Digital Bob Archive

The desire of the Atlin people for a road to Taku Inlet came to the surface again in 1916, immediately after the British Columbia parliamentary elections. Atlin is not in Yukon Territory, as is sometimes supposed, but in the Province of British Columbia and the Atlin District had a seat in the provincial Parliament.

Very soon after the election of 1916 the newly elected member from Atlin, Frank Mobely, a Liberal, took up the road cause. He first asked Colonel Wilds P. Richardson, U.S. Army, the head of the Alaska Road Commission, if a reconnaissance survey from the Taku Inlet end would be possible. The Alaska Road Commission was the new name for what had been created by Congress in 1905 as the Board of Road Commissioners. It was still charged with the duty of building trails and roads in Alaska and despite the change of name it was still a branch of the Army.

In addition, MP Mobely sent a representative, John Malloy, to Juneau to confer with J.C. Hayes, the local superintendent of the Road Commission, regarding the feasibility and probably costs of such a road. Malloy arrived in Juneau just as Hayes was preparing to start for the mouth of the Taku. Colonel Richardson had requested that if possible he undertake a reconnaissance survey as far as the Canadian boundary that fall. Accompanying Hayes on the survey trip was William Pendergast, road foreman.

\"Enthusiasm for the road is at a high pitch in Atlin,\" Malloy said in Juneau. He said that Mr. Mobely, the MP for Atlin, would try to get an appropriation to start construction of the road from Atlin to the boundary.

Hayes and Pendergast returned after about ten days and Hayes reported that it was fine country for road building and that a wagon road from the mouth of the Taku River to the boundary was entirely feasible. He said nothing about costs or funding, but Juneau residents began to show some enthusiasm for the project, too. This mostly took the form of circulating petitions asking for the road. A good many signatures were gathered and the petitions were forwarded to Colonel Richardson.

The Colonel was not lacking for petitions and requests. In Southeastern Alaska it seemed that every town needed at least one road. In Juneau it was extension of the Glacier Highway and improvements to the Thane Road, while the people of Douglas desired that a start be made on a road northward from the town. Father north there were even more needs. What had been the Valdez Trail and soon would become the Richardson Highway was a main artery for Fairbanks, winter and summer, and needed improvement as automobiles began to replace horses and dog teams. And for ail of this, Congress was far from lavish with its appropriations.

Over on the Canadian side, MP Mobely was not having any better luck. In Victoria, Atlin seemed as remote as Alaska did in Washington. As for the Taku-Atlin route, the Road Commission allocated some funds to the Territory, but it largely washed its hand of the project by turning it over to the Department of Agriculture, since the section to the boundary would be in the Tongass National Forest.