The old biplane Anchorage, by comparison, had no navigational tools save for a magnetic compass, which was unreliable given the proximity to the North Pole. Any pilot taking off from Fairbanks for Nome would find himself in the dark, in every sense, without a light to guide him along the route or a radio to warn him of an approaching blizzard.
To make matters worse, the territory had been mapped out in haphazard fashion. When the Post Office and other territorial officials organized the experimental mail runs in 1924, they had to consult three maps because each one showed a different topographical outline of the route. The pilots thus learned the terrain the hard way. A mountain measuring 1,000 feet on a map would loom up at 5,000 feet, and a riverbank that might have been considered as an emergency landing spot would turn out to be a tiny creek in the middle of a forest.
An Alaskan pilot had to be fearless and he was often forced to rely on instinct. Wien once landed on top of a 300-foot hill in the Interior to pick up a sick man, then found to his horror that he had insufficient room for takeoff. Wien "jumped off" the mountain in the hope that the light plane would catch a lift from the wind. Again, he'd been lucky.
Landings and takeoffs were the worst: the Standard J-1 biplanes like Anchorage and other planes of the era had no brakes and had to drag to a stop by means of a single skid on the bottom of the tail. Baseball fields, marshes, and riverbanks all served as airfields. Not until the late 1930s would federal funds be set aside for safe fields and organized air routes in Alaska. Until then, the average plane was expected to crash twice or even three times a year.
And even if Darling made it across the Interior, all the daring in the world could not help him up the Bering Sea coast. He knew none of the local landmarks—the big rock of Besboro Island off the coast of Unalakleet, the lopsided shape of Topkok Mountain east of Cape Nome—signposts that might have helped guide him in the event a gale blew him off course and out over the ice.
Later pilots traveling over the coast often found themselves flying into hazy skies that appeared to blend into the ice and snow below.
The result was a bewildering panorama that, from the vantage point of the cockpit, was like "flying inside a milk bottle," a void without reference points. A pilot could barely tell whether he was flying straight up or if he had been inverted or gone into a spin. Further, it would be difficult for any plane, let alone the Anchorage, to survive the coast's sudden snowstorms and heavy gusts, which could be as powerful as 75 mph.
"Airplanes can't fly into 60 mph winds," Wien once remarked of the fleet in Fairbanks after he had battled for hours against a headwind that eventually forced him down.
Anchorage's engine, while a model of modernity by the standards of the early 1920s, was like any other motor of its time—cooled by water and therefore unreliable in severe cold. Antifreeze had not yet been invented and pilots had experimented, with limited success, with various mixtures of alcohol. (Prestone coolants, or ethylene glycol, were not introduced until 1931.) Further, the oil turned viscous at about 10 degrees above zero, and whenever a pilot landed, he would have to set up a fire pot beneath the engine to keep it warm while the passenger or a local mechanic drained the oil into a pan and warmed it over the coals.
Water-cooled engines shook so hard in the air in those days that bolts and screws would sometimes come loose. Water lines were broken, radiators were loosened, steam spouted from cracks, and spark plugs fouled. The engines sputtered and cut out, and the quiet, eerie hum of the wind through the guy wires would suddenly replace the roar of the engine. When air-cooled radial motors were introduced in 1926, the number of forced landings dropped by 25 percent.
In the 1920s, an engine failure usually meant death or, at the very least, serious injury. If a plane lost flying speed, it would go into a tail-spin followed by an uncontrolled dive, and if the engine remained idle, there would be no possibility of recovery. It would be several years before the engineers would discover that a tailspin could be avoided by mounting sliding panels along the edge of the wings. When the plane tilted, the panels would slip forward and smooth out the airflow.
The aircraft had hardly been designed with arctic travel in mind, and the army did not even begin to perform systematic experiments in extreme temperatures until the 1930s.
There were other potential dangers as well. Snow and ice could clog the air filters and inlet connections, thus starving the carburetor of the oxygen needed for combustion; many a plane was forced to the ground when ice gathered on the radiators, propeller hubs, and wings—deicing technology still lay in the future.
Eielson would become one of the first pilots to master an engine in minus-40-degree weather. In April 1928, while flying over Point Barrow, north of Nome, the extreme cold caused the engine to falter repeatedly. To keep it operating, Eielson went into a steep climb above the clouds where the sun's rays warmed the engine. He repeated the procedure every twenty minutes for over two hours. The procedure worked but he had nearly run out of gas. 1
The dream of northern flight was not exclusive to Thompson, Sutherland, and Eielson. Explorers had envisaged conquering the Arctic and Antarctic by balloon, dirigible, or plane for at least two decades. After his successful bid by dog sled to the North Pole in 1909, Robert Peary predicted that the Arctic would be "reconnoitered and explored through the air." Roald Amundsen learned to fly and earned his pilot's license less than a year after reaching the South Pole in 1911. Dog teams, while reliable, were slow and cumbersome. On one of his dog sled expeditions across the arctic ice pack in 1915, Vilhalmur Stefansson told a colleague that in the future a plane might cover in one day as much territory as a dog team could in a year.
