The story of Fort McMurray is one of long hibernation followed by rapid growth. The Athabasca oilsands development from the 1960s onward turned it from a sleepy little northern frontier town into Alberta’s most explosive boom city. But it did awake briefly during the Second World War to act as the jumping-off point for a multi-million-dollar pipeline construction project described by its American contractor as “one of the largest projects of its kind and certainly unrivalled in the north.”

At the beginning of 1942, Fort McMurray was a railway outpost with little more than one gas pump, a rundown hotel, a few stores, no highway link to the rest of the province, and about 1,000 residents. For 17 years before that, private developers such as the International Bitumen Company and Abasand Oils had achieved some success retrieving oil from the oilsands. But their ventures faltered as commercial enterprises: there was no indication then that future large-scale commercial exploitation of the oilsands would eventually cause the permanent population of Fort McMurray to swell to more than 40,000.

When Japanese forces occupied parts of the United States-controlled Aleutian Islands off the Alaskan coast in June 1942, fears of Japanese invasion spurred the U.S. military to undertake building a 2,500-kilometre pipeline to ensure steady supply of gasoline to Alaskan bases. Fort McMurray became the staging ground for what was code-named the CANOL (“Canadian Oil”) pipeline construction project, as more than 3,000 U.S. troops began arriving by train during the summer of 1942 to establish a base they called Camp Prairie. They commandeered every available boat and barge to carry equipment and supplies 2,000 kilometres north along the Athabasca, Slave and Mackenzie rivers to a drilling site at Norman Wells in the Northwest Territories. The pipeline was to pump crude from Norman Wells to a new refinery in Whitehorse. Petroleum products would then be sent through subsidiary pipelines to the Alaskan communities of Skagway and Fairbanks, and to Watson Lake in the Yukon.

It took just twenty months to build the pipeline. More than 30,000 construction workers – mostly American civilians and roughly the amount of skilled labour that present-day Fort McMurray is said to be lacking – were hired by California-based Bechtel-Price-Callahan to complete construction of the project. Crude oil started flowing from Norman Wells to Whitehorse in April 1944. It had been flowing for just 11 months when the U.S. war department issued an order abruptly terminating the project – the Japanese invasion of Alaska had failed to materialize and the planners thought it prudent to scrap what a U.S. Senate committee would later describe as a $134 million “junkyard monument to military stupidity.”

The population of Fort McMurray dropped back down to 1,100 when the American soldiers went home. At that point, there was some renewed interest in developing the Athabasca oilsands commercially because of growing concern about Canada’s dependence on foreign sources of oil. However, this changed dramatically in February 1947 when Imperial Oil discovered a huge conventional crude oil reservoir near Leduc. As a result of this and other conventional crude discoveries, which were easier and cheaper to recover, oilsands development and the growth of Fort McMurray stalled for several years.

As for the abandoned CANOL project, much of the pipe and some of the associated buildings and equipment were salvaged. The Whitehorse refinery was relocated to Edmonton and pressed into service to accommodate the barrels of crude flowing out of Leduc. What was left of CANOL – a 363-kilometre stretch of overgrown roadway – was designated by the Northwest Territories government as a hiking heritage trail in 1996.

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