"It was impossible to get anyone to help those who were sick," wrote one survivor. "Those who were not sick were scared to death and would do nothing."
Nome's deputy marshal took charge of relief efforts, gathering up volunteers and sending them out to hunt for survivors. They had broken down doors and taken out the sickest of them, and brought in drums filled with stew to the Sandspit to feed the Eskimos. They had crashed through narrow openings into the darkened sod igloos and found entire families dead, some still sitting up in their chairs frozen in place after the fire had gone out. Others lay naked on the floor.
There was speculation that many of them had burned up with fever and stripped off their clothes to cool down. Children, some barely alive, lay between their dead parents for warmth. In one eight-day period, 162 Natives had died on the Sandspit, and a once bustling and lively community fell silent. The smoke no longer wafted up from the stovepipes, and there was no one left with strength enough to stoke the fires that had kept the igloos warm.
"Natives dying every few minutes," said one urgent dispatch from Nome to Alaskan officials.
Rescuers had to fight off starving dogs to reach the living as well as the dead. With no one left to feed them, the animals had turned on their masters. One Eskimo was found dead in the center of his dwelling with his hands frozen to his rifle, pointed toward the door. He had frozen to death trying to fend off the dogs.
In just a few weeks, the virus spread to the communities along Northwest Alaska. Relief parties moved by dogsled from village to deserted village in a desperate search for those still alive. Rescuers managed to save a girl and her infant sister, who had been trapped inside their igloo for days while starving dogs, teeth bared, paced outside. The girl had survived huddled next to her dead mother. She would occasionally put her arm out of the entrance of the igloo and scrape up a little snow, which she would warm in her mouth and then give to her sister. Another Native child was found with his feet frozen to the floor. He had sacrificed his mukluks to his younger sister.
A mission house at Pilgrim Hot Springs about fifty miles north of Nome took on the aspect of a wartime triage unit. "Were it within your power to pay me a visit," the Pilgrim missionary wrote, "you would find my house filled with orphans and sick people. Near by, in a tent, you would see seven corpses. At six miles from here, scattered in different igloos, you would see 40 other corpses. You are horrified? Hardly was the ordeal over in Nome, when I learned that my flock up here had the disease. I hurried up to help. Twenty-three were already dead. I gathered 30 in my house. Seven died on my hands. The others are convalescent. I am alone with a good man, but one old and feeble. I do not know how to take care of babies and small children. What else can we do?"
The sickness left terrible emotional scars on Nome's survivors, many of whom were housed in an old schoolhouse on Steadman and Third Avenue. There, in a gymnasium that had been turned into an aid station, two Natives committed suicide. The first hung himself from a coat-rack while his friend watched and then the other took the noose and put it around his own neck. The Nome Nugget reported that the second body was found swinging in front of a blackboard on which the Natives had written a suicide note in chalk: they wished only to end their lives quickly.
When the virus had finally run its course, volunteers began burying the dead. Bodies were removed by dogsled and piled up in abandoned houses until the spring, when a mass grave could be dug in the thawed ground. Cabins, furs, bedding, and clothes were burned as a protective measure. Dogs were shot, and for the first time in Nome's recorded history, the evening malamute chorus was silent.
The flu had taken the lives of at least one thousand people in the Nome vicinity and more than two thousand in all of Alaska. Of the three hundred children orphaned in the territory, ninety were in Nome—the large majority of them Eskimo.
The Natives were "mowed down like grass," said one missionary.
Everyone at the council meeting remembered the epidemic, and each had vivid memories of the devastation. Mayor Maynard immediately asked Welch to take charge of the situation. Instead, Welch suggested that a temporary Board of Health with the power to act independently of the town council be established. The council approved, and Maynard, Welch, and Hammon superintendent Mark Summers became the principal members of the board. Without further prompting from Welch, they all agreed on a single course of action: to lock down the town straight away. Welch suggested that every school, church, movie-house, and lodge be shut down, and that travel along the trails be strongly discouraged and banned outright for children.
One council member remembered that a card party was in full swing over at Pioneer Hall, and they agreed that someone should go over and shut it down. Then, in an effort to break the news gently to his fellow citizens and keep panic down to a minimum, Mayor Maynard decided to print up a circular detailing the facts of the epidemic as well as the first suggested steps to a total quarantine.
The meeting was over. The town leaders stood up and the health board made plans to meet again every evening until the danger had passed. It was late afternoon by the time Welch headed out. He made his way to the radio telegraph station and asked the U.S. Signal Corps officer in charge to send out two urgent bulletins: one was to be coded for all points in Alaska and would alert every major town and official, including the governor in Juneau, to Nome's desperate need for serum.
The other would go to Washington, D.C., to Welch's colleagues at the U.S. Public Health Service, which regulated the production of antitoxins and vaccines:
An epidemic of diphtheria is almost inevitable stop I am in urgent need of one million units of diphtheria antitoxin STOP Mail is only form of transportation STOP I have made application to Commissioner of Health of the Territories for antitoxin already STOP
In less than a week, Nome's plight would make the front pages of nearly every newspaper in America.
