THE CRUELEST MILES
The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men
in a Race Against an Epidemic
Gay Salisbury & Laney Salisbury
W. W. Norton & Company
NEW YORK LONDON
to Dorothea Boothe
Contents
MAP OF ALASKA
SERUM ROUTE
THE ROUTE OF THE 1925 SERUM RUN
PHOTOS
PROLOGUE: Icebound
1: Gold, Men, and Dogs
2: Outbreak
3: Quarantine
4: Gone to the Dogs
5: Flying Machines
6: Hunters of the North
7: The "Rule of the 40s"
8: Along the Yukon River
9: Red Tape
10: The Ice Factory
11: Cold Glory
12: Saved!
EPILOGUE: End of the Trail
AUTHOR'S NOTE
APPENDIX A
APPENDIX B: THE 1925 SERUM RUN PARTICIPANTS
SOURCE NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Major Collections of Primary Sources
Government Publications
Principal Newspapers: 1925
Books
Articles
Select Interviews
Web Sites
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
"He who gives time to the study of the history of Alaska, learns that the dog, next to man, has been the most important factor in its past and present development." — Alaska Judge James Wickersham, 1903
"There was no line of retreat, no going back and covering the same ground twice." — Fridtjof Nansen on naming his expedition Fram to mean "Forward"
"Well, all I know about dogs is not much, but when I was up in Alaska...their whole existence tangles around dogs...the backbone of the arctic is a dog's backbone." —Will Rogers's last column, recovered from the wreck of his fatal plane crash in Alaska, August 1935
COPYRIGHT
Copyright © 2003 by Gay Salisbury and Laney Salisbury
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Manufacturing by the Haddon Craftsmen, Inc.
Book design by Brooke Koven
Production manager: Amanda Morrison
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Salisbury, Gay.
The cruelest miles: the heroic story of dogs and men in a race against an epidemic / Gay Salisbury, Laney Salisbury
p. cm.
includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-10: 0393019624
ISBN-13: 978-0393019629
1. Diphtheria—Alaska—Nome. 2. Sled dogs. I. Salisbury, Laney.
II. Title.
RA644D6S25 2003
614-5’123’097986-dc21 2002156444
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company, Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London WIT3QT
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
Map of Alaska
Serum Route
The Route of the 1925 Serum Run
PHOTOS
A Nome dog driver with one of his best friends. (Authors' collection)
A passenger ship carrying miners eager to reach gold-rush Nome. (B. B. Dobbs, authors' collection)
The SS Ohio steaming through the ice of the Bering Sea. (B. B. Dobbs, Alaska Historical Library/PCA 12-200)
Springtime in Nome atop ice jams in the Snake River. (National Maritime Museum/Gl 1.22792A)
The mouth of the Snake River and Nome's Sandspit in the background where a population of Eskimos lived. (Photograph courtesy of Terrence Cole)
Miners working the golden sands of Nome in the summer of 1900. (National Maritime Museum/Gl 1.214A)
Unloading acres of freight on the Nome beach in 1900. (Leonhard Seppala Collection, Accession # 68-41-90, Alaska and Polar Regions Department, Rasmuson Library, UAF)
(Top) Partners mine the beach with only a rocker and a shovel. (Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum, Nome, Alaska)
(Bottom) The first ship to arrive in the summer often had to park at the edge of the ice pack, relying on dog teams to haul freight, mail, and passengers miles back to Nome's frozen shore. (B. B. Dobbs, authors' collection)
A five-dog team hauling a Nome water barrel. (Photograph courtesy of Terrence Cole)
An Eskimo woman cooking on the Sandspit. (Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum, Nome, Alaska)
Known as the "'Best Boatmen of the Bering," the King Islanders land on Nome's shore. (Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum, Nome, Alaska)
A portrait of a skilled hunter and the ancient art of making snowshoes. (Glenbow Archives/ ND-1-51)
Men dig out from another blizzard in front of Nome's tallest landmark, St. Joseph's Church, whose electric cross atop the steeple was a beacon for lost travelers on the trail. (Powell Collection, Accession # 64-43-299, Alaska and Polar Regions Department, Ras-muson Library, UAF)
There's no place like Nome. (Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)
One of the hazards of living in Nome was the delivery of frozen mail. (Lulu Fairbanks Collection, Accession # 68-69-1633, Alaska and Polar Regions Department, Rasmuson Library, UAF)
More than 100 of Nome's best sled dogs ship out to France in 1915 on a secret mission to aid French troops cut off from supplies and ammunition in the deep snows of the Vosges Mountains, some receiving the Croix de Guerre medals of honor in battle. (Glenbow Archives/Lomen Collection/NC-l-1165i)
Sled dogs of Alaska were depleted in numbers during the war years but made a brief but triumphant comeback. (Glenbow Archives/Lomen Collection/ NC-1-881)
Governor Scott C. Bone, center, standing in front of the Governor's mansion in Juneau during the winter of 1925. (Winter & Pond, Photographer, Alaska State Library/PCA 87-1259)
Dr. Curtis W. Welch and nurses Anna Carlson, Emily Morgan, and Bertha Saville serving Nome's only hospital. (Reprinted from the Boston Evening Transcript, February 3, 1925)
Diphtheria antitoxin was manufactured by the H.K. Mulford Company since 1894 in the first laboratory in the United States to produce the precious serum. By 1925, the company's super-concentrated antitoxin packed a stronger punch. (Courtesy of Merck & Co., Inc.)
