The Cruelest Miles: the Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic

by Gay Salisbury

  "There seems to be almost no limit to his [the breed's] endurance and his willingness to give all he has got in the way of strength and speed when he is called upon in an emergency," Seppala once said. "There is no other type of dog that I know of that can stand the mile eating pace that he hits up once he gets going."

  These dogs simply needed the right driver.

  The following year, Seppala would luck into his first Siberian Husky team, and it was his friend and boss Jafet Lindeberg who provided the stroke of good fortune. In 1913, Lindeberg had bought a team of Siberians as a gift for the explorer Roald Amundsen, who had been planning an expedition to the North Pole. Lindeberg asked Seppala to train the dogs, and the driver gladly accepted. "I literally fell in love with them from the start, and I could hardly wait for sledding snow to start their training." A few weeks after the puppies arrived, Amundsen canceled the trip, and Lindeberg turned the dogs over to Seppala.

  By 1913, Seppala had built a reputation as a capable dog driver for Lindeberg's Pioneer Mining Company. As he began training the new dogs, he attracted the attention of Scotty Allan, who encouraged him to enter the race in 1914. Seppala had followed the races since the very beginning, and every evening after work he would head down to the Board of Trade Saloon to root for his favorites. He had always admired Allan from afar and had watched how that driver handled his dogs.

  But Seppala had been undecided for weeks about whether or not to compete. His team was young and had little experience in difficult conditions. The only veteran was the freight leader, Suggen, a tough dog that was half Siberian and half malamute. There was also the question of stamina: Seppala was not sure if he was ready to drive for four days with little sleep and under the pressure of competition. The wind, the cold, and the distance were so tough that one in three drivers gave up or arrived at the finish line hurt or "raving mad."

  "It was truly a land where the Devil himself held sway," Seppala once said.

  A sampling of dispatches from the racecourse coming in to the Board of Trade could send shivers down any aspirant's back. "Three miles this side of Solomon. Rope tied around waist dragging his team against the blizzard," said one, which described a competitor named Coke Hill, who had given Allan a run for his money in 1911. Few drivers had time to eat. "Iron Man" Johnson claimed to have eaten just two hard boiled eggs during his whole four-day ordeal in 1910. To help the dogs along, the drivers would often run behind the sleds for long stretches of the 408-mile course; the journey up the slopes and over the ice hummocks with hardly a bite of food exhausted most of them, and many suffered from hallucinations. 4

  4. Although trail and weather conditions can vary so widely that no race can ever be the same, it is interesting that in 1983, when five-time Iditarod champion Rick Swenson raced the course in an anniversary challenge, he placed first but came in ten hours short of the all-time record set in 1910 by Johnson. Swenson's winning time was the sixth fastest in sweepstakes history (Dogs of the North [Anchorage: Alaska Geographic Society, 1987], 68).

  One All Alaska Sweepstakes competitor spoke of seeing a phantom team of black horses racing ahead of the dogs. He began to shout at them to move out of the way and continued to do so all the way to the finish line. In the 1910 race, after falling down a 200-foot vertical cliff, Allan imagined he saw a lantern bobbing ahead of the team, and the vision guided him to the finish line. The lantern stayed with him until he was three and a half miles from Nome. Then he blacked out. "They told me I came in with five dogs hitched, two in the sled, and three tied behind," Allan said. "One has to finish with all his dogs in harness, in the sled, or attached to the sled. I don't remember tying the three loose dogs." 5

  5. Putting an injured dog on a sled was standard practice among dog freighters and it became a rule in the race. The sweepstakes forbade cruel treatment. If a driver was caught breaking the rule, he was disqualified. It was common sense among good drivers that a well-cared-for dog worked harder than one who had been abused or intimidated. However, there were drivers who abused their dogs out of ignorance or plain cruelty, and the sweepstakes helped to improve the general treatment, care, breeding, and training of sled dogs.

  With just a few weeks left to go until the race, Seppala decided to enter, which was a rash and almost fatal move. Neither he nor Suggen knew the trail.

