When Dr Curtis Welch checked on a very sick three-year-old patient who had been admitted to his tiny hospital on January 20, 1925, his worst fears were realised. A thick, slimy membrane had appeared on the toddler, Billy Barnett’s tonsils and there were reddish lesions in his mouth. The rise in tonsillitis cases in Nome, Alaska – some of them fatal – already had Welch worried. But Barnett’s disturbing new symptoms confirmed the doctor’s suspicions.
It could only be diphtheria, an ancient and gruesome bacteria which suffocated its victims by infesting their windpipes with mucus.
Fortunately, there was a cure. In the 1890s, Emil von Behring – the very first winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine – had developed an antitoxin using serum obtained from immune animals. Unfortunately, Welch only had a few vials of expired antitoxin and Nome would be largely cut off from the rest of the world till the Alaskan summer, when the sea ice surrounding the ex-mining town thawed for a few brief months.
Welch knew he could not wait that long, and on January 22, with the approval of the town council, he sent an urgent telegram to the United States Public Health Service in Washington, DC. A diphtheria epidemic was “almost inevitable” if he did not receive one million units of antitoxin as soon as possible. “Mail is only form of transportation,” he wrote, in reference to the dog team relay which enabled a year-round postal service to Nome.
The events of the next month would put Nome – and the newly acquired state of Alaska – on the front page of most leading newspapers around the world. Advances in technology allowed readers to follow the plight of the town’s 3,000 residents in almost real time. But – despite the protestations of a few budding airmen – there was nothing modern about the way the town was saved.
While Welch and his chief nurse, Sister Emily Morgan, dealt with the rise of cases as best they could (imposing a quarantine, employing age-old remedies and only using their limited antitoxin supplies in extreme circumstances), people near and far scrambled to answer their cry for help.
While medical staff all over the country searched hospital inventories for supplies of antitoxin, officials debated how to get them to Nome. Before any antitoxin had even been located, Mark Summers – a Nome town councillor and the superintendent of the Hammond Consolidated Gold Fields – had come up with a plan to get the serum 1,085km (674 miles) from Nenana (the end of the railway line) to Nome.
Dog or plane?
Summers believed that “the entire route could be covered by two fast dogsled teams” – one heading west from Nenana and the other starting at Nome and travelling east to pick up the relay partway, write Gay and Laney Salisbury in The Cruellest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic. And Summers knew the one man who could complete the treacherous western leg of the journey, from Nome to Nulato and back again. The legendary Norwegian musher (the leader of a team of dogs) – Leonhard Seppala, who, together with his trusty lead dog Togo, had won multiple dog races and toppled several long-distance records – just happened to work for Summers.
While most in the council voted in favour of Summers’s plan, Mayor George Maynard urged them to consider a second option: flying in the serum. While this would be quicker if all went according to plan, the “board members were openly skeptical” of the chances of an open-cockpit plane making it all the way to Nome, write the Salisburys. Alaska’s first winter flight had been completed the previous year only – over a much shorter distance and in far warmer weather.
After the meeting, Summers visited Seppala to ask him to prepare for the adventure of a lifetime. Maynard, meanwhile, set about persuading the powers-that-be to consider a mercy flight.
While all this had been going on, the chief surgeon of the Anchorage Railroad Hospital located 300,000 units of serum in Alaska itself. At about the same time, a further 1.1 million units were cobbled together from various hospitals on the West Coast of the mainland US.
The drugs Welch needed had been found. But the situation in Nome was worsening by the day. By January 24, Welch and Morgan had counted 20 confirmed cases and a further 50 suspected ones. Another complication was the weather. “A continental high-pressure system had pushed temperatures in the interior to their lowest levels in 20 years,” according to the Salisburys.
Mayor Maynard found plenty of support for his aeroplane idea. Dan Sutherland, Alaska’s representative in Congress, had been working to bring aviation to the state for years and in Nome’s crisis he sensed an opportunity.
Sutherland leaned on William Fentress Thompson, the longtime editor of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner in Fairbanks, close to Nenana, and the founder of the Fairbanks Airplane Corporation, one of the pioneers of Alaskan aviation. Finding a plane, a rickety one, was no problem for Thompson, and – with his regular aviators out of town – he also managed to source a willing pilot: Detective Roy Darling, a Justice Department official who had hung up his flying goggles after suffering permanent injuries in a plane crash six years before.
