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

by Gay Salisbury

  Patience was the greatest virtue for the arctic traveler, because the only way to beat the wind was to wait it out. Sometimes the best step to take was simply to sit down and go to sleep. Vilhjalmur Stefansson told the story of an old Eskimo woman caught out in a sudden storm only half a mile from her home. The blowing snow enveloped her and in a matter of seconds she could not see further than a few feet in any direction. Instead of panicking and exhausting herself in a fruitless search for her house, she remained calm and sat down in the lee of an ice hummock to get out of the raging wind. Sitting on her fur gloves to keep her seat warm, she took her arms out of her sleeves and crossed them against her chest, leaning forward to reduce her surface space, much the way dogs instinctively curl up into a tight ball, and she soon went to sleep. Whenever she got too chilled, she awoke and jumped up to restore her circulation, before crouching down again behind the ice hummock. For more than seventy hours she kept sitting, jumping, stretching, and sleeping, before the storm finally abated, and she could clearly see her home only a few minutes away. The lesson according to Stefansson was simple. If you get lost in a blizzard, the old Eskimo way offers the best chance of survival: Keep calm, keep still, keep dry, and keep sleeping until the weather clears.

  Of all the great Eskimo innovations in hunting and traveling, probably none was more important than their use of dogs. Dogs became the Eskimos' "sixth sense," their extra nose, ears, and eyes, which could smell a seal or hear a caribou long before a mere human. The dog made life possible for the Eskimos in the Arctic. "Without dogs," as the ethnologist E. W. Nelson wrote in 1887, "the larger portion of the great Eskimo family peopling the barren northern coast of America would find it impossible to exist in its chosen home."

  When the first dog walked across the Bering Land Bridge more than ten thousand years ago, he did not come alone. Dogs and humans arrived in Alaska together, and into modern times the partnership between them has been one of the keys to survival in the north. Around the world dogs have served as hunters, sentries, and companions since before the dawn of recorded history; but no one ever learned to harness the power of dogs as effectively as the Eskimos did. The greatest technological leap came in relatively recent times, when the Eskimos put dogs together with sleds and perfected the art of dog traction. "The dog team," as one expert claimed, "is one of the most effective devices ever invented by man." Like the horse on the Great Plains and the camel in the desert, the dog was the cornerstone of the Eskimo way of life in the arctic ice and snow.

  Dogs are the oldest domesticated animals on earth, though no one really knows how many tens of thousands of years Canis familiaris has been man's best friend. It was probably during the Paleolithic Age that tamed wolves began gradually to evolve into dogs, and humans have been living with these "wolves in dogs' clothing" ever since. 3 The man-dog contract goes back to before the invention of writing, before the invention of the wheel, even before the invention of agriculture. In that sense, living with dogs may be one of the oldest surviving cultural landmarks of our heritage, a surviving fragment of the Stone Age.

  3. The relationship between prehistoric man and wolves, as explored in Mark Deer's Dog's Best Friend: Annals of the Dog-Human Relationship (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), dates back thousands of years to when nomadic hunters selectively bred wolves who possessed characteristics favorable for helping them in bringing down large mammals.

  Many Native American tribal myths depicted humans as descendants of wolves or dogs. One myth from the lower Yukon held that the mother of all humans was a she-wolf who married a man. "In the beginning there was water over all the earth," the legend runs, "and it was very cold; the water was covered with ice, and there were no people." Into this frozen land came a man "from the far side of the great water," who took the wolf for his wife in the hills along the Bering Sea coast north of the Yukon River, and they had many sets of twins, each with one male and one female, who spoke different languages. "The twins peopled the earth with their children..."

  Other ancient legends from Native Alaska date the alliance between man and dog back to the creation of the earth. When the world was being formed, one story goes, the earth split in half and a great chasm separated all of the earth's animals on one side and man on the other. All of the beasts took flight except for one animal: the dog. Standing at the edge of the abyss, the dog began to bark and howl and plead to the other side until the man shouted, "Come!" When the dog had hurled himself across the chasm to reach the other side, he clung to the "far edge" before man pulled him up by his two front paws. "Had it not been for man, the dog would certainly have been lost forever."

