Haines Junction’s beginning and growth.  The first was Ellen Harris’s paper called “A History of the Development of Settlements in the Shakwak Valley Area”, written for a university course in 1981.  Ellen was a school teacher in the early 1950s at Haines Junction and her paper contains a wealth of information, much of it from interviews and conversations with old-timer informants about the early history of the community and area.  Her paper can be found at the Yukon Archives.

In 2007 some of the history of Haines Junction and the area was compiled in a book of stories called From First We Met to Internet: Stories from Haines Junction’s First Sixty-Five Years as a Settlement, 1942-2007.  This informative and entertaining book was a History Project produced by the Haines Junction Campus of Yukon College.  The driving force behind the project and the book was its designer, coordinator and editor, Elaine Hurlburt. It is available at the Yukon Public Library.

Updated January 3, 2024

Why Haines Junction is here – Alaska Highway and Haines Road

The Kluane Wagon Road of 1904 in the southwest Yukon provided a path for the ‘pioneer road’ construction in 1942 and its upgrade to the Alaska Highway in 1943.  This path was through the future site of Haines Junction, but that fact alone did not determine that a town would grow at this location.

A potential place for development was where the Haines Road, also built in 1943, would connect with the Alaska Highway, but where this connection would be was in question for many months during that year.  It would take a couple of hastily-made highway routing decisions to determine where this junction and the community that was to follow would finally be located.

The Pioneer Road (1942)

The Alaska Highway was initially called the Alcan Military Highway, and “in 1942 the objective was to force through the wilderness with some sort of a passable trail during the short road-building season”.  This was deemed necessary to get military vehicles through to Alaska as quickly as possible, but also to provide follow-up highway construction forces with an access for staging out their equipment and materials along the length of the road.  This first phase of construction, known as the pioneer road, began in early March 1942, with haste as the driving force. 

The pioneer road was built by seven regiments of the United States Army Corps of Engineers along with 47 road contractors working under the US Public Roads Administration (PRA).   In monetary terms, these agencies contributed an equal effort to the building of the pioneer road with expenditures of about $9.5 Million each.

The US Army’s Eighteenth Engineers Regiment, consisting of over 1,500 men, was assigned the road-building task in the southwest Yukon, from Whitehorse to the Alaska border north of Beaver Creek.  The Regiment consisted of six companies, each broken into three platoons that carried out the construction work, with an additional platoon for support functions such as administration, medical, mapping, and mechanical work. 

Unlike most other areas that the pioneer road was to be built through, the Eighteenth Engineers were not going into a roadless wilderness, at least for the first 150 miles or so.  They would begin their work by following and fixing roads that had seen automobile traffic for the previous 20 years and horse and wagon use for 20 years before that. 

In early April 1942 the regiment headed northwesterly from Whitehorse following the Whitehorse-Dawson Overland Trail, which had been built in 1902, and then at about the 32-mile mark branched off onto the Kluane Wagon Road of 1904.  Fred Rust, the regimental historian for the Eighteenth, said that “the old wagon trail to Kluane provided a valuable access road for the group moving into new territory.  It was two ruts to nowhere and a damned hard thing to ride over, but it served our purpose well”.

The companies were assigned a five to 15 mile section of road, which they built at an average rate of 2½ miles per day, and on completion they would leap-frog past the others to a new section further along.  At any one time the regiment was working out of 10 to 15 camps spread out over 100 miles.  They built camps and bivouacs (short-term camps) at sites such as Marshall Creek, Bear Creek, and a spot two miles east of the future Haines Junction, but no camps were put up at what would become the site of Haines Junction. 

Rust wrote that the southwest Yukon was “like building a road in any rolling, wooded country with streams, [and] just enough trouble spots to broaden our experience without overwhelming our innocence”.  He described their experience with permafrost this way: “small muddy spots … in otherwise perfectly dry road … developed from below, from the slow thaw of sub-surface frozen ground [and] long stretches of dry road slowly [turned] to mud under the summer sun”.  He remarked that mud in other parts of the world is caused by rain, but in the Yukon it is produced by sunshine. 

Fred Rust said that the pioneer road “followed the line of least resistance and … had many curves [because] … it was faster to build around a hill than through it”.  The bridges were temporary and made of local materials, with “not a piece of manufactured lumber [in] these structures” and built with “axes, saws and sledges, picks, shovels and muscle”. 