  At the start of the 1914 race Seppala was up against a tough field of competitors, which included Scotty Allan, "Iron Man" Johnson, and another notable musher named Fred Ayer. He felt nervous and excited. The weather was calm, and for the first forty miles the race went smoothly. Then a blizzard kicked up. It could not have happened at a worse moment. Seppala was on the summit of Topkok Mountain, and the dogs, pushed forward by a strong tailwind, appeared to have lost the trail.

  "By the time we were making it seemed to me that unless I hit the Topkok cabin, we would run a chance of falling over the cliffs which lined the shore," he later recalled. Suddenly, in a lull in the storm, the clouds parted. Seppala's worst fear was about to come true.

  Stretched out 600 feet below him was the Bering Sea. The edge of the cliff was less than 20 feet away. Seppala jumped on the sled brake, but the metal claws only skidded on the hard snow. He grabbed a steel bar he kept in his sled for emergencies, jammed it into a hole in the brake board, then leaned on it with all his weight. The sled came to a stop. The dogs were now facing downward on an icy slope just feet away from the edge of the cliff. The puppies strained to keep going forward. Still leaning on the bar, Seppala shouted calmly to Suggen over the noise of the wind and ordered him to turn the team around. Suggen growled at the young dogs, but they were reluctant to swing the sled away from the cliff and into the wind. Seppala considered leaving them behind and climbing up the slope, but "the more I thought it over the less I could consider leaving my dogs to face such a tragic fate," he told a reporter later.

  Seppala urged the lead dog to force the team around, and Suggen understood the task. He growled again and moved to make the turn. Timidly, then more confidently, the young dogs began to follow, one by one. Suggen leaned into his harnesses, belly close to the ground, as the team clawed its way up the slope. By now, the icy crust was tearing and ripping apart the dogs' paws.

  "I don't know what [Suggen] told them but it worked. I have never been able to figure out whether dogs think or not, but every once in awhile some incident like this makes me wonder," Seppala said.

  Seppala scratched from the race. He was ashamed of himself, but he had learned one or two things about sled dogs and sled racing. The trail and the weather were too tough for the young, inexperienced dogs, and it was unfair to have put them in that situation.

  They had suffered: some had torn pads and broken claws and others frostbitten flanks. All were exhausted. Seppala swore he would never again abuse their trust in him, and he knew that in return for his loyalty, he would receive "their simple, canine faith"—a life-saving faith.

  For the rest of the spring and summer, Seppala nursed his dogs back to health. Then, in the fall, he began to train them again for the 1915 sweepstakes. Gradually, the dogs recovered their health and confidence. A few weeks before the race, Seppala took them over the trail and stashed hamburger meat in coal-oil cans he had set up at strategic points along the route. He switched the dogs to a high-protein diet of beef and mutton and had his brother, Asle, build him a racing sled which had extra long runners, so that he could better control the turns. He sewed racing harnesses for the animals. By the eve of the race, with all the preparations completed, he was so excited that "I felt like a loaded gun ready to explode any second."

  That night, he had trouble sleeping. Despite every effort, he worried. He still had to rely on luck, on being in the right place and at the right time at the very moment the weather turned. He also had his main competitor Allan to worry about. By then Allan had won three sweepstakes.

  On the morning of April 14, the racers lined up at the starting line for the eighth annual sweepstakes. With the drop of a flag, the t
eams burst across the line. Seppala, by contrast, started off at a leisurely pace, and word of his slow start immediately got back to the gamblers at the Board of Trade. Seppala wasn't worried. He knew his dogs well: they took their time to warm up, but they always finished strong, and he did not want to tire himself out too early. About sixty miles into the race he caught up with several drivers who had stopped at the Timber shelter cabin for a break. (Rest stops were not mandatory; it was up to the drivers to decide when and where they should stop.) He stayed long enough to wolf down a bowl of soup and a sandwich.

  Several hours later, he caught up with Allan, who had stopped briefly at a cabin about one hundred miles from the start. Seppala passed the Scotsman, and ten miles down the trail he stopped where he had stashed the hamburger meat for the dogs. Soon afterwards, Allan was back in the race, and their game of cat-and-mouse began in earnest.

