And then, as if nature herself were getting into the act, just as the relay was starting, snowstorms and gales that had been battering Juneau for days headed for the states, hitting the Midwest and the Northeast from Maine to Georgia, pushing temperatures in New York to record lows. The bad weather was killing people: in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a fifty-five-year-old man named Edward Sheridan was found dead in a snowdrift just yards from his home. In Baltimore, a night watchman in a stone yard froze to death near his shack. Harry Kayhan of the Bronx collapsed from the cold at 41st Street and Park Avenue. There were reports that children on their way to school had been lost in the storm.
It was 1 below zero outside the warm apartments of New York, and those looking out their windows were being given a small taste of what living in the Arctic was all about. Manhattan had, ironically, found itself icebound. The Hudson River had frozen solid, trapping barges and ferries in ice floes. At the West 60th Street piers, two separate cargos of live cattle were unloaded and herded down Twelfth Avenue to an early slaughter. The cows aboard were freezing to death where they stood. There was havoc in the shipping lanes north and train delays on the commuter lines. City and county workers in the thousands were trying to break up the ice and clear city streets.
A northeasterner unable to keep warm in zero-degree weather in New York could now begin to fathom what dogsledding in temperatures of minus 50 and 60 degrees might be like, alone and mostly in the dark of night. In living rooms across America, readers began drafting letters and poems in honor of the men and dogs taking part in the relay.
Maynard understood the intrinsic appeal of this man-against-nature story. He understood that the mushers were worthy of every bit of the praise and attention they were getting across the nation. But he also understood that Alaska desperately needed to move into the modern age.
The America of the 1920s was forward-looking, it was ebullient, but most of all it was an America captured by the belief that with a modicum of Yankee ingenuity, any problem could be solved. In the world of business, assembly lines and mass production were rapidly replacing the work of skilled artisans who might produce work of higher quality but at a cost only the very wealthy could afford. More and more Americans were trading in their horses and buggies for automobiles. Paved roads, built to accommodate fast-moving cars, were being laid down in every city and town across the country, and service stations providing food, gas, and "auto courts," the precursor to motels, were rising up across once lonely prairie land, their owners hoping to make a few dollars out of the new American wanderlust. Electricity too was reaching more and more households, and with the upsurge in available power came a concomitant interest in new appliances and technologies, such as the radio. As radio sets improved with the advent of new technologies that allowed for built-in speakers and AC power, Americans began to buy sets in great numbers. In 1922, some 60,000 households had a radio set; by 1924, there were more than 3.5 million.
Alaska needed to be part of this transformation. It needed modern communication and modern transportation, so that the next time an Alaskan town found itself without serum, or under threat from some different peril, it would not have to rely upon a Native technology that was older than anyone could calculate.
And there was something else driving Maynard, Thompson, and Sutherland. They were simply tired of being ignored by the federal government. After all, a good argument could be made that the federal authorities, having acquired Alaska, had in the end paid it little attention. Welch had asked for serum. His request had been ignored. In his annual report on the Yukon River region west of the town of Tanana, Governor Bone himself had observed that"...It is an unpeopled country, with abandoned mining camps bearing pathetic evidence of affluent days now gone, and steamers that once plied up and down the river beached at St. Michael and long out of commission. But for the boat service from Nenana to Holy Cross...this Yukon country would be wholly cut off from settled Alaska [the southeastern part of the state, especially around Juneau] and the outside world."
One could argue that there had never been enough people in the territory to justify the large expense of infrastructure needed to support a modern population; but one could also argue that new settlers were not going to come and make Alaska their home unless someone agreed to take up its cause and secured funds for roads and an air service. As it now stood, the 55,000 residents of Alaska had to take three separate means of transportation and travel over every terrain imaginable, up mountains, through forests, and over rivers, to reach the Interior from one of the towns of the southeast.
If it had to be a crisis in Nome that focused the nation on Alaska's plight, so be it. In an aggressive campaign of telegrams and exclusive dispatches, Maynard employed a no-holds-barred approach in the pleas he sent to wire services, newspapers, and institutions across the states, from the venerable AP and The New York World to the Seattle Chamber of Commerce.