When the US Army began building the pioneer road, the US Public Roads Administration (PRA) became involved as well.  Its initial role included laying out the road alignment ahead of the Army construction crews, and for that work they set up 16-man camps for themselves as they went.  One of these was six miles to the northwest of the future Haines Junction site at Bear Creek, where they could enjoy the comfortable accommodation and home cooking at Dorothy Mackintosh’s roadhouse and trading post.    (see link to related Mackintosh Trading Post article at end)

The PRA also established larger camps in preparation for its own contractor crews that would be following to improve the pioneer road to a higher standard.  Camps such as this were built at Canyon Creek and Silver City, but not at the future site of Haines Junction, meaning that neither the Army Engineers nor the PRA selected this spot for a camp during the construction of the pioneer road. 

The 1,422-mile pioneer road was completed in less than nine months and it was officially opened on November 20, 1942 in a ceremony at Soldiers Summit near the south end of Kluane Lake.  The rough standard that resulted was passable only by four- and six-wheel drive military vehicles, and it took at least two weeks to travel from Dawson Creek to Whitehorse. The conclusion of a post-war US House of Representatives Committee looking back at the Alaska Highway construction was that “the pioneer roadway was of great assistance … and the Alaska Highway could not have been completed in 1943 but for the work done on the pioneer road”.

The Alaska Highway (1943)

1942 was the year of the pioneer road, and 1943 was the year it became the Alaska Highway. As the pioneer road was being pushed through, the Public Roads Administration was following it up using 77 civilian Canadian and American contractors with almost 16,000 employees to transform it into an all-weather, gravelled highway. 

The PRA work was divided into six construction sections that each had a management contractor overseeing other contractors.  One of these segments, called Section B, spanned 308 miles from Whitehorse to the Yukon-Alaska border, with the Dowell Construction Company of Seattle as the primary management contractor.  Each section had its own mileage system, and Whitehorse was mile 0 for Section B. 

A company called Haas-Royce-Johnson from San Francisco was the contractor assigned a 27-mile stretch of Section B that began at about Mile 96, 12 miles east of present-day Haines Junction.  The company widened, graded and gravelled the pioneer road as it angled down toward and along the Dezadeash River to present-day Haines Junction. This part of the road, however, would be abandoned within the year.

Upgrading of the pioneer road by the Public Roads Administration carried on for most of the remainder of 1943, and it was officially named the ‘Alaska Highway’ on July 16, 1943.  There was no grand opening of the Alaska Highway as there had been for the pioneer road the previous November.

The US House of Representatives Committee on Roads Interim Report on the Alaska Highway in March 1946 gave six conclusions, most of them negative.  The only positive conclusion was the first one, that “the breaking through of the pioneer road (Alcan Highway) was an outstanding and praiseworthy performance”.  The remaining five were not complimentary, and the final recommendations were for changes in leadership for whatever ongoing role the US government would have in connection with the Alaska Highway.  

The Haines Road (1943)

At the same time the pioneer road to Alaska was being transformed into an all-weather highway, a connecting road from Haines, Alaska was also being built.  This undertaking is not well known as a part of the overall Alaska Highway project, but the Haines Road played a role in the war effort and was an unplanned contributor to the founding of Haines Junction.

In the latter part of 1942 as the pioneer road was being completed, difficulties were brewing in the transport of equipment and supplies into the Yukon.  It was all being handled by the White Pass & Yukon Route railroad from Skagway, Alaska to Whitehorse, but it was being overtaxed and creating a delivery bottleneck.  This situation was affecting not only the highway construction project, but also Yukon people and businesses that depended on the railway for provisions and supplies. 

The best solution to this problem was determined to be a road from the seaport at Haines, Alaska to connect with the pioneer road, soon to be called the Alaska Highway.  This decision led to construction of a road and development of a town, both containing the Haines name.  This name originated from Francina Haines, who was Secretary of an American church women’s society that funded the establishment of a Presbyterian mission and school in 1881 at what is now Haines.

On October 29, 1942 a directive was issued to the Public Roads Administration “to construct a two-way road … from Haines, Alaska to Champagne, Yukon or some point west of Champagne where a satisfactory line intersects the Alcan Highway”.  It was termed a ‘feeder road’ to the Alaska Highway, but was to be built to the same standard. The order specified that work was to start from each end, and as quickly as possible.

It is evident that when this directive was issued, possible routes for the road had not been studied and an assumption made that it could follow the old Tlingit trading trail north from Haines.  Known more widely by then as the ‘Dalton Trail’, it intersected the pioneer road at the settlement of Champagne, established as a trading post in 1902 by Harry and Annie Chambers.  It is interesting to speculate how the history of settlement and development in the southwest Yukon would be different if the ‘Haines-Champagne Cut-off’, as it was called for a short time, had actually been constructed.

The planned road had a number of names for a while, most using the word ‘cut-off’.  The ‘Haines Cut-off Road’ ended up being a name that stuck until the end of the 1970s, although long before then local people were calling it simply the ‘Haines Road’, and still are.

