July 2005 ISSUE

Home > Members > Publications> The PEGG > July 2005

book review

bounty of bulldozers remains
at the bottom of great slave

BY MIKE BRAITHWAITE
Freelance Writer

Ice Cones Searchers found a few things they weren't looking for, including these mysterious natural ice cones. The cones were hollow on the inside, and the boys pictured above fit inside them. The cones are described on page 83 of The Captain's Course.

The North does not give up her secrets easily. And even then, sometimes she yields ones that nobody was looking for.

Just ask Henry Kasten, P.Eng. This was a lesson he and others learned some 50 years ago when they tried to salvage six, 20-ton Caterpillar bulldozers from the floor of Great Slave Lake.

Over the several years of their efforts, a 300-lb. sea anchor and a 60-foot steel boat were found. Nobody had any idea how the anchor came to be in the lake. Initially, the boat was also a mystery.

Mr. Kasten, who practiced for 40 years as a senior partner in an Edmonton consulting engineering firm, has written a book about this venture, entitled The Captain’s Course. In it the APEGGA life member describes how the tractors came to be at the bottom of the lake, and details the various and usually futile efforts to reclaim them.

Storms and War

How did they end up in the lake in the first place? First, it’s useful to know that the waves in Slave Lake are legendary. In the 1960s a Fisheries Department boat was caught in a storm that drove it ashore — and right over the beach and into the trees.

Ours is a war story, of sorts. A tug boat towing a flotilla of barges was caught in one of the lake’s sudden and vicious summer storms in July 1942. The barges were carrying the six tractors, two road graders and other supplies to Norman Wells, where they were to be used in building the Canol Pipeline.

About six months had passed since the attack on Pearl Harbor and the need for the equipment was seen as urgent. The U.S. was deeply concerned about the security, or lack of it, of Alaska.

As a consequence, the Alaska Highway was built in 1942, along with the Canol Pipeline, which was to bring oil from Norman Wells to Whitehorse. There, a refinery — made up of bits and pieces scrounged from all over North America — was assembled (The PEGG, November 1994).

The consortium Bechtel-Price-Callahan was contractor on Canol, under the direction of the U.S. Army.

The flotilla was crossing the lake from Fort Resolution, where the Slave River empties into its west end and where the Mackenzie River begins. The captain had a premon-ition a storm was afoot. But because of the urgency, the flotilla proceeded.

The wind from the north-west had some 60 miles of open water to sweep across. And sweep it did.

The tugboat captain turned around and sought refuge in the lee of Burnt Island, largest of a group of islands along the south shore. He was forced to cut his tow line and set the barges adrift.

Once the storm abated, the barges were found driven up onto the windward shore of the lake. But their cargo was gone.

The exhaust pipes of the road graders were visible above the waters of the lake, but the bulldozers and all the other supplies were lost. The graders were easy to recover. The loss of the tractors, however, was seen as a major blow to the war effort, and the U.S. Army wanted them back.

NRC Gives it a Try

The National Research Council of Canada came to the rescue. The NRC employed two young scientists who had developed their magnetic gradiometer for detecting iron and steel objects under water. The device, intended to search for submarines, had found spent German torpedoes off Bedford Basin in Halifax (Beaver Magazine, September 1945).

One of the scientists, Regina native Dr. Claude Kitchener Jones, 25, was assigned to initiate an autumn search of Great Slave Lake, under the direction of the U.S. Army.

Storms hampered summer search efforts. After the lake froze over, the gradiometer was housed in a caboose towed behind a military snow vehicle.

On March 31, 1943, a bulldozer was found. On April 1 the sea anchor was found. The tractor was raised by a tripod of heavy beams and on April 18 it was started up and driven.

Dr. Jones worked out a schedule of further searches but the wartime urgency had passed and the U.S. Army decided to terminate further searches. The NRC was paid $10,000 for its work, which was about what it had spent.

The gradiometer was classified as top secret until February 1957. Commercial variations, called magnet-ometers, were available by 1959. Only a few efforts at salvage were made before then.

The Kasten Connection

Then along came Mr. Kasten. He became involved through Mac and Mac Steeplejack, a small Toronto firm which had relocated in Edmonton in 1959 with the aim of eventually salvaging the remaining five bulldozers. Its principals were Claud McDonald and Don McCallum, and they had one employee, Eddie LeBlanc.

The firm enlisted the support of the local Ironworkers Union, and eventually came into contact with a former RCAF electronics expert named Harry Hubbard. He could operate a magnetometer.

For summer searches, a borrowed magnetometer was attached to the wing of a bush plane. In May 1960 signals were noted. A spruce bough tossed from the airplane marked the spot. On May 7 a tractor was recovered, and then on May 8 a steel boat (later identified as the City of New Orleans) was found.

The recovered tractor was lost for the second time in its life, due to the uncertainty of the ice. It was finally recovered on July 12, was soon put back into working order, and was eventually sold for about $5,000.

The City of New Orleans, it would turn out, had been brought to the North as a Canol project tow boat and was apparently lost in a storm. It was partially raised and an effort was made to drag it along the lake bottom to Fort Resolution. But another of the lake’s infamous storms came up and it had to be cut loose.

Harry Hubbard and Mr. Kasten met in 1962 in Mr. Kasten’s office, and persuaded the firm to purchase a magnetometer, which they would rent to the salvage efforts. A salvage company, Edmonton (later Northern) Search and Salvage was formed for the search.

Mr. Kasten spent a lot of fascinating time in the North. He also learned new skills, not the least of which are spiling — a method of determining just what length of plank would fill a curved and twisted gap in a ship’s hull — and how to steam the plank so it could be bent and twisted into shape. This was necessary when the salvage company bought a wooden boat, the Sant’Anna, from a Catholic mission. Several planks on the lower hull needed replacing.

There were the abundant wild berries that took him back to his Prairie boyhood.

Although portions of many summers and winters were spent in the salvage effort, no further tractors were recov-ered. They are still at the bottom of the lake, awaiting other adventurous souls.

Mr. Kasten says the water is very cold and clear, so corro-sion is minimal. It’s been 63 years and yet, once recovered, chances are the bulldozers will be almost as good as new.

Any takers on giving the search another go?

Mr. Kasten’s book is self-published. It is available at the University of Alberta Bookstore, Greenwood’s Bookshoppe and other area shops, or by contacting him at 780-483-8255.