***
The quarantine began almost immediately. The Dream Theatre was closed and all social gatherings disrupted. Welch told his good friends the Walshes to pack up their belongings and head out to their isolated cabin a few miles beyond Nome and ordered them not to return until they'd heard from him.
Schoolchildren were ordered to go home, and Jean Summers-Wolf remembered much later that she and the other children knew right away that something was radically wrong. "I remember holding my breath real tight and running past any building I encountered with that big red sign quarantine, keep out."
Maynard finished composing his notice and sent it out to be posted all over town, then headed for his office at the Nome Nugget to make sure it made the next edition. He had written it carefully, but the soothing tone had failed to mask entirely the darker implications.
An epidemic of diphtheria has broken out in Nome and if proper precautions are taken there is no cause for alarm. On the other hand, if parents do not keep their children isolated from other children, the epidemic may spread to serious proportions...All children should be compelled to wash their faces and hands frequently during the day with some mild soap such as Ivory Soap. A strong soap is worse than none at all as it has a tendency to cause the face and hands to chap and crack and render them easily susceptible to the diphtheria germ...every effort will be made on the part of officials to prevent the carriers of the disease from leaving Nome and thereby contaminating the adjacent camps.
Despite their attempts to contain the disease, the health board had acted too late. Soon after Bessie's Stanley's death, her sisters, Dora and Mary, had developed membranes in their throats and their parents also appeared to have developed related symptoms. Welch treated them all "vigorously with the old serum."
By Saturday, January 24, the fourth day of the crisis, the death toll stood at four, by conservative estimates, and still there was no word of any available serum from Fairbanks, Anchorage, or Juneau, Alaska's major towns, or from Washington, D.C.
The phone in Welch's office began to ring with one parent after another calling in about a s
ick child or a loved one: Lars Rynning, the young superintendent of schools, called to say he had a sore throat and a fever of 99.6, and that he was particularly worried about an ulceration that had begun to form in his throat. His wife also complained of a bad sore throat, and both were worried about the effect all this might have on their two-month-old son.
Welch came over and examined the infant and told the Rynnings that, as near as he could tell, their son was in good health. Mother's milk contains a natural immunity to diphtheria and very young infants stand a 90 percent chance of fighting off the disease without medication. Welch was convinced that the Rynnings had been exposed to the virus and in an effort to protect their son, he placed the parents under quarantine. But he decided against giving them any of the precious serum. They were young and strong and he felt they stood a better chance of survival than most others. The medicine had to be saved for the worst cases, and there would be many more.
There was one other detail about Lars Rynning which bothered Welch: Rynning was not only the school superintendent but a teacher as well, and the chances were high that he had already come into contact with nearly every school-age child in Nome.
Welch was already feeling overwhelmed and exhausted, and there was no one around to replace him. The nearest doctor was four hundred miles away, a ten-day journey by dogsled. "My nurses are the only consultants I have," he noted in his medical report.
Emily Morgan was without doubt the most efficient and outstanding nurse in Welch's employ, and she had already proven her worth. She had had a long career in public nursing. For three years she had served with the Red Cross in a mobile hospital on the western front in France, working amid the chaos of bombs and the arrival of the dying and wounded. When the war ended she returned home to Wichita, Kansas, to continue her practice.
Morgan was forty-seven when she arrived in Nome the previous fall from Unalaska, on the Aleutian Chain, where she had provided medical care to the Native community. She was nearly a foot taller than Welch and provided a cheerful, easygoing counterpoint to her boss. She also had firsthand experience with diphtheria: she had been infected back in Wichita and spent three weeks in bed, and by the time she'd recovered from it she knew every twist and turn of its terrible progression.
It was time for Morgan to go to work. At Welch's suggestion, the health board had appointed her Quarantine Nurse, and she would go out in her heavy woolen sweater, fur parka, and knee-high fur boots to find and treat the most severe cases. She soon found herself putting up more and more of the red and black quarantine signs, which hung over the doorways and stood out against the white of the snow.
Morgan focused on the Sandspit, where teams of teachers and volunteers handed out food, fuel, and water. She had learned to work in the crudest and most insalubrious environments and thought nothing of roughing it out in the cold. But Nome was particularly tough. In Kansas, she said, "we had plenty of doctors and hospitals," but here she often worked alone, with Welch only occasionally at her side.
Morgan always brought along her medical bag, which contained a clinical thermometer, tongue depressors, several tubes of antitoxin, some candy to tempt the children, and a flashlight. She checked in constantly on her patients and took care to see that the antitoxin was working, but often found she could offer only her sympathy.
Once, on her rounds, Morgan returned to the home of an Eskimo family and was disturbed by the condition of one of the five children, a young girl named Mary, whose symptoms were extreme: the child's tonsils were covered with a membrane, the darkest Morgan had ever seen. As Morgan approached the igloo, a young Eskimo boy came running out.
"You are too late," he told her. "Mary has gone to heaven."