  By the second day of the race, Seppala's team was setting a steady, rapid pace. He sensed they still had plenty of energy to burn, and at one point the dogs smelled reindeer and geared up for a long, sustained gallop, one of the fastest rides of Seppala's career.

  At a shelter cabin 140 miles down the trail, Seppala joined his opponent for a bowl of soup. As he was getting ready to leave, a spectator came up to him and suggested he get some rest, but Seppala replied that he was out to beat the Scotsman and had to set off at once. On the way out, Allan looked up at him from his soup and "smiled back at me enigmatically. He and I both knew I was up against a tough job."

  For the next thirty miles Seppala remained far out in the lead, with no sign of his opponent. Then, as he reached the top of the Divide, he "could see a team way back worming its way over the crooked trail, looking like a big reptile in the distance." The race was far from over. Thirty miles on, Seppala reached Candle, the turnaround point where he had hoped to get a brief rest. One of the dogs came loose during a judges' inspection and Seppala knew he would be disqualified if he did not catch the animal. He ran around after the dog and finally backed him up against the shouting crowd. Scared and confused, the dog bit Seppala's hand, but he still managed to catch him.

  News of the injury soon flashed through to Nome: Seppala would have to drive the last 204 miles with just one hand, and the gamblers upped the odds against him. He had lost valuable time, and thirty miles out of Candle, while heading back up over the Divide, Allan passed him at a good speed.

  But the Scotsman's show of strength may have been a bluff. Allan would often psych out his opponents by pretending his dogs were in top form, and Seppala did not take the bait. As Allan pulled away up the Divide, Seppala noticed that one of Allan's dogs looked tired and another had run loose behind the sled. Seppala pretended his team was tuckered out and let Allan pull even farther ahead. Then, when Allan was too far away to notice, he picked up the pace.

  For much of the third day, Seppala continued to track Allan, staying a good half hour behind him. In a long-distance race, competitors would try to throw off the rest schedule of their opponents in the hopes of tiring them out. Seppala was determined to pressure Allan into making a mistake, but he was determined at the same time to run his own race. At one point, he stopped to rest at a cabin and let the young dogs rest in the sunshine. The dogs were quiet and relaxed, basking in the sun. It was the end of the day for them. Seppala had trouble getting them up. Only the leader was raring to go. Back at the cabin, a spectator misinterpreted the dogs' brief reverie and told the gamblers back in Nome that "Seppala's team is all in, and he can't even get them started."

  Then he placed a $100 bet on Allan.

  Seppala got the dogs back up and they were on track again. Death Valley was an easy ride for both drivers and each one sailed through the usually stormy valley with ease. Then, toward the end of the third day, Seppala pulled into Boston, about one hundred miles from the finish line. Allan, who had managed to keep a steady gap between them since the Divide, had arrived half an hour earlier. While their dogs rested outside, the two opponents sat at opposite ends of a table. Seppala told Allan that his dogs were tired out but that he was going to drive another twenty-six miles to Council. There, he said, he would take a long rest. Allan replied that his dogs were in excellent shape. He needed a few hours of rest in Boston and would then make the dash to Nome. He fully expected to cross the finish line before noon of the following day.

  Seppala doubted Allan could do it. He had driven thirty miles more than Seppala that day and he badly needed a long rest. There were 106 miles to go before the finish line. Allan watched as Seppala got back on the sled. Again, the Norwegian's young Siberians seemed to be enjoying the sun and appeared reluctant to get back up. "They were dragging along slowly" out of Boston, Seppala recalled, "and to all appearances were pretty tired and not able" to go many miles more; but I was banking on the Siberian traits I knew so well."

  Sure enough, just outside the camp, a rabbit jumped on the trail and the dogs clicked into high gear and were soon running as if they were just starting the race. They kept up the pace all the way to the next planned stop, at Council. There, Seppala learned that Allan had left Boston after resting for four hours. The musher usually stayed for six hours at that spot. Allan was worried about his competition.

