"This Was No &YXNH Picnic!": 24 Years of Wild and Woolly Mayhem in Dawson Creek

Andrea Geary is an agricultural reporter for The Manitoba Co-operator.

A self-confessed Alberta madman and journalist, Schmidt has followed up
his first book, Growing Up In the Oil Patch, with a tale of the
construction of the Alaska Highway. Schmidt begins his book with a bang,
as he tells of the 60 cases of dynamite and 20 cases of electric
percussion caps that exploded in Dawson Creek on February 13, 1943. He
contends that the death toll from the blast was 21, but that the U.S.
military covered up the incident and stated that only 5 civilians were
killed. This disaster serves to inform readers of the rough-and-ready
conditions that existed in the Canadian North during World War II, with
the influx of the thousands of American military personnel and civilians
who worked to build the Alaska Highway. Schmidt uses the recollections
of many of the people involved in turning 1,520 miles of bush into a
highway in less than two and a half years. While the recollections are
interesting, it is sometimes difficult to establish the identity of the
narrator of a particular passage. The chapters are enlivened with 15
drawings by Dr. Josephine Parrott.

Schmidt’s book is interesting reading for anyone who enjoys
discovering more about Canada’s history.