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

by Gay Salisbury

  Many scientists are reluctant to attribute human emotions to dogs, calling it anthropomorphism. A musher will be the first to disagree. Sled dogs experience a gamut of emotions, particularly on long expeditions, and lead dogs are not immune. The job is both physically and mentally demanding and they often need a break from their responsibility. Heading back from an expedition, Norman Vaughan, a polar dog driver in the late 1920s and 1930s, noticed that the harness of his lead dog, Dinty, was slacking. A slack harness is unacceptable for a lead dog, particularly on an expedition. Vaughan decided to retire the dog to the back of the team and in his place harnessed a ten-month-old puppy who was quick to express his excitement over the promotion. As if he were ashamed, Dinty put his tail between his legs and hit the trail without one leap or excited yelp. At night, he hid his nose in his paws, looking at Vaughan and the other dogs with a forlorn expression.

  After several days, Vaughan decided that Dinty had had a long enough break. The following day, Vaughan began to harness the dogs. He started with the wheel dogs, and as he moved up the line he stole a glance at Dinty. The dog was lying with his head on his paws, "pretending indifference." When Vaughan finally stood before the dog to put him back in lead, Dinty jumped up, "fairly trembling with excitement" to be back at front for the final pull home. "Who says a dog doesn't think, doesn't understand, has no pride of position?" wrote a dog musher on the expedition who had watched the whole affair. "They would have had their opinions reversed in short order if they could have seen Mr. Dinty step off on that journey. Head erect and sensitive ears pointing, his eyes fairly sparkling and that great black plume of a tail waving wildly erect, Dinty was again a lead dog to stir a driver's pride."

  This pride that many sled dogs "feel" toward their work, however, could have unfortunate consequences. One musher, a missionary of the Hudson Bay region, regretted that he did not show his dog a little more respect when it came time to retire his old leader. The missionary Edgerton Young described how his lead dog, Voyageur, could not accept being usurped by a younger dog. Voyageur was getting old and it was time to groom a new leader. Without much explanation or preparation, Young put a new dog in Voyageur's position and put the old leader toward the back of the team. The dog became furious, chewing through his own harness and then through that of the new lead dog. Young mended the harnesses, reprimanded the dog, and restarted the team. Voyageur rebelled and rebelled. He turned wild and snapped at the heels of the dog ahead of him, as if trying to catch up to the new leader. Young checked him with a whip. "Thus completely foiled in this as in every other scheme his dog intellect could devise, Voyageur suddenly collapsed," Young wrote. Like a good sled dog, Voyageur continued the journey, but his usual "proud, eager, ambitious spirit was completely broken. His high head with that ever alert eye went down and the long tail tried to disappear between his legs." Seeing the dog's utter dejection, Young unhooked the new leader and replaced Voyageur, but it was too late. Voyageur's heart was broken. For the remainder of the trip Voyageur did not once wag his tail or turn his eyes up toward Young as he so often had.

  Even an attempt to put him in the best harness decorated with ribbons and silver bells, which all the dogs were so fond of, would not lift Voyageur's spirits. The night the team arrived at Young's cabin, Voyageur trudged out to the middle of the nearby lake. Beneath a full moon, he sat on the ice, moaning and howling. When the moon sank down to the horizon, Voyageur lay down and died.

  On Wednesday, January 28, the first full day of the relay, the sun finally came up some 650 miles east of Nome at the roadhouse at Tolovana, Shannon's final destination. There was still no sign of Shannon. Among the regulars waiting at the roadhouse and warming themselves by the three big stoves was twenty-one-year-old Edgar Kallands. Half Athabaskan (on his mother's side), half Newfoundlander, Kallands was typical of many of the drivers in the Interior who had been forced, from the time he was a young boy, to rely on his own wits for survival. Kallands would take the serum from Shannon as soon as he arrived.