By early December 1942 there were three Public Roads Administration survey parties laying out the Haines Road route, one from each end and one in the Chilkat Pass area.  Their reconnaissance surveys and perhaps some local knowledge soon showed that the terrain and route direction favored joining onto the pioneer road 42 road miles west of Champagne at Mile 108 from Whitehorse.

Similar to the Alaska Highway, a ‘pioneer trail’ was first built by the US Army Corps of Engineers, with the addition of PRA contractors taken from the Alaska Highway project to build bridges and perform grading work.  The plan was to have the PRA personnel replaced early in 1943 by a new project management team with its own force of 2,000 employees.  However, when it began to look like the Haines Road might not be completed during the 1943 season, it was given priority over the Alaska Highway and the PRA crews were directed to continue working on it before being returned to Alaska Highway work in the spring. 

By early May 1943 the roadwork from the north end had proceeded about 45 miles to south of Klukshu village, although it was not passable by highway vehicles.  The final route beyond that point had not been marked out, so local First Nations men Dick Fraser, Oliver Jim and Dave Hume were hired as guides and packers to assist in finding and blazing the route southwards.  This work on horseback took them until mid-June, when after 70 miles of route locating they linked up with the line that had been marked out from the Haines end. 

At the end of November 1943, the Haines Road met its targeted completion date as an all-weather gravelled highway connecting the coast with the Alaska Highway.  The last link of this connection was forged by a new trestle bridge over the Dezadeash River at the site on the pioneer road (by then called the Alaska Highway) that was known as Mile 108.

Looking back at the building of the Haines Road, the US House of Representatives Committee’s review of the Alaska Highway construction said this: “the importance of the Haines lateral road as a feeder road to carry supplies to the Alaska Highway project, taking the load off the already overstrained White Pass & Yukon Route, cannot be overstated”. 

The above statement appears to be meant to justify the hurried implementation of the Haines Road project.  Following its completion, the road was not kept open that winter due to landslides and heavy snow, and neither was there a need for it because incoming freight was greatly reduced as the Alaska Highway construction was being completed.  The road was used more for taking heavy equipment out than bringing anything in, and was not open to any other traffic.  To this day the Haines Road has not met the expectations that were touted for it during its construction, and it remains a well-kept secret scenic drive with an expensive history. 

Camp Mile 108 (1943)

The decision about the routing of the Haines Road in late 1942 or early 1943 had determined that it would cross the Dezadeash River at Mile 108 of the pioneer road.  Before the end of February 1943, a bridge site was already being prepared at this location.

By May the bridge construction was well under way by the Angeles Gravel & Supply Company of Port Angeles, Washington.  The decision to cross the Dezadeash River at Mile 108 would have led to the need for a camp at that point, particularly for the bridge workers.  It is not known when Camp Mile 108 was established, only that it was sometime after January 1943 and on the north bank of the river near the bridge.

References to ‘Camp Mile 108’ (or Camp 108 or Mile 108) are few and photographs of it are even rarer.  The photo below was taken in the summer of 1943 by Glen Chapman, a worker with the Dowell Construction Company, the management contractor for Section B.  On the reverse of the photo is written “2:30 AM”, indicating it was taken sometime around the June 21 summer solstice.

The establishment of this highway camp could rightly be called the beginning of Haines Junction, though at that time there was probably little thought of a town developing there.  Camp Mile 108 is now a name long forgotten, but it is immortalized in a painting by the famous Group of Seven artist A.Y. Jackson, a unique record of a town’s beginning.

In October 1943 Jackson and another artist, Henry Glyde, were commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada to record the construction of the Alaska Highway in art form.  One of A.Y. Jackson’s paintings from this trip is called Camp Mile 108, West of Whitehorse, a piece depicting a camp with a mountain backdrop that is easily recognizable as Haines Junction.  (see link to related A.Y. Jackson & Haines Junction article at end)

The site was called Camp Mile 108 when Jackson and Glyde visited in October 1943, but that name was nearing its end.  Rerouting of sections of the highway between Whitehorse and Camp Mile 108 reduced the distance between these points to 98 miles, rendering the Mile 108 name irrelevant.  While this name had come from the camp’s location on the pioneer road/Alaska Highway, the future name of the place would be derived instead from the Haines Road.

The junction of the new Haines Road with the upgraded and newly-named Alaska Highway at Camp Mile 108 ended up determining the site of Haines Junction.  This had not been the intent, however, as only a few months previously the plan was that the highway junction would be 3½ miles to the north at what locals have long called the ‘Pine Creek corner’ (or ‘Pine Lake corner’).  This was because a new section of road called the ‘Bear Creek Cut-off’ was being constructed to provide a straighter route toward the northwest.