  Whether it was the dogs that owed their existence to humans, or the other way around, the collaboration between Eskimos and dogs certainly kept both alive through many thousands of long cold winters. Some archaeologists believe that initially dogs were predominantly kept as a walking larder to provide meat and far for traveling Eskimo tribes. A Russian explorer along the Bering Sea coast in the 1830s claimed that two delicacies in high demand among the Natives were "fermented fish-heads of salmon...and fattened young dog." Besides supplying fur and a diet of meat, the Eskimos also used dogs for hunting, navigating, and packing supplies.

  As hunting dogs, they were invaluable in tracking bears or finding tiny breathing holes for seals on the pack ice. When the pack ice thickened enough that the seals could no longer break through its thin surface with the top of their heads, they gnawed at the thickening ice with their teeth, tunneling holes that were up to seven feet in depth, but on the surface just big enough to stick their nostrils up against the hole to breathe. These breathing holes might have been invisible to the naked eye, but not to the dogs' keen sense of smell. Hunters from a village would span out on foot in every direction across the frozen ice with their sealing dogs, whose heads hung low to sniff out snowdrifts and ridges along the surface of the ice as the animals led the hunters on a zigzag course. The hunter walked behind his dog for a mile or more out from shore, then the dog would suddenly stop. The hunter poked through the soft drift of snow with his ivory rod until he indeed felt it dip into the hole hidden below. Next, the hunter would position himself on the downwind side of the hole. There he would wait, sometimes for hours, for the seal to rise near the surface, and then quickly spear it when the seal inevitably came up through the ice for air. The dog waited all the while beside his hunter, knowing from experience that his job was not yet done.

  Hunters from the village might come over to help pull out the seal if it was too much struggle for one man to haul out his 800-pound load. After hauling his prey from the water, the hunter would hitch the dead seal by a leather trace to the leather harness on his trusted dog, who would drag it a mile or two back to camp by himself while the hunter went across the ice to where a neighboring hunter stood over another seal hole. "The dog does this errand with the greatest of goodwill," one early explorer wrote, "for he knows that he is going to get a feed at the end of it."

  Though no one really knows when or where Eskimos first began hitching dogs to sleds, the scant evidence indicates that they copied the practice from Siberian Natives, perhaps as much as a thousand or five hundred years ago. Over the generations they developed various lightweight sleds, harnesses, and other equipment, using materials such as driftwood, rawhide, walrus tusk, caribou antlers, and whalebone. Early explorers recorded the ingenuity of seal-skin socks that the Eskimos designed to protect the dogs' feet and legs against rough ice. Some sledges even had runners coated with ice. It was a laborious process to make ice shoes for a sledge, and the ice had to be reapplied frequently because travel wore it away; but the result was far superior at the time to any other available material. To prepare the surface, the traveler smeared the wood skis on which the sled would run with an icy paste made from peat or moss mixed with water. Once this was frozen, he applied a final coat of warm water that quickly froze to form the ice runners that would glide across the snow.

  Initially, most Eskimos families usually
had few dogs; three or fewer was common because they did not have the food to feed them.

  Ordinarily, the dogs were quite territorial, but they were seldom if ever tied up, so that they could forage for their own meals on rodents, squirrels, and feces. With such small teams most travelers never rode on the sled; they were either out front with the dogs pulling or behind the sled pushing. When Lieutenant George Stoney explored the area north of the Seward Peninsula in the mid-1880s, he came upon a large Eskimo party of forty people, with fifty dogs and twelve sleds, and was astonished to see that the men, women, and dogs were all hitched together. A one-dog family in particular caught his attention. "A woman with a child on her back and a single dog with three or four puppies playing beside it would drag a sled," Stoney wrote, "while the man behind pushed and guided, yelling at the single dog as lustily as though his team comprised a dozen or more."