  By his own definition, Kallands was a loner. Dogs had played a large role in his life and at times they were his closest friends. Growing up in a small village in the Interior, his best friend had been a puppy. There was simply no one else around. "He was my dog, or I was his dog. One or the other," he once said. "He was raised up with me." As he grew up, his affection for dogs became even greater. While most teams would run into the woods when let loose, Kallands's dogs always stayed close, certain as they were that they would receive his affection: "...when I go away and come back and they're waiting for me, I pet them all right away. I wouldn't just pet one and go on. I pet the whole bunch. Anytime I got up amongst them, they were all right around me."

  As his regular job, Kallands worked as a musher for the Northern Commercial Company. The night before, at around 5:00 p.m., he had pulled into Johnny Campbell's roadhouse in Minto with the mail after chauffeuring an auditor for the NC Company from trading post to trading post along the Tanana and Yukon rivers. Their progress had been painfully slow because of the cold, and several times they had been forced to stop on the trail and light a fire. He had come to rest for the night at Campbell's place and had barely finished hanging up his wet gloves above the stove when the phone rang. It was Earl Parson, the NC Company's agent in Nenana.

  "I want you to go back to Tolovana and wait there," he told the exhausted Kallands. "There's a diphtheria epidemic in Nome."

  In a few moments Kallands had his gloves back on and hitched the dogs back up. Despite the temperature, which was nearly minus 60 degrees, he doubled back to Tolovana, a twenty-mile drive.

  It had been an exhausting day: he arrived at around ten-thirty that night, having traveled more than 70 miles that day and more than 150 over the past two days. The dogs needed a few days off as much as he did. That would have to wait.

  Now, twelve hours later, just around eleven o'clock in the morning, when the stillness outside the Tolovana roadhouse would usually be broken only by the occasional crack of a tree splitting in the cold or the extended clang of ice cracking under pressure, Kallands heard the pattering of dogs' feet and the rustle of runners gliding through the snow.

  It was Wild Bill Shannon. As the team approached, Kallands and the roadhouse owner and his family all went out to help.

  Shannon's face was still creased and black with frostbite, and his dogs looked for all the world as if they had been done in. Even the coming of daylight had done little to raise the temperature, which was now running at around 56 degrees below zero. For Wild Bill, the relay was finally over. He had done his part against tough odds, and done it well.

  After allowing the serum to warm up at the roadhouse, Edgar Kallands was ready to start the next leg of the relay. He hopped on his 16-foot mail sled and as if on autopilot, released the brake and took off. His share of the relay, thirty-one miles to Manley Hot Springs, would be overland through thick woods on a trail that cut across a wide bend of the Tanana River. It was as difficult a part of the trail as any. Years later, in an interview with a reporter, he recalled his memory of the day and what had driven him: "It was 56 below, but I didn't notice it. We were dressed warm. We didn't have down, but I had a parky. It went below my knees, so the heat couldn't get out. You was always running or moving; your feet never got cold...But what the heck? What do you notice when you're 20 years old? You don't notice a thing. I think about it now. How did I survive?"

  Behind the roadhouse at Tolovana, as if it were a normal day on the job, the Signal Corps operator dashed off a message to Ed Wetzler in Nenana, the governor's man in charge of overseeing the relay. "Antitoxin departed Tolovana 11 a.m." The relay was on its way again.

  Shannon tried to rest in Tolovana, but he had the fate of Cub, Jack, Jet, and now Bear on his mind. In a few days, he would return to Nenana with all four dogs in his sled. Cub, Jack, and Jet would die not long after his return. Shannon's own frostbite had been so severe that it would be weeks before he would once again be able to touch his own face with a
razor and shave. Even then, it was a painful experience.

  He told a reporter that he had done nothing out of the ordinary, that his animals deserved all the praise.

  "What those dogs did on the run to Nome is above valuation. I claim no credit for myself. The real heroes of that run...were the dogs of the teams that did the pulling, dogs like Cub, and Jack and Jet that gave their lives on an errand of mercy. I can't tell you yet whether I'll be able to save Bear or not. He's in pretty bad shape, and it looks like I may lose him."