The Bear Creek Cut-off and Pine Creek Corner (1943)

The Alaska Highway runs more east-west through the Yukon than north-south, but there was a time when Haines Junction people and others living along the highway west of Whitehorse were said to be on the ‘North Highway’.  This term, along with the similarly termed ‘South Highway’ east of Whitehorse, has faded away for the most part, perhaps to avoid confusion when the North and South Klondike Highways were named.

Looking from this North and South Alaska Highway perspective, an interesting quirk at Haines Junction is that to travel south on the highway, you drive north out of the community.  Residents rarely or never give this a thought; it’s just the way the road goes. 

The above map view of this situation shows that while the Alaska Highway is generally oriented east-west through this area, it makes an awkward jog to the south to pass through Haines Junction.  It also shows that the highway makes a sharp turn in the town, while the section of it that comes from Whitehorse is in a straight line with the Haines Road.  For decades until the highway signage was substantially improved, many travellers bound for greater Alaska breezed through Haines Junction and found themselves heading down the Haines Road.

This routing oddity at Haines Junction is due to the abandonment of most of a planned section of Alaska Highway called the ‘Bear Creek Cut-off’.  As early as August 1942, it was determined that the future path of the permanent highway through this area would be a few miles to the north of the pioneer road that ran through Camp Mile 108 and northwestward to the Kloo Lake area. 

The Bear Creek Cut-off if completed would have been almost 30 miles long and a more direct route than that of the pioneer road.  The cut-off started at a point about 13 road miles east of Camp 108 near km. 1557 of the present highway and went west, paralleling Pine Lake and curving around its west end. It then headed northwest toward Kloo Lake to rejoin the existing road near there.  This route would go around (north of) the Bear Creek drainage, rather than across the creek as the pioneer road did, presumably giving rise to its name.   

A photo taken on August 18, 1943 shows the cut-off road from its starting point east of Marshall Creek where it deviated from the pioneer road.  The photo is labelled as “section of completed highway on Bear Creek Cut-off”, and while this section remained as part of the present highway, construction further along had already ceased, long before being completed to its planned end near Kloo Lake.

By early May of 1943 the cut-off construction had progressed at least 10 miles to the west end of Pine Lake.  At this point it was bypassing Camp 108 by more than three miles and was swinging around Pine Lake to take a course toward the northwest. 

A section of a 1948 air photo below shows a completed portion of the Bear Creek Cut-off with a beautifully engineered curve around the west end of Pine Lake, indicating it was intended to be the permanent highway.  The road was planned to go for another 13 miles beyond the end of the road in the upper left of the photo.

Photos taken on June 26, 1943 of equipment working on the cut-off construction west of Paint Mountain show that the road had advanced about 14 miles from its starting point, almost halfway to the planned end of it.  Evidence that this road was a serious endeavor can still be seen in the large amounts of fill placed in some sections to build up the grade.  However, construction ceased soon after this, having gone not much further other than clearing the vegetation ahead for about another mile and a half and some apparent exploratory wandering with a bulldozer for a few miles more.

At some point a 3½-mile piece of new road was built to connect the pioneer road at Camp 108 to the Bear Creek Cut-off road near the west end of Pine Lake.  This likely occurred not long after the cut-off construction started to provide shorter access for workers and equipment to and from the camp.  This connection created the relatively sharp ‘Pine Creek corner’, as it became known by locals and truckers, but it is now a much gentler corner than the original.

For a short time at least, the Pine Creek corner was where the Haines Road was planned to end, and would therefore become the highway junction.  In a Royal Canadian Mounted Police report from May 1943, a constable sent from Whitehorse to investigate a death near Dalton Post was driven to “Pine Creek, YT”, which was undoubtedly the Pine Creek corner.  He then caught a ride on a US Army truck “four miles down the Haines Road” to an Army Engineers camp, which would have been Camp 108. This shows that for a few months in 1943, the section of highway from the Dezadeash River to Pine Creek was part of the Haines Road.

There is also mapped evidence that the planned terminus of the Haines Road was to be at the Bear Creek Cut-off.  It is contained in an undated Public Roads Administration highway route map that shows the proposed route at the time the map was produced.  The map has the Haines Road as staying on the east side of the Kathleen River, rather than crossing it near its outlet from Kathleen Lake as actually happened.  It also shows the Haines Road crossing over the pioneer road before connecting to the Alaska Highway, rather than terminating at the pioneer road as it actually did.  On the map this junction appears to be somewhere in the vicinity of Marshall Creek, which may account for it being indicated as 100 miles from Whitehorse rather than 108 miles. 

