Walter Wilson, a former Forest Ranger, was one of the first Lakes District residents to push for construction of a road between Highway 16 and Alaska. Wilson started his one-man promotional campaign in the early 1940s, but he wasn’t the first to float the idea of an all-Canadian route to the 49th state.
Clyde Charles Williams of Copper Centre, Alaska, started lobby for the Alaska Highway almost a decade earlier—and he did it with a dogsled.
Williams, born in 1881, boarded a ship to Alaska in 1900. Unlike most of the other men and women dumped unceremoniously on the mudflats at Valdez, he wasn’t searching for gold. Williams craved adventure and, in the thirty years that followed, he found it.
Six foot three inches tall and as slender as a sapling, William soon earned the nickname “Slim.” Like most Alaskans, he prospected for gold, did some hunting and trapping, and even carried the mail for a time. But his passion was dogsledding.
Slim bred and trained sled dogs. For a quarter-century, he sought to create the perfect working dog—one capable of pulling a heavy load all day in adverse weather conditions—by crossing malamutes and huskies with wolves. He claimed his dogs were the finest in Alaska, and his confidence in them knew no bounds.
In the early 1930s, Slim heard that another Alaskan planned to drive a team of dogs to the Chicago World’s Fair. Convinced that only his dog-wolf hybrids were capable of such a feat, the 51-year-old musher decided he too would make the journey. Somewhere along the way, he turned the trip into a publicity campaign for the Alaska Highway.
Slim left his home in Copper Center, Alaska, with a ten-dog team on November 20, 1932. He traveled light, intending to live off the land. He spent Christmas in Dawson City, Yukon, before heading south toward the BC-Yukon border.
He knew the trip from Atlin to Hazelton would be difficult. He thought he could reach the Skeena River in two months, but he was wrong. For the next five, he followed the Yukon Telegraph line through 500 miles of wilderness.
It was tough sledding. The temperature dropped to -62 Fahrenheit at one point, forcing him to make camp. When the weather improved and the temperature rose 11 degrees, he started down the trail again—only to suffer frostbite on one side of his face. The sun’s glare on the snow threatened to leave him blind beside the trail on four occasions.
To complicate matters, one of his best dogs developed sore feet. To rest the animal, Slim let it run beside the sled. The decision seemed a good one until the team encountered a pack of wolves.
“Going down a narrow valley, Slim saw a pack of wolves apparently awaiting them, and, without stopping to think about the dog, he put on his brake and stopped the rig, reaching for his rifle,” wrote Sidney Godwin of the Observer, Burns Lake’s weekly newspaper. “The free dog dashed at the wolves, and before a rescue could be started, the wolf pack had the dog scattered in little bits over several hundred square yards. Slim shot four of the wolves and the others made off. In the dusk of the evening, Slim said the pack looked like over a hundred to him, and he was glad to see them depart.”
Slim had to don snowshoes and break trail for much of the journey. He slept under the stars, and his diet consisted of the same food he fed his dogs: rice and dried salmon. When the salmon ran out, he stopped periodically to go ice fishing and hunting.
By the time he reached Hazelton in March 1933, Slim had also run out of snow. Ever resourceful, he added Ford automobile wheels to his sled and pushed on, arriving in Burns Lake during the first week of April.
His arrival here created a lot of excitement.
“Mush on, Brant. Gee, boy, gee,” wrote Trygarn Pelham Lyster “Barney” Mulvany in a report for the big city newspapers. “‘Slim’ Williams swung his team of eight beautiful dogs in a wide circle through the village of Burns Lake, BC, to the admiration of the gathering school children awaiting his heralded arrival … Some man, this ‘Slim.’ One hundred and ninety pounds of steel sinew and tough muscle, and this much of the trek already accomplished, which does not look to be speedy to the uninitiated, has never before been made in a single season by horse, foot, or dog team.”
Slim received a typical Burns Lake welcome. The local Elks Club and the board of trade held a reception for him in the Elks Hall, and the Alaskan dog musher repaid them with stories of his adventures. His dogs were put up in Brunell’s barn and fed “some choice Francois Lake mutton, which they seemed to appreciate after their diet of dried fish.”
“A very nice friendly time ensued with the guest of the evening recounting his experiences on the trail and answering questions,” wrote Godwin. “The youth of the town present in the hall were particularly keen on Mr. Williams’ descriptive stories of his adventure. H.T. Nicholls was informal chairman and Rev. E.S. Fleming, S. Godwin, and Lyster Mulvany conveyed the felicitations of the residents and those present, but all formalities were dispensed with and a free and easy evening was spent by all.”
The visit made an impression on at least one Burns Lake boy. “There was a fellow come through from Alaska with a dog team, Slim Williams, and that was in the thirties,” Ken Gerow recalled in 1987. “He stopped at the school and gave us a talk. He was … promoting the Alaska Highway through this way, and he went to the eastern states. He had a toboggan when he started out, and he had to put wheels on it. He gave us a quite interesting talk when he traveled through here, and it was pretty wild country in those days. The route was something along where Highway 37 is now.”