  No record exists of Bear's fate. He may have survived, but in all likelihood he never ran again—a horrible fate for an animal that lived and breathed solely to run with its pack down a moonlit trail. Some dogs just won't accept being left out of the team and will howl and moan as the team leaves the yard. Sometimes they will sink into depression and die. Even those who accept their fate to sit by and watch the team leave always keep alive the instinct to one day run again.

  "If ever their master comes to them with harness in hand," a modern-day musher wrote, "they will struggle on arthritic legs to ready themselves for the trail. There may be pain in their backs, but there is always hope in their eyes."

  9: Red Tape

  Headlines across the country told the unfolding drama in the far north as the mushers drove their dogs across the Alaskan wilderness. (Courtesy of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Seattle Post/Intelligencer)

  "Nome's Plight Worse: Nome Pleads for Airplane Relief Flight."

  - Seattle Union Record

  The temperature at Nome was 20 below, with a 10-knot wind blowing in from the north. In the dim purple light of the arctic morning, Emily Morgan and the other nurses who were gathered in the breakfast nook at Maynard Columbus Hospital could see the cross above St. Joseph's Church light up the sky like a constellation. Usually at this time of day, the staff would be finishing their breakfast, washing dishes, and taking the report of the night nurse coming off duty. But on this Thursday morning, January 29, the second day of the relay, there seemed little time for routine. The epidemic had taken a dramatic turn for the worse, and Welch needed all the help he could get over at the Sandspit and in town.

  Yesterday had been another exhausting day; yet by that evening, after Welch and Morgan had examined their findings in preparation for their daily report to Mayor Maynard, there seemed some hope. Welch had been able to report to the mayor that no new cases had developed. It was a surprising discovery. Had the town turned the corner on the crisis without new serum?

  Unfortunately, it had not. Between late Wednesday evening and Thursday morning, at least two more children came down with diphtheria. One of them, Daniel Kialook, a Native on the Sandspit, had membrane covering both sides of his throat and a temperature of 99.6 degrees; another child in town was positively ill with diphtheria; while several others were complaining of sore throats. Welch and Morgan now had some twenty confirmed cases on their medical list and almost double that number of suspected cases. Reports were coming in of at least one mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown, other parents in despair over the death of a child, and many more paralyzed with fear.

  Now, Welch had to face the fact that he had no way of telling how many more cases would develop by the end of the day or in which quarter of town. Would he wake up tomorrow and find ten new cases or maybe even twenty? How many more parents at the Sandspit would Emily Morgan have to comfort as they buried their child? It was not the town population's fault. Both Native and white residents had obeyed the quarantine. Each full-blown case, as well as those suspected of having been infected, had been kept away from the general population. But the particular strain of diphtheria affecting Nome was simply too virulent for these basic precautions to make enough of a difference, and the lack of modern medical equipment to fight the disease was finally getting to Dr. Welch.

  If only he had the means to perform the Schick Test. A little more than a decade earlier, in 1913, the Schick Test, named after the Hungarian-American pediatrician Béla Schick who created it, had been developed to identify those who had a natural immunity to the diphtheria toxin, most likely as a consequence of an earlier exposure that they survived. It was a simple test, an injection of diluted diphtheria toxin between the layers of the skin. If the skin turned red, the person was susceptible. With this information, Welch and Morgan would have been able to identify and then take special steps to shield those residents who were vulnerable and reassure those who were not.

  Even without Schick Tests, Welch and Morgan could have reduced the severity of the epidemic and possibly brought it under control if they had throat swabs, a microscope, and an incubator for making cultures and identifying the presence of the bacteria. Although a person can be immune to the toxin the bacteria produces, he or she can still carry the bacteria and communicate it to others. In addition, some people may take longer than others to develop symptoms or have such mild symptoms that their infection goes undetected for days. Welch had no way of reliably distinguishing a child with a nascent case of diphtheria from one who had a plain old sore throat. Nor did he have a way of identifying healthy carriers and preventing them from traveling freely, thereby spreading the contagion, even beyond town.