Emily Morgan as Quarantine Nurse posted the dreaded diphtheria notices on the homes where suspected and confirmed cases resided, with the warning "Do Not Enter." (Authors' collection)
Seppala was thought to hold a hypnotic power over his dogs: "He just clucked at them every now and then, and they would lay into their collars harder than I've ever seen dogs do before." (Glenbow Archives/Lomen Collection/NC-1-994)
Cartoons such as the "Grim Reaper" appeared daily in newspapers across the country, illustrating the drama unfolding in the north. This one appeared on February 3, 1925, in The New York Evening Post.
Balto was greeted by the Quackenbush twins of Seattle and other members of the welcoming committee in March of 1925 before he went to Hollywood to become a "film star." (Cleveland Press Collection, Cleveland State University)
Presumed dead, Togo walks into Nome more than a week after his teammates' return, missing all the fuss over Balto crossing the finish line with the serum. (Reuel Griffin Collection, Accession # 59-845-783, Alaska a
nd Polar Regions Department, Rasmuson Library, UAF)
Balto poses for sculptor Frederick G. R. Roth while on his vaudeville tour of New York City, July 1925, for the statue in New York City that would immortalize him. (Cleveland Public Library)
"The World's Most Famous Dog" receives the key to the City of Los Angeles in the shape of a dog bone from its mayor, with silent-film star Mary Pickford, on the steps of City Hall, March 1925. (Photograph courtesy of Matt Morgan)
Seppala bids farewell to his ailing Togo, December 5, 1929. (Photograph by Ralph Morril, Peabody Museum, Yale University)
(Top) Togo's obituary ran in The New York Sun on December 6, 1929, with the above photo and headline.
(Bottom) Balto's obituary ran in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Cleveland Press on March 15, 1933, with the above photo and headline.
Balto's teammates enjoying retirement at Cleveland's Brookside Zoo, 1927. (Cleveland Press Collection, Cleveland State University)
Liska, mother of Suggen and grandmother of Togo, whose progeny contributed to setting the standard for the breed as recognized by the American Kennel Club in 1930 and officially introduced two years later as the "Siberian Husky." (Glenbow Archives/Lomen Collection/NC-1-672)
PROLOGUE: Icebound
Passengers boarding the last boat out of Nome before the ice completely closes in and leaves the town icebound for seven months. (Photograph courtesy of Terrence Cole)
"We are prisoners in a jail of ice and snow. The last boat may be justifiably considered to have gone and this little community is left to its own resources, alone with the storms, alone with the darkness and chill of the North."
- Nome Chronicle
Curtis Welch was the only doctor for hundreds of miles along this forgotten edge of the Bering Sea, and for the past eighteen years he had watched winter descend suddenly, as it tends to do up in the far north. There were just two seasons here, they said: winter and the Fourth of July. Winters were at least seven months long in Nome, and the other seasons came and went within a few short weeks. From July to October, the Bering Sea was free of ice and the town was open to steamboats and schooners that sailed in from Seattle, the closest major port, about 2,400 miles and fourteen days away to the south. By early November, the Bering Sea would be frozen over until the following spring and the light would be nearly drained from the sky. The Victoria, usually the first passenger ship to arrive in spring and the last to leave in the fall, would have unloaded its cargo and headed south, leaving the town cut off from the world save for one route: a dogsled trail that linked the town through the Interior of Alaska to the ice-free ports in the southeast.
The unrelenting cold came on suddenly and violently, with blizzards that lasted for days and brought about an extreme isolation that could sap the determination of the hardiest soul. Each fall, nearly half the town's population left aboard the last ships of the season and stayed away until spring. And yet, Welch stayed behind. He had done so each year except once when he left on a short stint to work as a stateside doctor during the Great War. Welch had fallen for Alaska from the moment he arrived in 1907, and his fondness had grown over the years. He had once written to his sister back home in New Haven, Connecticut, that the big country provided plenty of room for him to stretch his soul.
From the time Welch was a young boy he had felt a distinct sense of otherness, and while he still found even the smallest social gesture a task—he was known to leave a dinner party when the conversation was just getting going—the boundless Alaskan space was heaven-sent. He had found himself at last, he wrote.
