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

by Gay Salisbury

  Sutherland had a personal stake in Nome. He had been one of the first to step foot on its beach in the summer of 1900, having traveled aboard a whaler that crashed through the melting ice to beat the thousands of prospectors close behind. When the others left, he stayed on as a miner and part owner of one of Nome's freight companies. He knew the Alaskan winters well. When he turned to politics in his late thirties, he stumped thousands of miles across the Interior on foot and by dogsled to win a seat on Alaska's first legislature after it became a territory in 1912. He was a popular representative, and in 1921 Alaskans voted him to be the territory's congressional delegate in Washington, D.C.

  Soon after receiving Thompson's message, the now fifty-five-year-old delegate approached the Public Health Service and its chief, Hugh Cumming, the U.S. Surgeon General, and told him that Fairbanks was prepared to launch an unprecedented air rescue of Nome. A single flight would take just a few hours, Sutherland said, but a dogsled would take weeks. By then, many children would be dead.

  Cumming listened carefully and told Sutherland he was open to the idea, whereupon Sutherland immediately cabled Mayor Maynard in Nome:

  Health Department will take immediate action to relieve the conditions at Nome. They are trying to get an airplane. Will keep you advised.

  Sutherland's other telegram, to Thompson, earlier that Monday morning, had been triggered by a wonderful discovery. The day before, a fifty-three-year-old doctor in the town of Anchorage had come across a supply of 300,000 units of antitoxin. Dr. John Bradley Beeson, chief surgeon of the Anchorage Railroad Hospital, had heard about Nome's epidemic and taken immediate action. He headed straight for the Signal Corps office next to the railroad tracks and fired off a telegram to Alaska's governor, Scott C. Bone:

  300,000 units of serum located in railway hospital here...package can be shipped by train to Nenana...Could serum be carried to Nome by mail drivers and dog teams?

  At about the same time, the Public Health Service had found 1.1 million units of antitoxin in various hospitals along the West Coast, and these had been ordered sent to Seattle where they could be forwarded to Alaska. But the next available ship north, the Alameda, was still out at sea and would not dock until Saturday, January 31, several days away. Worse still, the boat would take between six and seven days to reach the port at Seward, and by the time the serum had made its way to Nome, many more children would be dead.

  Beeson's serum would have a two-week head start. Although it was not sufficient to wipe out the epidemic, it could keep it in check for a while longer.

  Governor Bone directed Beeson to prepare the serum at once and send it north to the Interior by train. In the twelve hours it took for the serum to reach the Interior, he would decide whether to allow an airplane rescue or to rely on the dogs.

  Beeson was a competent and capable doctor, and he had become somewhat of a celebrity in Alaska. Four years earlier, he had been in the local papers after a house call of more than five hundred miles to the small town of Iditarod, where a banker was in urgent need of treatment. An impromptu relay of dog teams was set up along the route to carry Beeson to the Interior gold town, and they traveled at such speed and over such rough terrain that the drivers had to lash the doctor onto the sled.

  At one point, the sled had broken through the ice and Beeson was plunged into the water. His hands were too cold to untie the knots and he struggled to free himself. He felt the sled lurch. He could see up through the surface of the water and so was a witness to his own rescue as the dogs skillfully pulled the sled safely onto the bank. There were other mishaps along the route: one of the drivers' toes froze and another driver was hurt, and Beeson had had to drive a sled for the very first time.

  In retrospect, he was astonished he had made it all the way, and equally surprised that his patient was still alive when he arrived. The patient's name was Claude Baker, and he was already in the advanced stages of pulmonary tuberculosis. There was little Beeson could do but try to get him back to Anchorage, where he could receive round-the-clock care.

  Unable to set up i relay for the return journey, Beeson set off with one driver and little hope. By fortunate coincidence, he met up along the route with Leonhard Seppala, who was headed to Anchorage with two officials of the Alaska Road Commission. Seppala was traveling with four teams and forty-three dogs, and he agreed to break away with Beeson and his patient. Seppala was fast and he drove a strong team. They climbed over a 150-foot-high glacier and careened down a steep grade of glare ice and up over Rainey Pass. About 150 miles west of Anchorage the snow began to fall and Seppala had to break trail ahead of the dogs, but they made it back to the hospital without incident.