  Without these basic tools, the job of stemming the epidemic was all the more overwhelming and time-consuming. Each sniffle and cough had to be treated as if it were the start of the disease and each healthy resident had to be looked at as suspect. And now the one tool Welch did have, antitoxin—weak at six years old—was down to 21,000 units. From this point forward, Welch and Morgan would in effect have to play God and determine who would receive the life-saving medicine and who would not.

  By early that Thursday afternoon, Welch passed on the news to Mayor Maynard that his earlier, more positive assessment had been premature. If the epidemic continued to spread at this new rate, there could be several more deaths before the drivers carrying the 300,000 units reached Nome. "The situation is bad," a panicky Maynard wrote in a telegram to Thompson in Fairbanks and Sutherland in Washington; "...the number of diphtheria cases increasing hourly." According to reports from the Signal Corps operator, the serum was about 180 miles west of Nenana and was expected to reach Ruby at around eight o'clock that evening. It was another four hundred miles from Ruby to Nome; if all went well, it would be at least another eight days before new antitoxin reached Nome.

  Or would it? Maynard had never really given up on the idea of an air rescue. Governor Bone had overruled him, not changed his mind. With Welch's latest report and certain information he had recently received from the governor, Maynard wondered if the time was ripe to put in a second bid for a dramatic air rescue.

  The previous day, Maynard had received a message from Bone that more serum had been located in several towns near Juneau and was being consolidated in the capital for shipment. This third batch weighed about 1.2 pounds. 1 Bone was planning to send it by scheduled steamer from Juneau to the port town of Seward, where it would travel up the rail line to Nenana and wait for the next scheduled mail run.

  1. The serum was referred to only by its weight. Based on the weight of the 300,000 units—20 pounds—the serum being consolidated in Juneau was probably the equivalent of about 125,000 units, enough to treat about four to six patients.

  Yesterday, the Juneau units had seemed minuscule compared to the 300,000 units en route and the 1.1 million units scheduled to depart by boat from Seattle on Saturday. But now, with the epidemic escalating, prompt delivery of even a 12-pound package might mean the difference between life and death for four to six terrified children who were at risk of slow strangulation. Now was the moment to turn up the heat a degree or two on Bone and on the federal authorities in Washington for an air rescue, and Maynard knew just the men to start the ball rolling—Thompson and Sutherland. Thompson, in particular, understood that if you wanted to get the full attention of Washington's politicians and officials, there was no better way than through the American press.

  It had been easy to get their at
tention when the story first broke. From the day the Associated Press first reported the diphtheria epidemic in Nome and the dearth of antitoxin, the morning and afternoon papers, from San Francisco to Chicago to New York, had covered it without hesitation and in increasingly bold type. In a matter of days, Nome, Alaska, had once again captured the world's imagination, this time through a race of Alaska's dogs against the grim reaper. "Dogs Pitted Against Death in Nome Race," read the headline in the San Francisco Bulletin. "Dogs Carry Antitoxin to Snow Bound Alaskan City," wrote the Washington Herald. Editors fired off telegrams to Welch and Governor Bone, requesting exclusive interviews and personal accounts. Welch, with no time to spare, angrily declined. "I am a physician, not a press agent," he snapped. Bone on the other hand was, or at least had once been, a press agent. He typed out energetic reports for the International News Service praising the dog drivers, "who suffered for the sufferers" as they headed toward Nome.

  From newspapers, the story soon jumped to radio. Audiences across the country began to reach for the dial to tune in to the "Race Against Death" taking place out there in the vast northern reaches of the continent.

  Soon it was not just Nome in the limelight. Towns forgotten since the end of the Alaskan gold rushes once again became household names: Fairbanks, Tanana, Manley Hot Springs, and Ruby. Men like Wild Bill Shannon, Edgar Kallands, and Curtis Welch became symbols of America's thirst for adventure and for heroes. Other news stories—a total eclipse over New York and a federal war fraud case against former Assistant Secretary of War Benedict Crowell—were relegated to sections below the fold, and everyone from the lowliest official to the president himself had locked onto the tale of the territory.