This concept map would have been produced very early in the Haines Road planning process and was obsolete soon afterwards.  The planned route shown for the northern end of the Haines Road did not come to fruition once the final routing was determined in late 1942 or very early 1943.  By February 1943 the crossing of the Dezadeash River at Mile 108 was already being prepared for construction of a bridge.  This location was probably chosen over the one shown on the map due to difficult terrain on the east side of the Kathleen River and/or lack of a suitable crossing point of the Dezadeash River in that area.

The Bear Creek Cut-off was planned to bypass Camp 108 as well as the long-established trading post, store and roadhouse run by Dorothy Mackintosh at Bear Creek, six miles to the west.  This was a popular place amongst the highway workers and its bypassing may have given another meaning to the term ‘cut-off’. 

The previous year Mrs. Mackintosh had not been keen on the idea of a new highway running past her door, but she evidently came to the realization that she would lose all her business if it was to miss her by several miles.  She told a newspaper in July 1943 that she would “be worse off than I was before … because then I was on a [First Nations] trail, at least … but now [the First Nations people] won’t come here anymore”.  It is not known if she voiced her objections to any authorities.

A letter dated April 18, 1944 in the Mackintosh land file at the Yukon Archives states that the Bear Creek Cut-off route had been abandoned by then, but includes no information about when and why this was done.  Dorothy Mackintosh may have made her concerns known, but it is hard to imagine the American war road machine changing its plan back to the longer pioneer road route to appease her.  A photo from August 14, 1943 shows a quarrying operation in a pit on the hill just above Dorothy’s place for highway construction work now being carried out past her door. 

I have not found details about the decision to abandon the Bear Creek Cut-off after the investment that had been put into it.  Perhaps when the engineers studied the terrain ahead, they realized there would be a significant amount of wet country to deal with in the wide, flat valley bottom on the way to Kloo Lake.  This reality combined with already having the upgraded pioneer road in place along higher, solid ground on the west side of the valley as a fallback may have contributed to the decision.

The only part of the Bear Creek Cut-off that became permanent is the 10-mile section from where it started and went west to the Pine Creek corner.  The abandonment of the remainder resulted in the Haines Road junction with the Alaska Highway being where it is today, rather than where it might have ended up more than three miles north at the Pine Creek corner. 

Other Related Projects in 1943

The Alaska Highway was the centerpiece project in the Yukon in the American response to the Japanese attacks in the Pacific, but other projects associated with it came to the Haines Junction area.  In addition to the Haines Road, these included the Canol #4 pipeline, the highway telecommunications system, and a new airstrip, all of which were built near or paralleling the highway.

An American Army major-general, in being questioned about the costs of all these projects, explained and defended them this way: “[they] were forced by the war situation … and war projects cannot be compared to other projects undertaken during periods of normal activity.  All the projects in [northwestern Canada and Alaska] … are interdependent and serve one common war effort”. 

The Canol project was comprised of four components all or partially within the Yukon and referred to as Canol #1 through #4.  Canol #1 was a huge and well-known project unto itself, consisting of the development of the following: the oilfield near Norman Wells, NT; the 499-mile Canol Road; a 577-mile crude oil pipeline from Norman Wells to Whitehorse; and a refinery at Whitehorse.  Three distribution pipelines from Whitehorse called Canol #2, 3 and 4 were also constructed, with Canol #4 being a 3-inch line (inside diameter) that followed along the Alaska Highway for 596 miles to Fairbanks.

The Canol #4 pipeline was laid on top of the ground adjacent to the pioneer road/Alaska Highway in 1943 and came into the Haines Junction area along the south side of the road.  It passed through where the center of the town would be in a few years, and a number of residences and other buildings now overlie where the pipe had been.  The pipeline also had pumping stations, with the nearest ones to Haines Junction being located 17 miles to the east near Canyon Creek and 20 miles to the west near the Jarvis River.  The line carried petroleum products to points along the Alaska Highway until the Canol project ceased operations in March 1945, less than a year after crude oil started flowing from Norman Wells. 

A second project along the Alaska Highway that came through the highway junction area in the busy summer of 1943 was the Northwest Communication System (NCS), an inland communication link to Alaska.  Built in 11 months from Edmonton to Fairbanks, it involved the installation of 95,000 telephone poles and more than 14,000 miles of wires, “the longest open-wire communications line in the world”.  The line was generally built close beside the highway, but took shortcuts through the bush where feasible, requiring a new path to be cleared.  This was the situation near the highway junction, where the line passed by about 2½ miles to the north and a spur line was put in to Camp 108. 

The telecommunications system had a series of repeater stations at approximately 100-mile intervals to boost the communication signal.  These were also known as booster or relay stations and the nearest one was at Canyon Creek, 20 miles to the east.  This station along with the First Nation settlement there and the Canyon Creek Lodge that was soon established became part of the greater Haines Junction community.