"Help immediately!" Maynard begged in a cable to the AP.
Help by airplane with antitoxin serum is the appeal of Nome, not for sourdoughs, but especially for children of Young America of tomorrow.
We don't want to ask Russia to send an icebreaker with antitoxin, nor do we ask that the Shenandoah...be dispatched, but please get Uncle Sam to send a plane from Fairbanks where...men have volunteered to fly to Nome in four hours to bring relief to the dangerous situation prevailing here. Antitoxin shipped from Juneau would arrive in Nenana on Feb. 3, which if sent by airplane from there to Nome will beat the dog teams by several days, which may mean the saving of many lives.
Everything looked favorable yesterday but today conditions have been reversed...Dr. Welch states...has only one good dose left and this is six years old.
There was no such evidence that the cases were mounting hourly, and Welch had more than one dose left, though not much more. But there was also no doubt that Nome was in crisis and Maynard's appeal eventually made its way to nearly every newspaper. Soon, his germ of an idea took on a life of its own.
"There is no denying that a well equipped airplane station with pilots and machines ready at a moment's notice to undertake an emergency journey is a crying necessity for Interior Alaska," said an editorial in Juneau's Alaska Daily Empire.
It is no longer a novelty, but becomes a part and parcel of modern advancement. Unfortunately it requires some catastrophe to awaken the public consciousness to some crying need. It required the Titanic tragedy to bring greater safeguards for the sea. It has required the diphtheria epidemic at Nome to awaken Washington to what [pilots] Noel Wien and Ben Eielson have been urging for two years. It is hoped that the costly lesson—the safety of Alaskan babies—will have gone home to bear fruit.
Soon, nearly every American newspaper printed Maynard's broadcast for help, publishing it on their front pages and giving it a prominent headline. The Washington Post urged that the "Epidemic Grows Graver, City Begs Officials Here to Send Aid by Air." In New York, The Sun suggested that an air rescue would be "the greatest humanitarian service ever rendered by a flier in peace time," and the pilot Roy Darling became in the eyes of American public the "crippled war flier"—even though his crash had occurred after the war—who was willing to risk his life to race "over the icy wilds" to Nome.
Washington immediately began to reconsider its stance on the proposed mercy flight.
Delegate Sutherland was the first politician to move into action. With the snow still thick on the ground in Washington, D.C., Sutherland approached the Justice and Navy departments for official permission for Roy Darling to fly a plane out of Fairbanks. Permission was granted. He then moved over to the U.S. Surgeon General and the Public Health Service and urged officials there to review the possibility of an air rescue to Nome. They were, it seemed, open to the idea.
Sutherland then wired Thompson and Mayor Maynard the good news. "Aviator Darling of Fairbanks has permission from Dept of Justice and the Navy Dept to make flight to Nome if required STOP Have just wired this information to Fairbanks STOP Keep
me informed, official collect," Sutherland said in the message to Maynard.
For Sutherland, this must have been a moment of pure joy. An air rescue would not just further his dreams of establishing air-mail routes throughout Alaska but bring back from the edge of extinction a town that had so influenced his own life.
The news from Sutherland, however, did little to calm Maynard. By the following day, Friday, January 30, the mayor's anxiety had escalated. Apparently there had been another death overnight, bringing the death toll to five since the outbreak began on January 20.
Dr. Welch and Nurse Morgan were now monitoring twenty-two patients and thirty suspects. At least fifty-five people, according to his medical records, had been in close contact with someone who had the disease. Among the seriously ill was the young daughter of a miner named John Winters. She had membrane on both sides of her throat and a 102-degree fever. Welch gave her 6,000 units of serum, bringing his supply down to 13,000.
