More Heroism, Just Outside the Arctic Circle: How Alaskan Sled Dogs Saved Diphtheria Patients in Nome
February 2021: It’s snowing again in the Northeast, and we still endure a pandemic. This week, we passed more than 500,000 American deaths from COVID-19: in one year, more than a half-million lives were taken by a virus. Let’s draw some comfort from the story of sled dogs and their drivers, or mushers, who stopped an epidemic that could have killed 10,000 Alaskans almost 100 years ago, in February 1925.
Today, we associate sled dogs with the annual Iditarod race. But before Alaska’s gold rush began in 1897, Siberian huskies and the sleds they pulled had been the way Inuit and Northern Athabaskan Indians traveled cross country.
Dog sleds became the most reliable form of transportation for Canadians and Americans who came to the Alaska Territory seeking gold. There were few trains and fewer planes. Everyone’s mail arrived on sleds pulled by Siberian huskies.
Balto with his musher in the 1925 Serum Run, Gunnar Kassen. Wikipedia
Every year, the Iditarod race follows part of the 650-mile Iditarod Trail, a freight route made famous in January and February 1925 by some 20 mushers — Inuit, Athabaskan, grizzled prospectors--and 250 dogs. By dog sled, this trip from the freight railway station at Nenema to Nome, population then 1,400, took a month.
But the mushers who had volunteered themselves and their dogs didn’t have a month.
In Nome, children and adults were suffering an outbreak of diphtheria, a deadly bacterial infection. Without treatment, mortality among Nome’s infected would have been 100 percent. A previous outbreak had already killed the village’s entire Inuit population, who had no resistance.
In 1890, a German scientist had discovered that serum made from the blood of immunized animals contained an "antitoxin" that, when injected in patients, cured diphtheria. After a diphtheria vaccine was developed in 1913 and began to be used widely in the 1930s and 40s, the disease became rare. In 1925, diphtheria antitoxin was the only answer. Unlike some of today’s vaccines for coronavirus, antitoxin had to be kept above freezing. It had to travel in wooden boxes wrapped in skins and fur.
Beginning on Jan. 27, 1925, in relays of 24 to 52 miles, the volunteers rushed diphtheria antitoxin nearly 700 miles from the freight railroad station at Nenema to Nome’s desperately ill. It was no sightseeing tour of the Northern lights. Mushers had to urge their dogs on through 50 below cold, frostbite, blinding blizzards, headwinds so strong they lifted them and their sleds into the air, and ice that cracked under them, plunging them into freezing waters.
In a mere five and a half days, the first sled arrived in Nome with that precious, fur-muffled box of antitoxin.
The race to save lives in Nome attracted the attention of the press and the public. A crowd of photographers met that first sled and its dogs. The lead husky, 3-year old Balto, became a public hero.
In December 1925, 10 months after his run to Nome, Balto stood by during the dedication of his statue in New York’s Central Park, on a rocky outcropping near the children’s zoo. To this day, he is the only being who was present at the dedication of his monument in the Park. Children and dog walkers pass his statue every day -- thousands of them every year. In winter, snow drifts up on his statue, and children clamber onto its back.
Statue of Balto in New York City's Central Park. Wikipedia
Balto had the luck of the draw: He and the dogs and sled he led simply had been chosen to run the last leg of the race. The other mushers quietly returned home to their villages. A much longer, crueler and perilous 90-mile stretch, partly over Bering ice, had been led by another husky, 12-year old Togo, who traveled nearly 300 miles in all. Togo even retrieved the sled carrying the irreplaceable box of antitoxin when it became detached from the dog team and marooned on an ice floe. His owner, breeder and musher Leonhard Sappela, said, "I never had a better dog than Togo. His stamina, loyalty and intelligence could not be improved upon. Togo was the best dog that ever traveled the Alaska trail."
Togo did get a statue in New York, too, but not for another 76 years — in 2001. His statue stands in a playground in Seward Park on the Lower East Side, where many children had died of diphtheria. Togo’s statue is at ground level, so in snowfall, he appears to be still mushing onward. The park where his statue stands is named for Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William H. Seward, who bought Alaska from Russia in 1867 for a mere $7 million. This incredible bargain was derided as “Seward’s folly.” Good deeds concerning Alaska seem to be dismissed regularly.
A 2019 feature film, Togo, tells a much more accurate story than a silly 1995 animated movie, Balto. Togo includes some of its smart and courageous namesake’s accomplishments, like breaking a glass window to escape and return to his musher, and rescuing the priceless box of antitoxin from floating ice. An accurate account of Togo’s journey appears in Bob and Pam Thomas’ book, Leonhard Sappela: The Siberian Sled Dog and the Golden Age of Sled Dog Racing, 1908 - 1941. Curl up with it this chilly week.
Ann Marie Cunningham is a Columbia University Lipman Fellow for 2020 who will be working with the Mississippi Center for investigative Reporting. She is a veteran journalist/producer and author of a best-seller. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Technology Review, The Nation and The New Republic. Contact her at amc@mississippicir.org.