1. On November 9, 1929, Eielson and his mechanic Earl Borland disappeared while making a relief flight to bring out the cargo of the far ship Nanuk, trapped in the ice off North Cape, Siberia. The wreckage from his plane was found on January 27, 1930, ninety miles from where the ship had been trapped. The crash was probably caused by bad weather and a broken altimeter.
In the 1920s, there were still thousands of square miles of Arctic Ocean that remained unseen. Many believed that unmapped islands existed, and some spoke of an uncharted continent in the icy wilderness between Spitsbergen, in Norway, and Alaska. These mythical territories possibly contained mineral wealth and could have strategic military value, given their location at the top of the world. Tidal studies pointed to the existence of such land. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whalers and explorers who had sailed up through the Bering Strait claimed to have seen a landmass north of Alaska. Peary, while traveling along the northern coast in Canada, reported snow-capped peaks far off in the distance to the northwest. (All of the sightings were later proven to be mirages, common to the Arctic.)
In the spring of 1923, Amundsen made the first attempt to fly to the polar rim, from Wainwright, near Point Barrow, Alaska, to Spitsbergen. The attempt ended in failure: Amundsen's Junkers J-13 metal monoplane crashed on a test flight after landing on the rough arctic ice. Several months later, in 1924, the U.S. Navy had planned to survey the area with its first rigid dirigible, the Shenandoah. Six planes were to accompany the balloon from Teller, about seventy miles north of Nome, but the navy called the expedition off at the last minute: it was too expensive and dangerous.
It was clear to Governor Bone that flying to Nome would be a hazardous undertaking. In his opinion, the equipment was inadequate to handle the rigors of the northern winter, and although Darling had a deep supply of courage, he lacked the necessary experience. If he went down, the serum would go down with him, and so would Nome's chance to fight the epidemic.
On the other hand, a mail drive was not without risks. If Bone were to trace the mail trail from Nenana to Nome on a map, his finger would follow the course of the Tanana River to the point where it converged with the Yukon, 137 miles to the west at the village of Tanana. It would continue on or along the river for another 230 miles to the village of Kaltag, then over coastal mountains to the Bering
Sea and up the coast to Nome.
The Tanana and Yukon rivers cut through the heart of the Interior, a land Jack London once described as a "pitiless" expanse of "the bright White Silence." One could travel for days in the Interior and never see another soul. "Nature has many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his finity," London wrote in his short story "The White Silence," but". .. The most tremendous, the most stupefying of all, is the passive phase of the White Silence. All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice. Sole speck of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead world, he trembles at his audacity, realizes that his is a maggot's life, nothing more."
From Kaltag, the trail left the Yukon River and rose into the mountains and along a ninety-mile portage of plateau, forest, and river that tumbled out at the Bering Sea coast. The coast was often stormy and treacherous and, compared to the deep cold and nearly windless Interior, it offered an entirely different riding experience. The snow was icy and hard, the wind blew unimpeded for miles, and there were few trees to dip behind for protection or to cut down for fuel.
The trail followed the coast of the Bering Sea along Norton Sound for 208 miles, and traveled across its shifting fields of ice. It traversed lagoons and river deltas and passed through "blowholes" or wind tunnels. There was nowhere to hide along the coast during a blizzard or a gale, so drivers holed up in roadhouses whenever they could find one. When they could not, they would huddle behind a pressure ridge, ice hummock or boulder, and absent any natural protection, they made do with climbing into the sled.
In sum, the 674 miles between Nenana and Nome held every kind of danger. A driver caught unaware or without sufficient preparation risked serious injury or death.
Many parts of the trail were originally used by Natives for travel between summer and winter camps. It is estimated that the Kaltag portage had been used for centuries as a winter trade route between the Athabaskan Indians in the Interior and the Eskimos on the coast. When the Russian fur traders arrived in the late eighteenth century followed years later by an army of miners, the trails were expanded and served the white-owned trading and military posts and towns. As European settlers set up the telegraph lines and mail services along the trails, entrepreneurs set up roadhouses for travelers.
These roadhouses were the rough equivalent of small inns, simple log cabins insulated with mud and moss, or in the more remote areas, just a canvas tent with a large barrel stove. On the more popular trails, they were separated by about a day's travel, or a distance of about thirty to fifty miles, and provided a modest place to rest, eat, and warm up. Meals generally cost between one and two dollars, and wild game—whatever the proprietor could hunt or buy—was often the specialty of the week. There was freshly baked bread and local vegetables, and if a traveler was lucky he could find a basin of water and a towel to rub across his grimy face.
The roadhouses provided a certain degree of intimacy for the traveler, and each one had its own particular character. The innkeepers were tough, independent sorts on the whole, but each of them knew the value of a cup of coffee or a free meal for the wanderer who stumbled in wet and cold. On more than one occasion, a roadhouse operator would go out into the cold in the middle of the night to bring in a lost traveler. Alaskans depended on this kind of "bush hospitality," and they offered it selflessly. One never knew when one might need a helping hand.