  Relying on a combination of human power and dog power, only the bare essentials, supplies, and survival gear could be loaded on the sled. Everything had to be trimmed exactly to size. Seal meat, for instance, was butchered to fit the width of the sled for easy loading. With so few dogs, the sleds could neither haul heavy loads—on a good trail a single dog could pull at most about 75 to 100 pounds— nor travel too far. As a result, Eskimo settlements scattered along the Bering Sea tended to be small, widely dispersed, and mobile, with the people constantly following the food supply in a seasonal cycle.

  For the Eskimos as well as the Indians in Alaska, the familiar cycle of life was radically altered on a July day in 1741 when Vitus Bering, a Danish sailor on a Russian ship, sighted the Alaskan mainland. It was the beginning of a tidal wave of change that would touch every aspect of Native life. Western technology, Western values, strange diseases, new religions, and alcohol all would challenge every assumption of the old ways, leaving many to believe that traditional knowledge no longer had any relevance.

  People armed with clearly superior technology tend to believe they are themselves superior. A man with an iron tool is unlikely to be impressed by a man with only a stone. This was a prejudice shared by many early European explorers, who steadfastly refused to consider eating native foods or wearing aboriginal clothing, in the belief that "going native" signified a character defect and a lack of civilization. As a result, many adventurers from southern climates who eschewed fresh seal blubber for tinned beef or preferred wool coats and leather boots to far parkas and sealskin mukluks suffered the consequences. A diet rich in raw meat provided Eskimos with a needed source of vitamin C and was further supplemented in the summers by eating berries and cooking a broth from tree bark that protected them against illness. In the absence of this diet, debilitating cases of scurvy, not to mention frostbite and lead poisoning from the solder used in canning, were inevitable pitfalls for the unprepared explorer, as shown most dramatically by the death of Sir John Franklin and the 128 men in his crew on his last expedition in 1847.

  Less rigid than the military men or professional explorers were fur trappers and traders, who, because they lived among the Natives for years, were often better students of what it took to survive in the north, and less blinded by standards of "appropriate" behavior. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Alaska was the front line where two colossal fur-trading empires collided: the Russians from the west, and the British Hudson's Bay Company across Canada from the east. Though the fur traders were relatively few in number, the wealth of trade goods that they brought with them had an enormous impact, even on peoples hundreds of miles away with whom they never came into direct contact.

  Among the many trade goods that they introduced, no single item was more important than the rifle. The introduction of firearms to a hunting society had profound implications. Most of all it meant that a man's killing power and range were vastly increased, but at a steep price. Native groups had always traded with neighboring tribes, but in general the local environment had provided the necessities of life. Now those necessities included firearms, manufactured cloth, steel needles, and cast-iron pots. What hunter would want a spear if given the chance to use a gun? To acquire the ammunition he suddenly needed, the hunter would now have to become a professional trapper, securing skins not for his family's clothing but to sell to the trader. The trading post thus often became a permanent population center and the nucleus of a future village.

  Firearms and fur-trading capitalism revolutionized the use of dogs in the north, the proof of which is still evident every time a dog musher says "mush." French Canadian fur trappers in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company recognized how useful the dog traction of the Eskimos would be on a trapline. They hooked up their dog teams to toboggans and sleds, and commanded them to go in French, shouting, "Marche!" or "Marchons!" which was gradually corrupted to "Mush!" The trappers taught the Athabaskans to mush dogs and the Indians readily adopted dog traction as a superior method of moving faster and farther about the forest. Previously the Athabaskans only had small "pack" dogs, not sled dogs. But packing with a single dog was not nearly as efficient as sledding with a team of dogs; the new weapons and new demands of trading made the vast leap from packing to sledding inevitable. The new cycle had an irresistible logic. Hunger for trade goods, combined with the desire to kill more game in order to trap more furs to get more trade goods, made the adoption of Eskimo dog sledding by the Athabaskan Indians a natural development.