Thompson abandoned all objectivity when he penned the paper’s lead story on January 26: “The atmosphere is not right for flying, no flier would bet on such days as these … EVERYTHING is against the game, yet the emergency undoubtedly exists, and Fairbanks [is] in the eyes of the Flying World, and Nome is our neighbour and our pal. What you goin’ to do? The answer is GO.”
Maynard, Sutherland and Thompson had made a compelling argument for flying the serum in. But the final decision would be made by one man only: Alaska’s Governor Scott C Bone. Bone was passionate about the potential of aviation to transform Alaska’s fortunes and he wanted to say yes to the airmen. But he was also a practical man who understood that getting the serum safely to Nome was the top priority.
After weighing all the factors – the weather and the state of both plane and pilot – he made his choice. Flying the serum in was definitely the more glamorous and exciting choice. But Bone decreed that the first 300,000 units would travel to Nome by dog sledge. As the Salisburys write: “At a time when American innovation and ingenuity were changing the world with production lines and radio communication, Bone had put his faith in the folk wisdom of Alaska’s natives.”
All systems go
On the evening of January 26, the vials of serum – packed in a padded box and wrapped in a heavy quilt – were carefully loaded onto the train in Anchorage. When they arrived in Nenana, almost 24 hours later, Wild Bill Shannon and his team of nine dogs (led by Blackie, a five-year-old husky with a white cross on his chest) were raring to go. With the mercury dropping to 50 degrees Celsius (-58 degrees Fahrenheit) below zero, Shannon should probably have waited till morning before embarking on the 52-mile (84km) journey to Tolovana. But you do not earn the nickname Wild Bill through prudence and, after kissing his wife Anna goodbye, Shannon and his dogs set off into the icy darkness.
Poorly maintained trails which had become impassable forced Shannon to travel on the frozen Tanana River – colder, and even more dangerous than sledging on land due to the risk of falling through the ice. As the hours dragged on, Wild Bill and his dogs began to suffer. Shannon later told a reporter that he became “fairly stupefied by the cold”. At 3am, after 30 miles (48km) on the trail, he reached a roadhouse belonging to one Johnny Campbell. The thermometer outside the door read -62F (-52C).
Four hours sitting in front of a stove and drinking coffee were enough to get Wild Bill back on the trail, but he was forced to leave three of his dogs behind. Cub, Jack and Jet would all end up dying from exertion. At 11 the next morning, thanks to the heroic efforts of his six remaining dogs, Shannon finally reached Tolovana. As Shannon said a few days later, “What those dogs did on the run to Nome is above valuation. I claim no credit for myself. The real heroes of that run were the dogs of the team that did the pulling.”
After the serum had warmed up in the roadhouse, another musher took over. Edgar Kallands had just completed a gruelling 150-mile (241km) mail run, but when he was asked to help get the serum to Nome, he did not hesitate. Many years later, he would look back on his decision with wonder: “What do you notice when you’re 20 years old? You don’t notice a thing. I think about it now. How did I survive?”
Over the next five hours, Kallands and his team of dogs carried the serum 31 miles (50km) to the roadhouse at Manley Hot Springs. Three-and-a-half days later, when the serum rolled in to Shaktoolik, 15 more mushers – and their respective dog teams – had taken it a further 422 miles (679km). The bitterly cold and windy conditions meant there had been more than a few close shaves.
But the parcel was still intact and, when Leonhard Seppala, newly arrived from Nome, took over on the evening of January 31, Nome was just 169 miles (272km) away. There were just two problems: the most treacherous section of the trail lay ahead, and the weather had just taken a turn for the worse, with a giant northeast storm brewing. Seppala would have to decide whether to attempt a nocturnal crossing of the Norton Sound – an inlet in the Bering Sea, measuring 200km by 150km (124 miles by 93 miles), which is notorious for its unstable sea ice and gale-force winds – or to take the long way round along the coastline.
‘The dogs always came first’
Mark Summers had ordered him to take the land route, but Seppala would make his mind up. He reached the shore as darkness fell (the sun sets at about 4pm in the Alaskan winter) and, without hesitation, headed out across the sound, fighting against strong headwinds that brought the temperature down to -85F (-65C). He had full confidence in his dogs, especially the 12-year-old lead, Togo. As one of Seppala’s friends, Frank Dufresne, related in the foreword to a book published in 1927: “They were inseparably linked … one does not speak of one without mention of the other.”