Another project associated with the Alaska Highway was a series of small local airstrips constructed in 1943 at points between the larger airfields of the Northwest Staging Route.  Known as intermediate or emergency landing strips, they were built to provide safety and support for aircraft along the flight corridor to Alaska.  One of these airstrips, now the Haines Junction airport, was built in the fall of 1943 at a location three miles north of Camp 108 and west of Pine Lake.  The strip was called Pon Lake, the origin of this name not known, but perhaps to distinguish it from a Pine Lake airstrip that was along the highway between Teslin and Watson Lake.

Summary

The spot along the Dezadeash River on the pioneer road of 1942 that was to become Haines Junction was never chosen as a site for a camp during the road construction.  It only became one because of two decisions, to bridge the river at that point and to abandon the Bear Creek Cut-off route that had been partially completed.  These had the effect of the Camp Mile 108 location becoming the highway junction and a permanent camp at an attractive site for future development.

It is interesting to consider what might have transpired at a highway junction near Pine Lake if the Bear Creek Cut-off had been completed.  A settlement probably would have grown there, with some advantages such as higher land and proximity to the recreational values that Pine Lake, Pine Creek and Paint Mountain have to offer.  The mountain views would be equally spectacular, a little more distant but broader in scope, and there would be more winter sunshine.  What would be missing from this location, though, is the feeling of coming around the last corner near the airport and the familiar mountain panorama opens up to welcome you home.

Link to Part 3:  The Beginning of Haines Junction

Link to related article: Mackintosh Trading Post

Link to related article: A.Y. Jackson and Haines Junction

The town of Haines Junction in the southwest Yukon is relatively new, having its beginning in 1943 with the construction of the Alaska Highway and Haines Highway through the area.  In the 80 years since, the community and surrounding area has gradually grown to a population around the 1,000 mark.  It owes its existence primarily to roads, the first built for access to goldfields and two more for wartime measures.

The future site of Haines Junction was determined, in part, long before the town came into being by two related events, the Kluane gold rush of 1903 and the Kluane Wagon Road of 1904.  The Kluane Wagon Road eventually became the route for much of the ‘pioneer road’ of 1942, including through the site that became Haines Junction.  The location was made permanent in 1943 by two more related events, the upgrading of the pioneer road into the Alaska Highway and the building of the Haines Road (now officially called the Haines Highway).

The junction of these two highways resulted in the start of the town built around it and gave it its name.  The location of this junction, however, was not determined very far in advance.  Had different decisions been made in the routes of both highways, the junction of them and perhaps the community may have ended up 40 miles to the east at Champagne or three miles to the north near Pine Lake. 

This article provides historical and geographical context for how and why Haines Junction came to be where it is.  It also documents the early developments in the community up until the first survey of town lots in 1950.  By that time, the first government services, businesses, and residences had been established and the town had a population of around 100.

The article is divided into three parts:

Part 1:  Before Haines Junction – the Area History to World War II (starts below)

• the general history of the southwest Yukon along the Whitehorse to Kluane corridor from 1890 to the beginning of the Second World War.

Part 2:  Why Haines Junction is here – the Alaska Highway and Haines Road (link)

• how the building of the pioneer road, the Alaska Highway, and the Haines Road came together to establish a camp at the site that would become Haines Junction.  It had not been planned this way and is the result of some fortuitous decisions. 

Part 3:  The Beginning of Haines Junction (link)

• the establishment of Haines Junction as a community and its first developments up until 1950, when the first lots were surveyed in the new town.

Part 1:  Before Haines Junction – Area History to World War II

Haines Junction is unlike many other Yukon communities.  Some were established trading centers, some were built in areas of mineral resource discoveries, some were transportation hubs along the Yukon’s waterways and early roads, and some were combinations of these.  Haines Junction, on the other hand, was a product of a modern road intersection and grew to provide highway maintenance and other government functions as well as to serve tourist and local needs.

Haines Junction is situated in a geographic feature called the Shakwak Trench, a wide valley that runs northwest along the frontal ranges of the St. Elias Mountains from the elbow of Kusawa Lake to the Kluane Lake area and on into Alaska.  Joining into the trench are other valleys, the most notable one in the Yukon running east-west from near Whitehorse to Haines Junction and includes parts of the Takhini and Dezadeash Rivers. 

Before the Kluane Gold Rush (pre–1903)

Haines Junction is located where valleys merge and cross and are natural movement and transportation corridors.  The area is called Dakwäkäda, meaning ‘high cache place’, by the Southern Tutchone people who have used it for a long time.  This central location with its intersection of trails was a good place for camping, getting gophers, and staging from to hunt in the valley and nearby mountains.  The products of the hunts, such as furs and dried meat, were stored in the caches, structures built above the ground to provide protection from scavengers until the goods could be taken elsewhere, usually to winter quarters.