Inside, Morgan found the father hewing a coffin out of rough boards while his two other daughters looked on. Morgan could do little to ease their grief, so she knelt beside the father and "did all I could toward finishing the crude box." When they were done, the man lined the box with his daughter's parka, placed her inside, nailed it shut, and buried her in a nearby snowdrift. A proper burial would have to wait until spring, when the ground had thawed out.
Morgan visited one family after another. During one house call to a young girl named Vivian Blackjack, Morgan noticed that while the parents sat cross-legged in the middle of the room eating dried fish dipped in seal oil, their daughter lay under the covers in her bunk.
"Her sharp black eyes stared at me defiantly; her lips were compressed tightly. I knew by the redness of her face that her temperature was high," she remembered. Morgan tried to open the girl's mouth but she resisted.
"I smiled at her and in a low tone told her mother I would not force her. But with a temperature of 104 something had to be done...then in a pleading voice [Vivian] said, 'Mother, let us pray.' "
Kneeling by the bedside, Morgan prayed with the mother and child, and when Vivian "looked straight at me and opened her mouth...her throat showed all the indications of diphtheria."
Morgan gave the child a shot of serum, and her condition improved. But both Morgan and Welch estimated that at the current rate of infection, their stock of serum would not last through the week. Without a new supply, many would die.
Late on Saturday evening, Morgan and Welch went to the health board to summarize their findings. Between them, they said, they had about twenty confirmed cases, with at least fifty others still at risk.
The board had been briefed on Welch's desperate message to Washington, and while all knew there was nothing more they could do to help the government find serum, there was another problem they might solve—how to get serum to Nome once it was located. The Bering Sea was icebound so a sea trip direct from Seattle was out of the question. That left the land route. At this time of year mail and supplies were shipped by boat to the ice-free port of Seward in southeast Alaska, then traveled north for 420 miles to Nenana on the only major railroad in Alaska. From there it took about twenty-five days for the mail teams to travel the 674 miles west to Nome. It was a start-and-stop route, divided up among several drivers, with time built in for overnight rests. The board had to come up with a faster alternative. '
Mark Summers had a plan, an express delivery. The entire route could be covered by two fast dogsled teams, one starting from the railhead at Nenana heading west, the other from Nome heading east. They would meet halfway on the trail at Nulato. Summers knew the one man who could do the western portion of the run, from Nome to Nulato and then back again: a scrappy Norwegian outdoorsman named Leonhard Seppala. Seppala was the gold company's main dog driver. He supervised the company's no miles of ditches that supplied water to the gold fields, and he freighted supplies and passengers out to the company's mining camps and ferried officials on business trips to other towns in Alaska. Tireless and disciplined in his work, he was undoubtedly the fastest musher in Alaska.
Seppala's record on the trail was legendary, earning him the nickname "King of the Trail." He had won most dog races he entered in Nome and in the Interior, and with his favorite lead dog, a well-known dog who went by the name of Togo, Seppala had toppled a number of long-distance records. Seppala knew every turn of the trail from Nome to Nenana and had once reached Fairbanks—the Interior capital seventy miles northeast of Nenana—in thirteen and a half days with the added weight of a passenger. It had taken him just four days to reach Nulato, halfway on the Nenana-to-Nome trail, and he had averaged an exhausting eighty-one miles per day.
After listening carefully to Summers's suggestion, the health board's approval was unanimous. But Maynard suggested that the board members also consider one other option: to fly in the serum.
The mayor had long been an advocate of Alaskan aviation. It was a fledging industry in the territory, but he was certain that planes would eventually end the crippling isolation of many Alaskan towns and allow them to thrive.
While flying the serum in would be quicker, board members were openly skeptical: winter flights were extremely dangerous, the cockpits were wide open, and it would
be a tough trip in the cold and the wind.
The previous year, a former army pilot had been the first to fly through the Alaskan winter. The experimental flights, which were airmail runs between Fairbanks and McGrath, were considered a great success in Alaska and proved that winter flight in the territory was possible. But compared to the projected flight to Nome, the air-mail run had been relatively short and had taken place in much warmer weather.
That very evening Summers paid his employee a visit to tell him to prepare for the run of his life, and to let him know that although the board was considering an air rescue, most of them believed that Nome's fate lay in Seppala's hands. Meanwhile, Maynard sent a telegram to the one man who had the power and political clout to make an air rescue possible, Alaska's delegate to the U.S. Congress, Dan Sutherland. Sutherland had been working to bring aviation to Alaska for the past three years and had lobbied hard for the experimental air-mail runs.
Serious epidemic of diphtheria has broken out here STOP No fresh antitoxin here STOP Interview surgeon general department of public health and tell him to dispatch million units antitoxin to Nome immediately...Airplane would save time if feasible.
Now, as the delegate sat in his office near Capitol Hill and read the message from Nome's mayor, he saw a perfect opportunity to herald the cause of aviation once again.
It was time to send the birds up into the Alaskan sky.
The Cruelest Miles: the Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic Page 6