Seppala’s wife, Constance, was under no illusions: “The dogs always came first in importance … Our living room was often a place of utter confusion, littered with mukluks [sealskin boots], harnesses, dog sleds, tow lines …”
Together, Togo and Seppala had traversed more than 55,000 miles (88,514km) of trail, write the Salisburys. “They had saved each other’s live countless times crossing the Norton Sound, and despite Togo’s advanced age, Seppala still felt that wherever they went together he travelled with ‘a sense of security’.”
The darkness of the night and the howling of the wind meant Seppala could see and hear almost nothing. As author Kenneth Ungermann wrote in his 1963 account of the serum run, The Race to Nome, Seppala was “forced to rely unquestioningly on Togo and his uncanny sense of direction to lead him to safety across the dark, treacherous miles of sea ice”.
The journey was brutal – “the dogs slipped and sometimes fell and once the light hickory racing sled was blown sideways, pulling the struggling dogs with it”, adds Ungermann. But just four hours later, Seppala and his team reached the roadhouse at Isaac’s Point, on the other side of the sound.
After feeding his dogs a mix of salmon and seal blubber, Seppala retreated into the roadhouse to warm himself, and the serum, up. As the blizzard raged outside, he nabbed a few precious hours of sleep (he and his dogs had barely stopped since leaving Nome on January 28) before getting back on the trail at 2am on February 1. The weather conditions had worsened, and Seppala was forced to take a longer – but safer – route that hugged the coastline of the Seward Peninsula.
Thirteen hours later, at 3pm, Seppala reached the roadhouse at Golovin and handed the parcel to Charlie Olson, a 46-year-old quartz miner and musher who had lived all his life in the Alaskan wilderness. Finally, Seppala, Togo and the other dogs could rest – they had travelled 260 miles (418km) – from Nome to Shaktoolik and back to Golovin – in just four-and-a-half days in some of the toughest conditions imaginable.
Nome – where the number of confirmed cases had risen to 28 – was just 78 miles(126km) away, but weather conditions were worsening. While Dr Welch was desperate to receive the antitoxin, he was even more concerned that it might be lost in the blizzard. So he made the difficult call to pause the relay. Telephone calls were made to Gunnar Kaasen and Charlie Rohn – Olson was already on the trail by this time – the mushers tasked with the last two legs of the relay, ordering them to wait till conditions improved.
As Welch put it in a telegram to the Public Health Service: “Have ordered antitoxin stopped as I wish to take no chances on its freezing or being lost to save a few hours.”
There was just one snag: telephone communication in 1925 was unreliable at the best of times – more so in a blizzard. While Rohn did receive the message, Kaasen – waiting patiently for Olson’s arrival at a roadhouse at Bluff, 25 miles (40km) from Golovin – was completely unaware of the decision to pause the relay.
Kaasen, also originally from Norway, was Seppala’s understudy at the Gold Fields and he had assembled his team of 13 dogs from Seppala’s kennels. For his lead dog, Kaasen had chosen Balto, a big black husky that Seppala considered “only a fair dog”, writes Ungermann, “a good enough freighter, but without any outstanding characteristics”.
Averting disaster
When Olson and his team finally arrived at Bluff at 7pm, they made a sorry sight: Olson’s fingers were so stiff from frostbite that he could not untie the serum from the sledge, and his dogs could barely walk. They had been blown off the trail repeatedly and at one point had been hurled into a snow drift.
Kaasen did not set off immediately: he tried waiting for conditions outside to improve. But after a few hours, he went outside and hooked his dogs up to the gang line. “There wasn’t any use in waiting,” he later said.
Conditions were the worst Kaasen had experienced in 24 years in Alaska, and he soon gave up on trying to steer the dogs to Nome. In the thick onrushing snow, all he could do was put his faith in Balto and hold on tight. “I didn’t know where I was,” he said. “I couldn’t even guess.”
Kaasen struggled to keep his sledge upright in the 70mph (113km/h) winds but eventually, the effort became too much and the rig was flipped on its head. As he fumbled to right the sledge, he realised that the worst had happened: the serum had fallen off. He scrabbled around in the snow on his hands and knees until he hit something hard. There was no time to check whether the glass vials had broken. He could only get back on the trail and hope for the best.
A few miles later, the trail changed direction and suddenly Kaasen had the wind at his back. After 32 miles (51km), when he reached Port Safety – the last roadhouse before Nome and the place where he was meant to hand the serum over to Charlie Rohn – at 3am, he found the buildings completely dark. Rohn, thinking the relay was on hold, had gone to sleep.