The most important and respected travelers on the trails were the mail drivers. Whether they were Native, part Native, or white, they were usually the best dog drivers around, and they were experts at surviving in most any weather conditions. It was a tough job and carried huge risks, and this was reflected in their pay, which was about $150 a month, one of the highest in Alaska. They took their oath seriously and went out on the trail at times when no one else dared. They braved blizzards, rain, and bitter cold, and sometimes became the only contact between the isolated miner and the outside world. They understood the importance of a letter home to both the miner and the shopkeeper.
"To see the excitement that the mail from the Outside makes, to see the eagerness with which the men press up to the postmaster's desk for their letters, and the trembling hands as they are opened, and the filling eyes as they read, touches the heart," wrote one author as he watched the arrival of mail in 1897.
By law, mail drivers had the right of way and were always given the warmest seat at the roadhouse. They were served the best food and their dogs were given table scraps saved especially for them; sometimes the animals would be given beds of hay for the night. The dogs worked as hard as their drivers and everyone acknowledged that the mail would never get through without them.
In 1899, one driver on his route from Valdez in the south to Eagle in the Interior had tried to use horses instead of dogs, and eleven of his horses died in transit. Furthermore, just three letters made it through. Nothing could compare to the dog team, particularly when the weather was bad. The drivers often had to pay a penalty if their delivery was late, and they pushed themselves and the dogs to the limit.
"You'd have to be on time regardless of the weather or trail conditions," said Peter Curran, Jr., who had the mail route between Solomon and Golovin along the Bering Sea coast. "If I lost a day, I had to make a double run the next day. So I had to go no matter what the weather...Sometimes in those storms you couldn't see half the team. You just had to trust your leader to keep going."
"There were days the poor dogs, they just hated to go," said another driver, Bill McCarty, who had a route in the Interior in the mid-1920s. "Going up river, against a headwind, cold. Oh. It really bothered them. But we had no choice. They had to go."
Roadhouse keepers and other travelers understood the extent of the pressure on the drivers and their dogs, and they often went out of their way to help. If it had snowed overnight, they would wake up early and tramp down the trail for more than ten miles so that the mail driver and his dogs would not have to labor through heavy drifts.
The drivers rarely took advantage of these privileges, and whenever they could, they would take passengers to neighboring villages or drop off gifts along the route. A mail driver might have as many as twenty-five dogs pulling two heavy freight sleds, or as few as five dogs pulling a light load. Either way, the mail was packed into heavy canvas bags tied shut with a drawstring and lashed down in the basket of the sled. Important mail such as bank drafts and company slips stayed in the driver's backpack. Sleigh bells were tied to the dogs' harnesses to announce their arrival and to warn a traveler that they were coming round the bend. ' . '
By the 1920s, mail drivers crisscrossed the entire territory. For the most part, they were a tough and humble lot, often identified by the gruesome stamps of their profession, an amputated finger or a toe lost to the cold, or a frostbitten nose or cheek. Some of them were legendary: one driver along the Yukon River route was reputed to have worn phonograph springs in his shoes after the ends of his feet were amputated. In the early 1900s, Big Ben Downing shared an 800-mile-long route that ran along the Yukon River between Dawson City in the Yukon Territory and Tanana, Alaska. On one of his runs, Downing fell through the ice and was dragged to safety by his dogs. It was minus 60 degrees and he had no matches, dry clothes, or even a hat. The only way to stay warm was to sprint behind the sled until he reached a roadhouse several miles away.
When he arrived, his clothes were frozen solid and had to be cut away. His face, hands, and legs were badly frostbitten and he hobbled across the floor. But despite his condition, Downing chose duty over recovery. Almost immediately he headed back out to his next destination, three hundred miles away.
When he arrived, his feet were so badly blistered and bleeding that the doctors wanted to amputate. But Downing, gun in hand, allowed them only a slight trim off the ends of four of his toes.
"Them feet and me are goin' together/' he was reported to have said. "If I live I have use for them; if
I can't have them I don't want to live."
If a driver failed to deliver his mail on time, it was a sure sign that there had been a mishap, and the lodgers at the roadhouse would go out and look for him.
William Mitchell, who laid down Alaska's first telegraph lines before becoming assistant chief of the U.S. Army Air Service, wrote about one particularly tragic experience. In his memoirs of Alaska, Mitchell described a trip in which he had been dogsledding on the trail to Valdez and came across a mailman who appeared to be kneeling by his tent, head leaning over his hand. The mailman's lead dog, a large black Newfoundland mix, sat by his side.
"I called to the man but received no response, and going closer found that he was frozen to death. The mail was in the sled under him. Between his teeth was a match and between his knees was a box where he had tried to scratch the match when his hands had frozen."
Mitchell recalled seeing an open hole in the ice several yards behind and realized what had happened. There were pieces of harness around the mailman's camp, evidence that the four other dogs had bitten free and fled. But the lead dog had stayed behind, by his master's side, with his four paws frozen to the ground. The loyal dog was so severely frostbitten that Mitchell had no other option but to shoot him.
The Cruelest Miles: the Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic Page 11