This paper will examine comparatively the ideological and literary strategies of three travel books, the first to be written by civilian travellers on the Alaska Highway after the completion of the right-of-way in 1943. Harold Griffin, a Canadian journalist and poet, travelled about half the length of the highway, then flew on to Fairbanks Alaska, to gather the materials for his Alaska and the Canadian Northwest: Our New Frontier (1944). Philip H. Godsell combined his own memories of early years in the North with scattered observations of the modern highway project in The Romance of the Alaska Highway (1944). Gertrude Baskine, a social worker and poet, was the first person to travel the entire overland journey from the southern terminus of the highway in British Columbia, to Fairbanks. Her account was published as Hitch-hiking the Alaska Highway (1946).
These three books, all valuable as first-hand observations of one of the most prodigious achievements of road-building in North American history, are distinguished from one another by the ideological biases of the authors. Griffin's perspective is Marxist; Godsell's is essentially romantic; Baskine's is feminist. Griffin is especially interested in such subjects as conditions for the construction workers, and the treatment of native populations and the members of black American labour batallions. He qualifies his criticism of government and corporations, however, by his emphasis on the new spirit of cooperation among capital, labour, government and military. He is especially interested in prospects for post-war cooperation among the US, Canada, and the USSR in developing the North. Godsell's view is much more simplistic: he idealizes the frontier past and the spirit of cooperation between Canada and the United States, but his book is very antagonistic not only to the Japanese, but to the aboriginal population and the American blacks. Baskine is less interested in ethnic and political questions. A feminist, she uses her own experience as a lone woman travelling through a predominantly male environment to evaluate current experience and future prospects of women in the North and in North American society generally.
All three books are essentially wartime propaganda, primarily concerned with idealizing the Allied war effort and prospects for post-war international cooperation and prosperity. Griffin's Marxism, Baskine's feminisim, and even Godsell's rather narrow-minded romanticism, reconstruct the Alaska Highway as a symbolic road to a triumphant future.
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