Non-First Nations people did not enter this part of the Shakwak Valley until the 1890s, and the early ones skirted around the Dakwäkäda area.  On an 1891 exploratory trip with horses northward from the Shäwshe (Dalton Post) area, Edward Glave and Jack Dalton passed by about seven miles west of present-day Haines Junction on their way through the Kloo Lake area and beyond to Kluane Lake.  A few years later, Dalton began commercial use of a coastal Tlingit trading trail going north from near Haines, Alaska, and its closest point was 27 miles southeast of what is now Haines Junction.

In July 1900 J.J. McArthur, a Dominion of Canada topographic surveyor, made a trip from Shäwshe along some of the same trails used by Glave and Dalton nine years earlier.  From a location seven miles to the west of Haines Junction, where the Dezadeash River turns to flow south, McArthur took the first known photo of the valley area where Haines Junction would later be located.

These early expeditions came into the region from the south and bypassed the site where Haines Junction would later be located.  There is no record of any east-west travel by newcomers through the Whitehorse-Kluane Lake corridor, and therefore the site, until after the discovery of gold in creeks to the north of Kloo Lake in the summer of 1903.

The Kluane Gold Rush and Kluane Wagon Road (1903–1904)

Gold was discovered on Fourth of July and Ruby Creeks north of Kloo Lake in early July 1903 by Dawson Charlie and Skookum Jim of the Klondike gold discovery fame.  Acting on information from First Nation people of the Kloo Lake area, they headed west from Whitehorse with horses and staked the first placer gold claims.  These discoveries, along with later ones near Kluane Lake, sparked a stampede of prospective gold miners into the area over the rest of that summer and fall.  Initially they all would have followed a First Nations foot trail which passed through or near where the townsite of Haines Junction would be established 40 years later. (see link to related Ruby Camp article at end)

In the fall of 1904 the Kluane Wagon Road was built from a point on the Whitehorse-Dawson Overland Trail 32 miles northwest of Whitehorse.  It went for 122 miles to Silver City on the southeast shore of Kluane Lake, with a side branch to north of Kloo Lake to provide better access for the gold miners.  In many sections it appears to have deviated from the original walking trail to go where it could better accommodate horses pulling loaded wagons. 

Most of the Kluane Wagon Road was a single route, but for a 16-mile stretch between Marshall Creek and Bear Creek there came to be separate summer and winter routes.  The future site of Haines Junction was between those two points and located on the summer route, which can be seen in a 1948 air photo when the community was in its infancy.  For almost 40 years there was traffic through this site, but nobody during that time would have had a reason to think there might someday be a community there.   (see links to related Kluane Wagon Road articles at end)

The Traffic Before the Town (1904–1942)

For 40 years before a community was established at Haines Junction, there was traffic through the site for a variety of purposes.  While the rush to the gold creeks of the Kloo Lake and Kluane Lake areas subsided fairly quickly, a level of mining activity persisted over the years along with other economic and governmental endeavors that also arose.

Among the earliest people to use the Kluane Wagon Road on a regular basis and for the longest period of time were Gene and Louis Jacquot, who established themselves at Burwash Landing in 1904.  They built and operated a trading post, store, roadhouse, and later a big game outfitting business, all of which required considerable travel and freighting over the wagon road throughout the years of its existence. 

Beginning in 1904 with Richard McConnell, parties with the Geological Survey of Canada used the Kluane Wagon Road to study and map the geology and topography of the Shakwak Valley and beyond.  Many of the early and good quality photos that document this area and its history, particularly during the 1910s, were taken by these government scientists.

In 1909 a crew for the proposed Alaska Midland Railway project from Haines to Fairbanks conducted a survey of the route, which was the same as that taken decades later by the Haines Road and the northern 400 or so miles of the Alaska Highway.  The survey crew took photos along the way and passed through very close to the location of Haines Junction, but unfortunately no photos from this area resulted.  This was one of the more serious of many railway proposals that arose following the Klondike gold rush and would have altered the course of history in the southwest Yukon had it advanced.   

From 1909 through 1913 the Alaska-Yukon boundary survey parties used the Kluane Wagon Road to access the southwest Yukon section of their work.  By 1910 the big game hunting industry began in the upper White River area, meaning increased traffic on the wagon road in the summers and falls.  A few years later the development of a fur farming industry in the southwest Yukon added to the activity along the road.  For a couple of years beginning in 1913, a small gold rush to Chisana, Alaska, just over the border in the White River area, created a significant spike in use of the Kluane Wagon Road as well as a new wagon trail to the White River country.   