  Beeson's house call had taken a month from beginning to end.

  Now, as Beeson looked over the amber-colored glass vials of serum on the main floor of Anchorage's four-story hospital, he recalled every mile of that unbearably cold trip, and each jolt of the sled. If the shipment had to be carried by dog team all the way to Nome, it would need protection, so Beeson padded the inside of a container and placed the vials inside. He took a heavy quilt and wrapped it around the container, then placed it into a wooden crate, covering it with thick brown cloth. When he was done, he pinned a note to the cloth instructing whoever would be carrying the serum to warm the container up for fifteen minutes after each stop on the trail. By the time he was through, the package weighed 20 pounds.

  Beeson carried the serum over to the railway station where the locomotive stood by and handed the package to the conductor, Frank Knight. Knight placed it in a snug corner of the baggage car. As the engineer blew the whistle, the train jolted forward. Beeson sent a message to Governor Bone telling him the serum would be arriving in Nenana by the following night, Tuesday, January 27.

  "Appreciate your prompt action for Nome relief," Bone replied.

  Back in his office, Bone considered his options. The decision would be his whether to send the serum by dog team or by plane. With his slight paunch and bushy gray eyebrows, the sixty-four-year-old governor had a kind and warm way about him. He made friends easily, and was relatively broad-minded. Bone's trajectory to the governorship had been unusual: he had been a journalist most of his life and worked his way up the press room ranks to become editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

  As the gateway to Alaska, Seattle was home to a number of West Coast businesses that had control of a large part of the state's principal industries, including commercial fishing, lumber, and shipping, and Bone had begun to take an interest in the territory while working at the paper. In 1913, in his capacity as editor, he had been invited to tour the territory with the Alaskan Bureau of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, and he and several others had traveled the length of the territory, visiting nearly every major town, including Nome. Less than ten years later, after a brief time as publicity director for the Republican National Committee, in 1921, he became the tenth governor of Alaska.

  The governorship, a position appointed by the U.S. president, was a tough and in many ways a thankless job. The salary was a pittance; a previous governor had once complained that he spent $10,000 annually in office, $3,000 more than he was earning. Many Alaskans resented the fact that they did not even have the right to elect their own leader, and some viewed the position as a branch of the meddlesome federal government.

  While Bone may have been the highest official in a region more than twice the size of Texas, he exercised little executive control. Most decisions about the territory's development, the allocation of resources and taxes, were in the hands of conflicting and often uninformed bureaucrats in Washington.

  For nearly every decision, Bone had to wade through a swamp of federal bureaucracy, a situation that had become familiar to every governor before him. A case in point: neither Bone nor the taxpayers of Alaska had the authority to move the governor's modest office without Washington's approval.

  Since 1906, when the capital of Alaska had finally moved to Juneau from the former Russian outpost of Sitk
a on one of the islands of the Inside Passage, each one of Alaska's governors had been forced to work out of a cramped and dilapidated log cabin. By 1924, the two-story cabin was in such a state of disrepair that both floors slanted and the ground floor rested on steam pipes. An architect authorized by the Interior Department at Bone's urgent behest reported that the crumbling cabin was "unfit for habitation" and warned the governor to move out before winter, for it could easily catch fire or get swept away by a strong wind. '

  Washington continued its indecision until the day the architect's prophecy came true. On January 5, 1925, the floor in the center of the building settled on the boiler and burst into flames.

  Bone was not the only Alaskan official frustrated by the federal bureaucracy. "It will not be long," one Alaskan lawyer quipped at the time, "before Alaska will need a license signed by a cabinet officer to kill a mosquito."

  Nearly six decades after its purchase by the United States, Alaska still could not legally determine its own fate, and it would be another thirty-four years before it received statehood. It was run by at least thirty-eight federal bureaus and five cabinet officers who were all—as Bone wrote in one of his articles for the Saturday Evening Post — "interlocked, overlapped, cumbersome and confusing, each intent upon its own particular business, jealous of its own success and prerogatives, and all more or less unrelated and independent in their operations."