  Among the Eskimos too the introduction of firearms and the resultant increase in hunting power and hunting range had permanent effects, including a substantial rise in dog power, which in turn facilitated the growth of larger and more permanent settlements. Armed with rifles and steel implements the Eskimos could hunt more game and catch more fish, enabling them to feed bigger and better dog teams. It was also about this time that Eskimos began to adopt the Siberian practice of using specially designated lead dogs, improving harnesses, and developing the tandem hitch. In aboriginal times in Alaska, the few dogs were usually hitched to sleds like fingers on a hand, with each dog attached to a trace directly from the sled. This "fan hitch," which is still common today in eastern Canada and Greenland, was preferred when hunting on the ice pack, but the tandem hitch was superior on land. It not only kept the dogs separate but also delivered more concentrated power to the front of the sled, and it became the universal practice in Alaska.

  The increased mobility brought by the dog teams led to the concentration of population into fewer settlements, as hunters could regularly commute between various hunting and fishing grounds from a single location. A man with eight dogs could haul four times as much seal meat or travel four times as far as a man with only two. The added mobility made it more practical for the meat to be carried back to the family, instead of carrying the family to the meat.

  As far-reaching as the changes wrought by the fur trade were, the handful of solitary traders in the Interior was merely the first act in a larger drama that began when outsiders learned there was gold in Alaska and the Yukon basin of Canada. Following the Klondike strike of 1896, tens of thousands of men from around the world swarmed across the ancestral lands of the Eskimos and Athabaskans, tearing up the creeks digging for gold. Ironically, it was dogs and dog traction, for centuries the mainstay of Eskimo survival, that made this new world run. During the gold rushes, dogs brought the modern world to Alaska, hauling food, mining supplies, medicine, passengers, and gold across the network of rivers and trails that Eskimos and Athabaskans had been following for hundreds of years.

  In addition to trade goods, the gold rush brought some strange ideas to Alaska, and the most bizarre may have been the belief of some U.S. government officials that Alaskans would be better off living in Alaska without dogs. Ambitious entrepreneurs tried many alternative forms of transportation and communication that they hoped would be superior to dogs, including horses, goats, hot-air balloons, bicycles, ice skates, ice boats, ice trains, and passenger pigeons. But the favorite choice of several key officials was the reindeer. The man behind the reindeer
project was a Presbyterian missionary, Sheldon Jackson, the head of the U.S. government's education program for Alaska, who founded the first schools among the Inupiaq Eskimo along the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean in 1890. Jackson feared that the depredations of the Yankee whaling fleet, which by that time had been cruising in the Bering Sea for almost half a century, had helped to decimate the marine mammals and the caribou upon which the Eskimo depended, leaving them with the prospect of imminent starvation. Meanwhile, on the Siberian side of the Bering Sea, he saw that the prosperous Native reindeer herders had plenty of stock to see them through the harshest winter. Reindeer and caribou are the same species, only reindeer are domesticated and the caribou are not. Jackson reasoned that the solution would be to "stock" the Alaskan side with Siberian reindeer that would thrive by grazing on the tundra moss, and to transform the Eskimos from caribou hunters into reindeer herders.

  Alaska governor John Brady agreed with Jackson's plan wholeheartedly, and claimed that reindeer could provide "an abundance of wholesome food...at comparatively small effort." He believed the introduction of reindeer to Alaska was providential. "The camel," he wrote, "is no more divinely fitted for the burning desert than is [the reindeer] for the frozen north."

  Beginning with the initial shipment of 171 deer in 1892, by the end of the decade with further shipments and births the total had climbed to nearly three thousand animals. Dr. Jackson was a tireless promoter of the reindeer project; in 1903 he went before Congress to argue that reindeer should replace dogs as the primary beasts of burden in Alaska, and that they even be given the responsibility of hauling the U.S. mail. In general, Jackson had a low opinion of Native culture; he believed for instance that Native languages were decadent and encouraged the policy of punishing children for speaking them. But he reserved special scorn for dogs, testifying to Congress that dogs were unreliable, treacherous beasts that "require considerable food for their support, while reindeer are gentle, timid and eat little, foraging on the moss and spruce of the tundra."