After hearing the day's tolls from the doctor and his staff, Maynard again hurried to the Signal Corps office, this time with a much more audacious plan. The chances were high, he knew, that even with the epidemic worsening, Governor Bone could not be persuaded to allow a plane to fly in the 12 pounds of Juneau serum. So Maynard decided to turn up the pressure a notch. He addressed his next telegram to his colleagues at the Chamber of Commerce in Seattle. He wanted Seattle businessmen to use their influence in Washington to prepare a plane to leave from Seattle with the 1.1 million units of the serum that were scheduled to leave on board the steamship Alameda tomorrow and head for Alaska's ice-free port of Seward. A plane could get the 1.1 million units of serum to Nome within seventy-two hours and wipe out the epidemic in its entirety.
The Seattle businessmen moved on the suggestion and wired the Chamber of Commerce's representative in Washington, J. J. Underwood, asking him to use his influence to secure a meeting with Major General Mason Patrick, chief of the U.S. Air Service.
The year before, the air service, with the help of the navy, had launched the first successful round-the-world flight on planes specifically built for long-distance flying. The planes were Douglas World Cruisers with 50-foot wingspans and cruising speeds of 90 mph that had been built by a torpedo-plane manufacturer, Donald Douglas, who worked out of an abandoned movie studio in California. On that epic round-the-world flight, teams consisting of a pilot and a mechanic set off in four separate aircraft from Seattle and flew up the Pacific Coast to Alaska and down the Alaska Peninsula to the Kuriles and beyond, circling the globe and touching down in Seattle five months and twenty-two days later. A major aim of the multi-stop expedition had been to provide U.S. pilots and their support crews with experience in the preparation and logistics of long-distance flying.
The chamber wanted one of those fliers, Lieutenant Erik Nelson—who had also been a member of the Black Wolf Squadron that had flown from New York to Nome via Fairbanks in 1920—to fly the serum to Nome. Nelson's chances of succeeding in a Douglas World Cruiser were far greater than Darling's chances in a flimsy aircraft of the Fairbanks Airplane Corporation.
The proposed flight, in which Nelson would take off from the Sand Point federal aviation field north of Seattle with Nome as his destination, would be a groundbreaking event: a rescue attempt that was also the longest air-mail flight in U.S. history.
The press understood the significance of the proposed flight and quickly called in experts to debate the possibility 7 . Sand Point Commander Lieutenant Theodore Koenig, reached by the Seattle Union Record and the Post-Intelligencer, confirmed for reporters that a properly equipped plane with a large flying radius leaving from Sand Point could reach Nome before one of the smaller planes in Fairbanks. But if Maynard had hoped for a ringing endorsement from experienced fliers, he soon learned that he would get nothing of the sort. "Even so, the flight from Seattle presents grave difficulties as the opportunity to make favorable landings and replenish the fuel supply en route to the northern city is practically nil."
The longest single hop of the 1924 flight had been about 875 miles. Nome was more than 2,000 miles from Seattle. Furthermore, the U.S. War Department had taken nearly a year to prepare supply depots and landing places, and to coordinate patrol vessels before the 1924 fliers embarked on their round-the-world journey. In addition, an army plane leaving Seattle in winter would have to be equipped with pontoons to make the trip from Seattle to Seward port and then refitted with skis for the overland journey to Nome. This alone, added Koenig, "would take longer, after preparations along the route had been made, than to transport the serum by dog team."
Major H. C. K. Muhlenberg, commander of the air service unit of the ROTC at the University of Washington, agreed. He added that any pilot flying to Alaska would need an electrically heated suit, and it would take time to track one down because none were currently available north of San Diego.
While the experts continued to debate the merits of the flight, one reader in New. York and the general manager of a major U.S. wire service were working on an entirely different plan. The reader was Carl Lomen, son of the former Nome mayor, who was in the city on business. The wire service general manager was Loring Pickering of the North American Newspaper Alliance, an organization that had the power of sixty-nine newspapers behind it. Lomen and Pickering wanted Washington to take a greater role in the rescue effort and had come up with an idea that would solve the problems of refueling and landing. They wanted the government to send a cruiser with a plane on board up the Pacific Coast as far north as the Bering Sea ice line so that when the plane took off, it would have the shortest possible trip to Nome.