  Bone often used his pen to rail against the red tape, which he said maimed the pioneer spirit of Alaska, and to educate Americans about "The Land that Uncle Sam Bought and then Forgot," the headline of an article he had written for the Review of Reviews.

  By 1925, Bone was fed up and determined to leave the territory for good by mid-year. "No one understands Alaska," the frustrated governor had once told a reporter while on a trip to Washington. "Even official Washington does not understand what we have. They wire me to step over to Nome to look up a little matter, not realizing that it takes me 11 days to get there."

  Bone knew that the issue of transporting the serum could get bogged down in red tape and become a political football. Delegate Sutherland and News-Miner editor Thompson were pushing hard for an air rescue, and while Bone leaned toward the idea, he wanted to make sure that his was a responsible choice. The final decision was his alone, and no amount of pressure, political or otherwise, could sway him.

  Bone was familiar with the debate surrounding the potential for an Alaskan airline industry, and he had no doubt that air routes would play an important role in the territory's future. In 1923, when Warren Harding became the first U.S. president to visit Alaska, Bone was among a crowd who watched Eielson fly over Nenana in his biplane and perform loops, spirals, and stalls in the president's honor. Harding was in town to celebrate the completion of the railway line, and as Bone watched the president drive a golden spike into the tracks, he may have already known that the future was in the skies above them.

  Still, Bone began to question the mercy flight to Nome.

  The weather—one of the most crucial factors in almost every aspect of Alaskan life—had turned bitterly cold, and most travel within the territory was at a near standstill. For over a week, a continental arctic high-pressure system had pushed temperatures in the Interior to their lowest levels in nearly twenty years. Because the Interior was a basin-like stretch of land surrounded by mountains and high hills, it was difficult for a competing warmer weather system to blow in and dissipate the cold. And the cold grew deeper as the days wore on, stealing what little solar heat had been stored in the ground. No wonder the territory was known as "Seward's Ice Box," after Secretary of State William Henry Seward, who had bought the territory from the Russians in 1867.

  The recent cold temperatures in the Interior had been front-page news in nearly every local newspaper. In Fairbanks, the post office had to shut down because there was not enough heat to keep the employees warm. Farther to the east in Canada's Yukon Territory, temperatures of minus 70 degrees forced a halt to the delivery of water and mail in Mayo and in Dawson City.

  Meanwhile, an entirely different system was harassing Juneau and the other towns of southeastern Alaska, often called the Panhandle. In January, the temperature on average is close to freezing, relatively warm when compared to the Interior, but the amount of snowfall is high and the storms from the Gulf of Alaska frequent. From his new offices in the Goldstein Building—by far the tallest in Juneau—Bone could see the town digging out from beneath a snowstorm as 25-mile-per-hour winds whipped down the streets, creating 10-foot high drifts and traffic jams of cars and horse-drawn buggies.

  The snowstorms and gales over the past several days had also created havoc in the shipping lanes. The steamer Admiral Watson limped down the Gastineau Channel into port that morning, listing dangerously from the layers of ice that coated its pilothouse, rails, and bow. It had been the stormiest voyage in memory, "an almost continuous succession of snowstorms and gales," the captain remembered.

  Four days earlier, in the middle of an equally alarming weather system, the steamship Alameda had arrived with 400 tons of copper ore and cured herring. The ship had taken forty-eight hours to cross the Gulf of Alaska and its ninety passengers had been "shaken up by the rough passage," which was probably an understatement. Even during relatively calm voyages, the tall, narrow, and top-heavy Alameda "rolled like an old-fashioned churn..."

  "Just as she seemed to be lying almost flat on her side, she'd right herself with a shiver and come slowly back to an upright position, only to roll over just as far to the other side," one passenger recalled.

  If strong winds and temperatures of 10 degrees above zero could do such damage to the two stalwarts of the Seattle-to-Juneau service, one could only imagine the dangers of flying a plane during an Alaskan storm.

  The three aircraft in Fairbanks each had open cockpits, and Bone questioned whether any pilot, let alone an injured man like Darling, could survive any flight in temperatures of minus 50 degrees.