Kaasen thought about waking Rohn. But waiting for him to hitch his dogs would delay the serum’s arrival in Nome, 21 miles (34km) away. Kaasen was feeling good, and his dogs still had fuel in the tank. Forget the plan – he would continue straight through to Nome.
At 5:30am on February 2, Kaasen made his way up Nome’s main drag and stopped outside the door of the Miners and Merchants Bank. He staggered off the sledge and collapsed next to Balto, mumbling: “Damn fine dog.”
Minutes later, Dr Welch had the parcel in his hands. Like a child at Christmas, he unwrapped the parcel: although the serum was frozen solid, miraculously, none of the vials had shattered. By 11am, the antitoxin had thawed and was ready for use. Welch and Sister Morgan wasted no time in administering doses to those who needed it most.
‘We take our hat off to the dog’
The first 300,000 units of serum were a lifesaver, but Welch knew that to stave off an epidemic he needed the larger shipment of 1.1 million units to reach him as soon as possible. After much deliberation, he wrote a telegram asking that at least half of the second shipment be sent by plane. Governor Bone initially stuck to his guns and made plans for a second dog relay. But on February 7, with the ship carrying the serum from the US mainland due to dock in Seward, near Anchorage in a few hours, he succumbed to the public and media pressure and ordered that half of the units be sent by dog relay and half by plane.
There is no doubt Bone made his decision under duress. Mayor Maynard had just been quoted in The Washington Post accusing the governor of “stand[ing] idly by while our people suffer and die and while red-blooded men are willing to fly airplanes to our relief”.
But Bone would have the last laugh. The mechanics of the Fairbanks Aviation Company could not get any of their planes to start and the 550,000 units of antitoxin sent by the dog team would prove to be Nome’s ultimate saviour. To his credit, WF Thompson, Fairbanks’s outspoken editor and aviator, was magnanimous in defeat: “The airship will go when it can, but the dog seems to go whether he can or not. We take our hat off to the DOG.”
As The New York Sun wrote after Kaasen and Balto reached Nome: “All the mechanical transportation marvels of modern times faltered in the presence of elements … Other engines might freeze and choke, but that oldest of all motors, the heart, whose fuel is blood and whose spark is courage, never stalls but once.”
Thanks to the efforts of the mushers and their dogs, a full-scale epidemic was averted. Two weeks after the first shipment of serum reached Nome, the quarantine was lifted. The official death toll was six, but Welch suspected it may have been much higher. As he said in October 1925: “I imagine there were at least a hundred cases among the Natives and no telling how many deaths in the Eskimo camps outside the city.” While the doctor and nurse treated any of them who came forward, many did not do so.
The story made global headlines, with photos of Kaasen and Balto gracing the front pages from San Francisco to London. A statue of Balto erected in New York’s Central Park remains a popular tourist attraction. And Kaasen and his dogs even appeared in a 1925, 20-minute Hollywood remake of the adventure starring Kaasen and Balto themselves.
Seppala was peeved that Kaasen and Balto had received all the media adulation. “It was almost more than I could bear when the ‘newspaper’ dog Balto received a statue for his glorious achievements,” wrote Seppala, who spent the next several years “reminding the public that he and Togo had travelled farther than any of the other teams, and that their section of the route had been by far the most dangerous”, according to the Salisburys.
Seppala would go on to become a hero in his own right, raising the profile of dog racing and winning almost every race he entered. He died in 1967.
The Airmail Act of 1925 would lead to planes gradually replacing dogs on US mail routes, with dogs working just 10 of Alaska’s 66 routes by 1941. The invention of the modern snowmobile in the 1950s, meanwhile, led common Alaskans to abandon dogs in favour of combustion engines.
But the dogs would have their day, with the inauguration of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in 1973. (Iditarod is from the language of the Athabascan people of Interior Alaska and means “distant place”.)
The prestigious race between Anchorage and Nome, which boasts a prize purse of $574,000, was inspired by the 1925 serum run and follows much of the original route. This year’s edition kicks off on March 1 in Anchorage and will last until March 16.
But before that happens, former US Marine Jonathan Hayes and a team of 16 “Seppala Siberian” sledge dogs bred by Hayes himself in Maine from the descendants of Seppala’s dogs, will be re-enacting the original serum run from Nenana to Nome, starting their journey on January 27, as part of the Centennial Seppala Expedition, the first commemorative expedition to start on the anniversary of the original serum run.
Unlike the 1925 run, the team will cover the whole run themselves – safely. This time, Hayes says, “we’ll take our time to ensure all the dogs finish it”.