Mystery Man of The
Alaska Highway

Charles Bedaux, Friend of Kings and Princes Set Out to Conquer the Northern
Wilderness With Cowboys, Tanks, Rubber Rafts and a Lady’s Maid—A New
Sidelight on the Now Famed Alaska Highway.

Former field officer for the Hudson's
Bay Company, Mr. Godsell knows this
region intimately. Seven years before the
mysterious Bedaux expedition invaded
these fastnesses, he slashed the first 300-
mile link in the Alaska Highway between
Fort St. John and Fort Nelson and later
crossed Alaska and the Arctic Rockies by
_dog-team after establishing Aklavic as the
“metropolis” of the Western Arctic. The |
following story is from his new book:
“Romance of the Alaska Highway’ just

published.

NO GLITTERING bells or silver tinsel
decorated the Christmas trees when Uncle
Sam’s doughboys headed north from Fort
St. John to slash the Alaska Highway
through the pine forests of the upper Peace.
Instead gasoline cans hung in rusty disarray

from spreading
conifers — mute
testimony of the
futile efforts of
Charles F. Bedaux,
friend of the Duke
of Windsor, to
explore the do-
main of the moun-
tain goat and
grizzly. Whitened
bones of prairie
broncs, picked
clean by prowling
wolves and coy-
otes; twisted gears
of caterpillar trac-
tors embedded in
the clutching grip
of quaking mus-
keg and the de-
flated remnants of
rubber rafts tells
of the retreat of the Napoleon of the
Rockies from the saw-toothed ranges through
which brown-shirted doughboys have just
completed the sixteen hundred mile Alaska
Highway.

It was back in the summer of 34 when
Charles F. Bedaux invaded the region that
has now become an important link in allied
war strategy. Alaska seemed a long way
off in those days and nobody could have
foreseen the day when an Austrian house-
painter would set the world aflame.

From Dawson Creek near Pouce Coupe,

Charles
of the expedition, who
died by his own hand
last winter while United

leader

Bedaux,

States authorities were
preparing to indict him
for treason.

TWELFTH EDITION

60 miles to the southward, a de luxe expedi-
tion such as the North had never seen was
preparing to launch itself upon the wilder-
ness. A mysterious expedition that was
going to show insular old-timers, trappers,
traders and pioneer sod-busters something
new in exploration. Equipped with tractor
tanks, rubber pontoons, truck loads of shin-
ing suitcases and champagne, a lady’s maid,
a uniformed wireless operator, camera-men
and herds of capering prairie broncs, stocky
Charles F. Bedaux, with sun-tanned face
and pleasing manners, told inquiring re-
porters in throaty French accents of his
plans.

“Tt’s fun to do things others call impos-
sible,” Bedaux flashed his magnetic smile.
“Everyone says to take a fleet of automo-
biles through the unmapped Rockies can’t
be done. I say it can! The Government
hasn’t much faith in me,” he laughed, “but
I've done the impossible before.”

The reporters smiled.

“When Citreon crossed Africa in cater-
pillar tractors,” he explained, “I said it could
be done in automobiles. They said I was
crazy. Said the desert was difficult even for
caterpillars. I took five passenger cars and
went across. Now everybody’s doing it.”

Well . . . Citreon crossing Africa in
caterpillar tractors is a different proposition
to scaling the saw-toothed Rockies with
these clumsy vehicles, wallowing through
unending miles of gripping muskeg and
shouldering through primeval forest pierced
only by the runways of the fox, wolf and
grizzly.

“Who was this magnetic Charles Bedaux
who travelled like some Oriental potentate
and tossed money around with princely
splendour?” marooned settlers asked them-
selves, and what was the object of this
mysterious incursion.

Like Halley’s comet streaking across the
heavens, the name of this mercurial French-
man flashed from time to time across the
headlines. A nine dollar a week itinerant
waiter in New York, his first job after land-
ing from his native France with only a few
dollars in his jeans, had been washing bottles
and glasses in a waterfront saloon. Then
he’d worked as sandhog on the East River
tunnel, and later patented an efficiency
squeeze system to exact the last ounce of
sweat from the worker that had earned him

By
PHILIP H. GODSELL

F.B.G.S.

Author of “Arctic Trader’ and ‘The
Romance of the Alaska Highway,” just
released by Ryerson Press, Toronto.

*

labour’s undying hatred and netted him un-
told millions, making him the leader of a
fashionable international set, friend of
money barons, ambassadors and princes,
whom he entertained with regal splendour
in his magnificent French chateau.

It was after this mysterious trip to the
Northwest when Wallis Warfield Simpson
fled through the night to seek sanctuary
in his famous Chateau de Cande that
Bedaux first attained world fame. Behind
those battlemented walls the exiled Duke
of Windsor and the lady he loved defied
the edicts of mitred bishops and rounded
out a romance that caused a throne to totter.
Advance agent for Windsor’s trip to in-
vestigate the ways of the American working
man two years later, labour’s angry protests
echoed through the nation against the man
who'd devised the hated squeeze-system—
and the trip was off!

After the fall of France, Bedaux and his
beautiful American-born wife were con-
fined in the monkey house at the Bois de
Boulogne zoo by the Nazis. Escaping, he
next showed up in Africa where, prior to
the American occupation, he was living in
luxury with a large staff at the Aletti Hotel
in Algiers, shunned by Britons and Ameri-
cans alike as an active pro-Vichyite. In the

Map showing how route of Bedaux party almost
paralleled the important Alaska Military High-

way, built later through the same terrain.

Page Fifty-three