Oct. 29, 1942: Alaska Highway Built as Hedge Against Invasion

1942: The Alaska Highway officially opens to military traffic. Until the early 1940s, Alaska was a neglected U.S. territory. The Klondike gold rush of the 1880s and ’90s was a distant memory, and oil had not yet been discovered. There were a bunch of trees and rivers and snow, but nothing really worth exploiting, so [...]