In a telegram to the U.S. Surgeon General, the Alliance offered to find and pay for a bacteriologist, culture tubes, swabs, an incubator, and other emergency laboratory supplies at any point on the Pacific Coast if Washington would dispatch a "cruiser carrying airplane and crew" to the edge of the ice pack of the Bering Sea. According to the telegram, the ice pack reached as far as Nunviak Island that winter, only some three hundred miles south of Nome.
In addition to the offer, Pickering's telegram gave space for the personal element of the tragedy unfolding and allowed Lomen to type in his own message. Lomen implored the Surgeon General to act immediately upon the Alliance's suggestion and
not permit this epidemic to ravage our community as the influenza epidemic of 1918 unfortunately did...even successful delivery of antitoxin now en route by dog sled will by no means save situation... Everything humanely possible should be done...Even if the dog sleds should arrive within ten days, which would be a remarkably quick trip considering the possibility of Alaska blizzards, there would still be a need in Nome for a large additional quantity of serum and laboratory equipment. May we have immediate reply so no valuable time, meaning lives, is lost.
The telegram arrived at the office of the U.S. Surgeon General and got pushed all the way up to the desk of President Coolidge, who instructed his health czar to provide Nome with whatever it needed.
Sutherland, meanwhile, was continuing to pressure the War Department and the Surgeon General's office. The likelihood of a Seattle-to-Nome flight had diminished as the very real problems such a flight posed became more and more apparent. But what about the Newspaper Alliance's proposal? An aircraft carrier was a fairly new innovation. In 1921, the navy had set up its Bureau of Aeronautics and a year later had commissioned an old collier, the Langley, into an aircraft carrier with arrester gear. A landing platform only 534 feet by 64 feet was built over the deck and it could transport about fifty planes. It was nicknamed "the Covered Wagon" because the landing deck shaded the entire length of what had been the main deck. The ship had been the scene of several flying exhibitions and by 1924 had become part of the Pacific Battle Fleet operating off the California coast.
The navy had less than twenty-four hours to make its decision. It could send the Langley or it could send one of the fleet's battleships that had had the turret converted to launch a plane. Sutherland urged the bureau to
take a role in the rescue, but by the close of day, the navy had decided that the trip was too risky. A cruiser would not be able to get close enough for a plane carrying serum to make a nonstop flight to Nome without itself risking being crushed by the Bering Sea ice. The best the navy could offer, it said, was to place its minesweeper Swallow, which operated along the northwest Pacific Coast as well as in Alaskan waters, on high alert to rush any bacteriologist and lab supplies found by the Alliance to the ice-free port of Seward.
"We have been conferring with Delegate Sutherland and public health officials about situation," the navy rear admiral said in his reply to Pickering, "and will render whatever aid possible."
At least one expert disagreed with the navy's decision: the explorer Roald Amundsen also happened to be in New York, and there he was attempting to drum up support for his 1925 aerial assault on the North Pole.
A cruiser was entirely feasible, he told reporters; "from what I know of the Western Coast of Alaska at this time of year, I am convinced that a cruiser or destroyer could get within firing range of Nome." As it turned out, the aerial flight to the pole Amundsen was planning at the time would be a disaster. The engines conked out en route. But that flight and its failure were" still in the future. Despite the strong endorsement of one of world's most renowned explorers, the U.S. Navy still would not commit.
Sutherland kept up his lobbying efforts to fly the Juneau serum. Over the past two days he had kept one card close to his chest— William Thompson in Fairbanks. In the event that the War Department declined Maynard's plea for a plane, Sutherland had cabled Thompson to begin preparations for a flight: "...suggest aviator Darling have sourdough passenger who knows the trail," he told Thompson. "My suggestion to send snowshoes in event forced landing at a distance from the trail. Calm weather conditions reported on Bering Sea coast, maximum 19 below, north wind."
The Cruelest Miles: the Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic Page 19