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    Mushers and dogs braved a horrific Alaska winter to deliver lifesaving serum 100 years ago

    Among the events celebrating the centennial of the 1925 “Great Race of Mercy” are lectures, a dog-food drive and a reenactment of the final leg of the relay, all organized by the Nome Kennel Club.

    Mushers and dogs braved a horrific Alaska winter to deliver lifesaving serum 100 years ago
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    Representative Image 

    MARK THIESSEN

    The Alaska Gold Rush town of Nome faced a bleak winter. It was hundreds of miles from anywhere, cut off by the frozen sea and unrelenting blizzards, and under siege from a contagious disease known as the “strangling angel” for the way it suffocated children. Now, 100 years later, Nome is remembering its saviors — the sled dogs and mushers who raced for more than five days through hypothermia, frostbite, gale-force winds and blinding whiteouts to deliver life-saving serum and free the community from the grip of diphtheria.

    Among the events celebrating the centennial of the 1925 “Great Race of Mercy” are lectures, a dog-food drive and a reenactment of the final leg of the relay, all organized by the Nome Kennel Club. “There’s a lot of fluff around celebrations like this, but we wanted to remember the mushers and their dogs who have been at the center of this heroic effort and ... spotlight mushing as a still-viable thing for the state of Alaska,” said Diana Haecker, a kennel club board member and co-owner of Alaska’s oldest newspaper, the Nome Nugget.

    “People just dropped whatever they were doing,” she said. “These mushers got their teams ready and went, even though it was really cold and challenging conditions on the trail.” Other communities are also marking the anniversary — including the village of Nenana, where the relay began, and Cleveland, Ohio, where the serum run’s most famous participant, a husky mix named Balto, is stuffed and displayed at a museum.

    Jonathan Hayes, a Maine resident who has been working to preserve the genetic line of sled dogs driven on the run by famed musher Leonhard Seppala, is recreating the trip. Hayes left Nenana on Monday with 16 Seppala Siberian sled dogs, registered descendants of Seppala’s team.

    Diphtheria is an airborne disease that causes a thick, suffocating film to develop at the back of the throat; it was once a leading cause of death for children. The antitoxin used to treat it was developed in 1890, and a vaccine in 1923; it is now exceedingly rare in the U.S. Nome, western Alaska’s largest community, had about 1,400 residents a century ago. Its most recent supply ship had arrived the previous fall, before the Bering Sea froze, without any doses of the antitoxin. Those the local doctor, Curtis Welch, had were outdated, but he wasn’t worried. He hadn’t seen a case of diphtheria in the 18 years he had practiced in the area.

    Within months, that changed. In a telegram, Welch pleaded with the U.S. Public Health Service to send serum: “An epidemic of diphtheria is almost inevitable here.” The first death was a 3-year-old boy on Jan. 20, 1925, followed the next day by a 7-year-old girl. By the end of the month, there were more than 20 confirmed cases. The city was placed under quarantine.

    West Coast hospitals had antitoxin doses, but it would take time to get them to Seattle and then onto a ship for Seward, an ice-free port south of Anchorage. In the meantime, enough for 30 people was found at an Anchorage hospital.

    It still had to get to Nome. Airplanes with open-air cockpits were ruled out as unsuited for the weather. There were no roads or trains that reached Nome.

    Instead, officials shipped the serum by rail to Nenana in interior Alaska, some 675 miles (1,086 kilometers) from Nome via the frozen Yukon River and mail trails.

    Thanks to Alaska’s new telegraph lines and the spread of radio, the nation followed along, captivated, as 20 mushers — many of them Alaska Natives — with more than 150 dogs relayed the serum to Nome. They battled deep snow, whiteouts so severe they couldn’t see the dogs in front of them, and life-threatening temperatures that plunged at times to minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 51 degrees Celsius). The antitoxin was transported in glass vials covered with padded quilts. Not a single vial broke.

    Seppala, a Norwegian settler, left from Nome to meet the supply near the halfway point and begin the journey back. His team, led by his dog Togo, traveled more than 250 miles (320 kilometers) of the relay, including a treacherous stretch across frozen Norton Sound.

    After about 5 1/2 days, the serum reached its destination on Feb. 2, 1925. A banner front-page headline in the San Francisco Chronicle proclaimed: “Dogs victors over blizzard in battle to succor stricken Nome.” The official record listed five deaths and 29 illnesses. It’s likely the toll was higher; Alaska Natives were not accurately tracked.

    AP
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