Slim left Burns Lake on April 8, but not before thanking the community profusely. “After leaving town on Saturday morning, Mr. Williams wished the editor to thank all for the reception that was given him and his dogs. He was most gratified with his kind treatment and said that at every place in Canada he has been received with the greatest courtesy, consideration, friendliness, and every possible help on his way had been offered to him.”
The Alaskan dog musher rolled into Chicago in September 1933, where he became an instant celebrity.
“Slim is located at the Alaska exhibit with his huskies and sleigh mounted on auto wheels, and is one of the main attractions of the fair,” wrote a man named Bill Lukens in a letter to the Observer dated October 26, 1933. “Wherever Slim goes, a crowd follows. Special privileges are granted him; one is, to build an open campfire at his camp, and he is the only one allowed to build a fire of any kind on the fairgrounds. When President [Franklin] Roosevelt visited, he paid a call on Slim, rode behind his dog team, and invited Slim to visit him at the Capitol at Washington … Slim wants me to extend his thanks to you for the wonderful reception you accorded him at Burns Lake—Barney Mulvany as master of ceremonies, and he also added that Barney could have just as well been on this trip. He also wants to thank Mrs. Trousdell for the basket of lunch she gave him.”
Slim Williams married Indiana resident Gladys Pennington in 1936 and traded his trap line for the lecture circuit. Despite assurances from government officials that construction of the Alaska Highway was imminent, years of inaction followed.
In the late 1930s, Louis A. Johnson, US assistant secretary for war, claimed it was not feasible to build a road to Alaska. Slim decided to prove him wrong—this time, by riding a motorcycle from Alaska to the eastern states.
Slim enlisted the assistance of John Logan, a 25-year-old he had met at the Adventurer’s Club of Chicago. The two men purchased a pair of BSA 250-cc motorcycles and had them shipped to Alaska. A husky named Blizzard was a last-minute addition to the team.
The trio left Fairbanks on May 14, 1939. Neither man had ridden a motorcycle before, so they proceeded with caution. The region’s lack of roads slowed their progress. They finally reached Dawson City on July 25, having pushed the motorcycles most of the previous 225 miles.
They got as far as Atlin by mid-August and then tackled the most challenging part of the journey. There were still no roads between Atlin and Hazelton, and downed trees blocked sections of the original telegraph right-of-way. It rained incessantly, forcing the men to build corduroy trails through swamps. One of the motorcycles broke down, and they sent it to Hazelton by packhorse.
River crossings proved problematic, too. In some cases, Slim and his traveling partner were able to use tramlines built by the area’s telegraph operators. When these proved inadequate, they built rafts and floated their gear across. At one point, they had nothing to eat for six days.
By the time the adventurers reached Nahlin, a telegraph station between Atlin and Telegraph Creek, they were down to their last cup of fuel. They purchased a horse to carry their gear and tow the motorcycle. The dog followed.
The ordeal took far longer than either man had anticipated. They were on the trail so long that newspapers in communities along Highway 16 gave them up as lost. Some thought they had died.
“Slim Williams is believed astray, two months overdue on hazardous trip overland from Alaska to the United States,” wrote the Smithers Interior News in early November 1939. “Considerable anxiety is being felt for the safety of Slim Williams and John Logan, two hardy Northmen who started out early last summer to make the long overland trip from Alaska to the United States. Slim is remembered by many as the man who mushed a dog team from Circle City [sic], Alaska, to the big fair at Chicago as the means of proving the suitability of the west route via Hazelton for the Alaska Road.”
Slim and his traveling partner arrived in Hazelton on November 9, 1939. They stayed long enough to have a mechanic connect their two motorcycles with a short platform, then hit the road again.
The dog rode on the platform between the bikes. This arrangement worked well on straight stretches but proved hazardous on curves. To avoid tipping over when rounding a bend in the road, the inside rider had to slow down, and the outside one, speed up.
It was almost winter by the time Slim and Logan arrived in Burns Lake, where they had their photograph taken outside Ruddy Motors.
The two adventurers and their dog reached Seattle before calling it quits. Though they never finished the journey, they considered it a success because it proved that a wheeled vehicle could travel from Alaska to Hazelton—providing its owner was willing to push it.
Slim and his wife, Gladys, settled in Chicago. Army engineers started construction of the Alaska Highway in March 1942 and completed it in eight months with help from 16,000 Canadian and American civilians. Today, BC’s second route to Alaska—Highway 37 between Kitwanga and Watson Lake in the Yukon—follows Slim’s original dog sled route.
The man who considered himself Alaska’s greatest dog musher died October 9, 1974, at the age of 93. He is buried in Mitchell, Indiana—far from his beloved Alaska.