He was fifty now, the golden blond hair white, standing up in shocks. He looked forward to the town's annual exodus, and to his solitude.
At any time of year, Nome was a distant place, a speck on the map of America's last frontier, that vast territory of Alaska stretching out over nearly 600,000 square miles—an area as big as England, France, Italy, and Spain combined. At one end, in the southeast, were the capital, Juneau, and the territory's year-round ice-free ports. At the other end, to the northwest, was Nome. In all its parts, Alaska defied exaggeration. To the west, active volcanoes spewed smoke over a rugged North Pacific Coast, and to the east, glaciers the size of Rhode Island hovered over fjords. In the Interior, the heart of the territory, North America's tallest peak, Mount McKinley, reached up through the clouds over an endless expanse of timber. A traveler in the early 1900s said that one would have to spend a lifetime in Alaska to fully understand it, to catch the seasons' change over four climatic zones or to smell the sweet cold air as it hustled across the frozen sea. And perhaps, by the end of that lifetime, one would finally reach Nome.
In the early 1920s, Nome was the northwesternmost city in North America, a former gold rush boomtown that had lost its glitter years before. It sat 2 degrees south of the Arctic Circle on the southern shore of the Seward Peninsula, a windswept fist of land that jutted two hundred miles out into the Bering Sea. It was closer to Siberia than to any other major town in Alaska, and a little further north, on a rare, clear day in this foggy, storm-ridden world, one could see across the Bering Strait to Russia, fifty-five miles away. The international date line was a few miles off the westernmost tip of the peninsula, and one could literally see tomorrow.
From the second floor of his modest corner apartment above the Miners & Merchants Bank on Front Street, Welch and his wife, Lula, had front-row seats to the town's elaborate winter preparations. The Victoria was gone and the last ship of the fall season of 1924, the Alameda, sailed in with the town's winter supplies. It sat heavy in the water a mile and a half off the coast at the "roadstead," as near as a ship could get to shore without running aground. Nome had neither dock nor safe harbor, and the lighters and launches had to maneuver through the surf and out to the great ship before turning back to shore with their precious cargo.
On Front Street, which ran parallel to the sea, gangs of Eskimo longshoremen unloaded the cargo, which they stacked up along the waterfront and readied for storage. There were boxes of dried fruit and frozen turkeys, mountains of coal, and crates filled with butter and tea. The work went on all day and into the night. Horse carriages and wheelbarrows moved down Front Street to the hulking wooden warehouses along the shore of the Snake River on the west side of town. There was room enough to store supplies for Nome's 1,400-odd residents, as well as for many of the 10,000 other Alaskans living in scattered villages and small mining camps of the Seward Peninsula and beyond.
The town had become the region's commercial hub, and many Alaskans traveled here through the winter to buy everything from hardware to curtains and coal. If they took ill, they ended up in the care of Welch and his four nurses at Maynard Columbus Hospital, which had twenty-five beds and was considered the best-equipped medical institution in northwestern Alaska.
Front Street was never busier than in the days before the last ship sailed out. Its wooden planks creaked and its sidewalks sagged from the human traffic headed down to the waterfront. Eggs were stored in vats of brine and turkeys were laid out in cold caches built behind every home, and if the missus ran out of storage space, she could always walk down to Front Street and make a last-minute deal for a little extra room in one of the trading posts.
Children came home from the tundra with buckets filled with the last of the season's wild berries; these would be turned into preserves or better still, into cordials, which were technically illegal since Prohibition was the law of the land. Miners who had spent the summer prospecting for gold in the hills beyond Nome returned in knee-high rubber boots and woolen breeches and waited in the hotels and coffee shops to ship out. Those who stayed behind traded in their boots for warm, waterproof Native footwear called mukluks.
The U.S. Marshal was known to hand out government-issued blue tickets, which were exit visas for the insane, the destitute, and the criminally inclined. Dallying was firmly discouraged, for the Alameda was the only way out, and the captain could hardly risk being trapped in for the winter. The ice was the
final arbiter: there was no higher authority.
Nome's permanent Eskimo population lived a mile and a half west of town on a sandbar across the mouth of the Snake River called the Sandspit, and they readied for winter as they had for centuries. Those without jobs as laborers in Nome traveled down the Bering coast with their nets to fish for a last batch of salmon or char, and the women would go to work with their curved steel knives, or ulus, and hang the fish up on drying racks to cure in the cold sea air. If they came upon a seal on one of their frequent trips up north, they would shoot it, load it onto their wide, skin-covered boats (umiaks), and, after a rough ride over the waves, bring it home. There it would be skinned to make mukluks and its blubber would be cut, eaten, or rendered into oil for food or fuel.
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