  Until now, most flights in Alaska had taken place during the summer or in the warmer winter months. Eielson's experimental air-mail runs had been a success, but he had never flown in temperatures colder than minus 10 degrees—40 degrees warmer than the temperatures in Fairbanks that week.

  Eielson had had to wear two pairs of heavy woolen socks, caribou-skin socks, a pair of moccasins that reached over his knees, a suit of heavy underwear, khaki breeches, heavy trousers of Hudson Bay duffle, a heavy shirt, sweater, marten-skin cap, goggles, and over all of that a reindeer-skin parka that went down to his knees and a hood trimmed with wolverine fur. He could barely climb into the plane, and in addition to the stacks of mail, he carried a full set of emergency gear just in case he crashed or became lost en route. He also carried tools, a sheepskin sleeping bag, ten days' worth of food, 5 gallons of oil, snowshoes, a gun, an ax, and repair materials, although he never had occasion to use them.

  Eielson had crash-landed a few times, coming close to destroying his plane, but he had been lucky, all in all. Returning to Fairbanks on the first run, night fell and he got lost. Volunteers built a huge bonfire on the baseball field, wondering if the worst had occurred. Several hours later, they heard the sound of his motor in the distance. It was so dark by that time that they could hear the plane but could not see its wings until it "came within the rays of the bonfire." It was a near catastrophe. As Eielson landed, he had to guess where the front edge of the field was, misjudged, and broke off" one of his skis on the top of a tree. When the plane hit the ground, it flipped forward on its nose and the propeller was crushed. The waiting crowd rushed to the plane to find Eielson shaken but otherwise all right. "We found him grinning behind the stick," one witness said, "but he was so stiff with cold and exhaustion that we had to lift him out of the cockpit."

  On his final mail run, Eielson encountered a patch of mud on the airstrip, causing the plane to nose over once again, breaking the propeller, rudder, and wing struts. Eielson rolled out, then released the straps on a passenger he'
d agreed to take back with him, dropping him haplessly but harmlessly on his head.

  In the course of the mail runs, during which he'd spent fewer than fifty hours in the air, Eielson had gone through a large crate of spare parts, and the U.S. Post Office refused to send more. With none available in Fairbanks, the Post Office called a halt to the two remaining runs. Of the ten scheduled runs, Eielson completed eight.

  Despite the crash landings, Eielson's flights had become famous. In a cabinet meeting in Washington, someone had read out an account of Eielson's adventure, and the story so captured the imagination of President Calvin Coolidge that he sent Eielson a congratulatory note.

  U.S. Post Office officials, however, felt the territory was not yet ready for a regular air-mail service, and they asked for their crippled plane back. In a letter to Eielson, Assistant Postmaster General Paul Henderson told him in no uncertain terms that they had considered the experiment only a partial success: "There are many things which must be done before we can continue on a permanent basis our use of the airplane in mail carrying in Alaska," Henderson wrote. But he promised he would consider trying again at some future date.

  Eielson had been flying a government-issue De Havilland, a plane that had once been considered the workhorse of the mail service and that had also been used during wartime as a bomber and a reconnaissance craft. The De Havilland was far sturdier than the flimsy biplanes owned by Fairbanks Airplane.

  Even if Thompson's "Forlorn Hope" could overcome the wind, the cold, and the mechanical limitations of the time, there was one factor that Thompson, Dan Sutherland, and Mayor Maynard were overlooking. The days were shorter in January, and Darling would have a limited number of daylight hours in which to fly safely. Flying at night was a risky proposition. The U.S. Post Office did not make a serious attempt until 1923, on the Chicago-to-Cheyenne segment of its Transcontinental Air Mail Route, where officials made elaborate preparations on the ground as well as in midair. They installed revolving beacons that could be seen for 150 miles. Built on 50-foot towers, these became "lighthouses in the sky." The beacons were placed in five cities along the air-mail route, and between them, the Post Office laid out emergency landing fields, illuminated by smaller, less powerful beacons. As an extra precaution to aid pilots, flashing ground lights fueled by acetylene were placed every three miles between the emergency landing fields. The planes were also fitted with state-of-the-art technology, including wing tips with lights, and cockpits with radio transmitters to alert the pilots to bad weather ahead.