These local industries and government projects over the decades supported the operation of a number of roadhouses, most of which were short-lived, opening and closing as circumstances dictated.  The ones at Champagne and Bear Creek, though, persisted for the duration of the wagon road’s existence and on into the time of the Alaska Highway.

Life along the Kluane Wagon Road and through the area of mixed grassland, aspen and spruce that would one day become Haines Junction carried on with the ebb and flow of these various activities.  From Takhini River to Kluane Lake, the constants through all these years were the businesses and settlements at Champagne, Canyon Creek, Bear Creek, Kloo Lake, Silver City and Burwash Landing.  As a new decade began in 1940, however, a new and larger road through the southwest Yukon was on the horizon that would bring big changes to these places and create new ones.  

World War II and the Southern Yukon (1939 – 1942)

Kluane region people would have been aware of the onset of war in 1939 on the other side of the world and followed news of it when they could.  For most people it likely had little direct effect on their lives, but that would begin to change at the end of 1941, brought on by events far away at an island paradise in the Pacific.

The bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941 led to a call to action that was explained this way in a 1946 US House of Representatives review of the Alaska Highway: “military ground and aerial forces and navy strength in [Alaska] were believed to be too weak to withstand a direct Japanese assault” and “an overland supply route to supplement and, if necessary, replace marine transportation to Alaska was held to be a military imperative”.

A road to Alaska from southern Canada had long been contemplated and discussed by the Canadian and American governments, but the threat to Alaska and beyond from the Japanese aggression in the Pacific spurred the decision to do it.  The “overland supply route” would be the Alaska Highway and its related projects in the southern Yukon, a ripple effect of the war. 

By February 14, 1942 the decision had been made to proceed with the construction of the road.  The route selected was from Dawson Creek, BC to Big Delta, Alaska to tie in a series of airfields that was in place from Edmonton to Fairbanks, some having just been built in 1941.  The existence of this airfield system, known as the Northwest Staging Route, would have a military purpose by supporting the transport of supplies to Russia for its war effort against Germany.  In turn, the highway would support the airfields by providing ground access between them. 

The plan was for US Army engineer troops to quickly punch through a ‘pioneer road’, which would then be followed up by contractors working under the US Public Roads Administration (PRA) to improve it to the standard of a highway.  Three months after Pearl Harbor, personnel and machinery were on their way north by land and sea to points where they could begin building the new road. 

The story of the influx of thousands of US Army personnel and civilians along with tons of equipment and supplies into northern British Columbia, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Alaska to build the Alaska Highway and associated projects is very familiar to Yukoners.  The pushing of the Alaska Highway through the northern wilderness by southern people in terrain and weather conditions they were unaccustomed to is well captured in print, images and some video. 

The common perception of the Alaska Highway is that it was built by US Army soldiers.  They got it started, but this view overlooks the large contribution made by civilian workers under the employ of the US Public Roads Administration (PRA) and its contractors.  The pioneer road construction in 1942 involved a little over 11,000 US Army personnel, assisted by 7,500 people working under the PRA.  By early 1943, most of the Army people were gone and during the remainder of that year a peak PRA force of 15,900 people (3,700 of them Canadians) transformed the pioneer road into a highway.  Of the $138 Million spent on building the pioneer road and Alaska Highway, $122 Million (88.5%) of it was PRA work (there are different dollar figures used in various sources, but the point here is to show the proportion of work contribution by these two entities).

A project connected with the Alaska Highway that was mostly carried out by the PRA was the building of the Haines Road in 1943.  This road did not achieve a high profile in the Alaska Highway story, but as will be shown it played a role in the war effort by providing an alternate transportation artery from the coast that also benefitted Yukoners at the time. 

Summary

For the first four decades of the 1900s, the people of the Kluane region in the southwest Yukon lived relatively quiet lives close to the land.  They engaged in hunting, trapping, fishing, fur farming, big game hunting, mining, freighting, and operating trading posts and roadhouses.  The travel and transportation means to carry out these activities was enhanced by the Kluane Wagon Road when it was built in 1904.

The Second World War resulted in thousands of outside people coming into the region in 1942-43 to build the pioneer road, Alaska Highway and Haines Road.  This brought profound change and effects on existing communities and populations that had never known such a scale of activity.   Another effect of these highways was the creation of a new Yukon community on the Dezadeash River that for many people is ‘home’. 

Link to Part 2:  Why Haines Junction is here – the Alaska Highway and Haines Road

Link to related article: Ruby Camp

Link to related article: Kluane Wagon Road

Link to related article: Roadhouses of the Kluane Wagon Road