  Seppala, meanwhile, bedded down for a full six hours of rest. The dogs would need it for the last eighty miles to Nome. Three hours into his light sleep, Seppala awoke at around ten-thirty to the sound of Allan's dogs arriving at the camp. The Scotsman lingered a few minutes and then drove on. Seppala panicked and began to gather his things and hook up the dogs. He had three of them on the line when, about thirty 7 minutes later, Allan was back. The driver claimed that his leader had lost the way in the dark. Seppala wondered if this was a ruse to break his rest and get him back on the trail. But he remembered his pledge to run his own race and curled back up to sleep with the dogs.

  Two hours later, he awoke and quietly hitched up the team. Lookouts working for Allan alerted the Scotsman, and twenty minutes after Seppala left Council, Allan was in hot pursuit. By the time Seppala reached the Timber shelter cabin twenty miles away, Allan had closed the gap to four minutes. Seppala picked up speed. He reached the coast and went up Topkok Mountain. At the top, he looked back and saw no sign of Allan. A thick fog hugged the midriff of the mountain. These were the last fifty miles, and here Allan would usually put on a burst of speed and topple the competition. Seppala began his descent from the windswept summit, struggling to keep the sled upright as it bounced over bumps in the fog. At the base of the mountain, the fog lifted and the team raced into the sunshine. Seppala looked over his shoulder, expecting to see "Scotty come dashing after me, emerging from the cloud down Topkok Mountain. But there was no sign of him."

  Seppala traveled another twenty-two miles to the checkpoint at Port Safety and stopped long enough to ask spectators if they knew of his rival's whereabouts. Allan, they said, had only just arrived at Solomon, the checkpoint ten miles back. The four-minute gap between them had widened to forty-five. A little after 3:00 p.m., Seppala passed Fort Davis, where the cannon boomed at his approach, and a few minutes later he crossed the finish line. He was tired and shivering from the cold. It would be another two hours before Allan arrived.

  Seppala's reputation was nearly secure.

  For the next two years, Seppala dominated the All Alaska Sweepstakes as well as other local races. What seemed to astound people most was his ability to get the most out of his dogs. It was almost uncanny, one competitor said. "That man is super-human. He passed me at least once on every day of the race and I was not loafing any. I couldn't see that he drove the dogs. He just clucked to them every now and then and they lay into their collars harder than I've ever seen dogs do it before.

  "Something came out of him and went into those dogs with that clucking. You've heard of some men who hold an unnatural control over others—hypnotism, I guess you call it. I suppose it's just as likely to work on dogs, and Seppala certainly has it if anyone has."

  In additi
on to preparing for the races, Seppala continued to earn his title by ferrying U.S. officials, Hammon employees, and an occasional accident victim across Alaska. On one occasion, he helped police chase down a criminal.

  Seppala became 1 celebrity of sorts at the roadhouses, the log cabins that had sprung up along the trails to accommodate travelers. Awed patrons would help him harness the dogs and they would line up to watch him start out on the trail.

  "I am proud of my racing trophies," Seppala once said, "but I would trade them all for the satisfaction of knowing that my dogs and I tried honestly to give our very best in humanitarian service to our fellow man, regardless of race, creed, color, in Alaska's pioneer days. Often the going was rough—sometimes my courage was greater than my team's—several times I was ready to quit but was ashamed because of the great fighting heart of the Siberian Husky."

  Nearly a decade after the last sweepstakes, with thousands of trail miles behind him, Seppala had a new lead dog, a Siberian Husky named Togo. At the age of twelve, the black and gray leader had become Seppala's favorite. The relationship was based on friendship as much as on partnership and mutual need. They were "inseparably linked," a friend said. "One does not speak of one without mention of the other." They would often romp together at night, and Seppala's favorite game was to try to grab Togo's feet while the dog danced. If Seppala was tired, he often sat by the fire with the dog next to him.

  Togo simply seemed to know what to do, Seppala once told a reporter. One time, before the start of an eight-mile race, he had hitched the dog up to a sled driven by a young girl who had never ridden before, and he whispered in the dog's ear: "Go to it. I'll be waiting here for you."