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

by Gay Salisbury

  With the overflow behind them, the team charged over a series of ridges that ran perpendicular to the shore. Each dropped sharply down to a creek and Kaasen found a momentary reprieve from the wind. The last and highest of the ridges was Topkok Mountain, the brutal 600-foot climb with a long, exposed summit. Mushers generally tackled Topkok only in the daylight. The trail hugged the rocky cliffs, but with the wind howling down the slope, a driver could quickly become disoriented. You work your way too far to the south, and you sail off the edge to the beach below. It was here that Seppala nearly lost his life during his first sweepstakes race in 1914. As Kaasen approached the base of Topkok, he stopped for a few minutes, caught his breath, and then, pushing from behind, he urged the dogs on as he charged up the mountain. It seemed that for every step they took forward, the storm pushed them back two. The dogs crawled on their bellies as they fought their way up. Kaasen's right cheek went numb from the cold. "Topkok is hell when it's storming," Kaasen would later recall. "It was storming some when I got up there."

  Upon reaching the summit, Kaasen jumped back onto the sled and held on as the dogs raced along the summit. He strained his eyes in the darkness to make sure the dogs were not heading toward the edge. If it had been daytime and calm, Kaasen would have been able to see clear across the coast to Cape Nome, but it was well after midnight now and the storm continued to rage. At the end of the ridge, the team picked up speed and began to race down the far slope of Topkok. They were on the six-mile stretch of flats after Topkok, and the wind was coming across the sloughs- and lagoons, picking up snow in such thick veils that Kaasen could barely see his hand in front of his face. His wheel dogs were completely obscured. This stretch of the coast was famous for violent local winds. A series of wind tunnels lines the coast, generating hurricane-force gusts and areas of calm as if someone were flipping off and on a switch. As the team fanned along the curve of the beach, the winds harassed them from the right. This is a dangerous part of the trail, for it ran just behind the dune line, crossing slippery lagoons and bare spots. To the left, on the other side of the line, was sea ice, and open water often lay just a quarter mile offshore. A team can easily drift over the line in a strong wind, and any team that found itself on ice had to turn directly into the wind and fight its way back to the beach.

  For more than an hour, the blowing snow had been so thick that Kaasen could not see the trail and could only guess at his position each time Balto crossed another lagoon or creek. He had given control of the team over to Balto and his job now was to hold on. "I didn't know where I was.," Kaasen would later recall. "I couldn't even guess." Then, in a lull between gusts, Kaasen recognized a vast depression in the land up ahead as the Bonanza Slough. He was well beyond Solomon. It was two miles back. He had missed the roadhouse, which was just north of the trail. It was then that he made a decision, the most controversial of the entire race. He would push on to Port Safety. He could rest later. It would be a decision he would soon regret.

  It was about ten more miles to Port Safety, where Ed Rohn was to take the serum into Nome. As Kaasen headed over across Bonanza Slough, he entered a long blowhole and the wind hit him. It takes a 60- to 70-mph wind to flip a sled, and throughout his journey Kaasen had struggled to keep the rig down. Finally, he was overwhelmed. Entering the blowhole, Kaasen did not have enough strength or weight to keep the sled upright. Several times the sled was hurled off the trail, dragging the dogs with it. Each time, Kaasen had to take off his gloves, untangle the team, and right the sled.

  Before crossing to the other side, a final gust slammed into the sled. Kaasen found himself buried in a drift. He crawled in the darkness back to the sled, righted it, and fumbled with the dogs' harnesses. He patted the sled down with his hands to make sure the serum was still in place. He worked his hands up and down the basket, first methodically and then frantically. It was gone. His stomach tightened. The worst had happened. Kaasen dropped to the ground and crawled around the snow, probing in the darkness with his bare hands for the serum. His right hand hit against something hard. He grabbed it. It was the serum. He lashed it back to the sled, gave it a few extra turns with the rope, and fled this devilish stretch of land.

  The gust that flipped Kaasen's sled marked a turn in the musher's luck. At the end of the slough, the trail curved to the southwest and the wind was now at his back. In his own words, the going was better and "boosted" him along over the last few miles to the Port Safety roadhouse in a little over an hour.

  When he arrived, it was about three o'clock in the morning and the roadhouse was dark. After sending the storm warning to Nome earlier that evening, Ed Rohn had gone to sleep, assuming that Kaasen too would be waiting at Solomon for the storm to abate before heading on to Port Safety,

  Kaasen stared up at the roadhouse from the trail. He contemplated waking Rohn. But it would take time for the driver to harness and hitch up his dogs. The wind appeared to be easing, and although he and his dogs were cold, they were still moving fast down the trail. He figured he would make better time if he continued on to Nome.

  For the last twenty miles, the trail ran along the beach. The wind continued to die down, but travel was slow and difficult because of heavy drifts. Although his fingers ached with frostbite and several of his dogs were stiffening up, Kaasen was grateful at least to be able to see the path ahead.

  Around 5:30 a.m. on Monday, February 2, Kaasen could make out the outline of the cross above St. Joseph's Church. Within a few minutes he pulled up onto Front Street and stopped, exhausted, his eyes stinging from the cold, dry air, outside the door of the Miners & Merchants Bank of Nome.

  Witnesses to this drama said they saw Kaasen stagger off the sled and stumble up to Balto, where he collapsed, muttering: "Damn fine dog."

  12: Saved!

  Gunnar Kaasen with Balto in the lead driving down Front Street on February 2, 1925. This was a reenactment of their arrival earlier that morning, staged for photographers. (Authors' collection)

  "Final Dash Brings Antitoxin to Nome, But It Is Frozen. Believe Serum Still Good."

  - The New York Times, February 2, 1925

  That Monday, February 2, within minutes of Kaasen's arrival, Welch began to unwrap the package. The serum was frozen solid but the vials did not appear to be broken, a testament to the care Dr. Beeson in Anchorage had taken in packing them, as well as the care with which the mushers handled their cargo. 1 The serum would have to be thawed before it could be used, and that would take time. Welch took it to the hospital and put it in a warm room (by Alaskan standards), at 46 degrees. By nine o'clock, the serum in the vials had been partially liquefied and not a single bottle was broken. By 11:00 A.M., the serum was clear and was ready for use.

  1. According to telegrams sent after the serum's arrival, Dr. Beeson in Anchorage had apparently counteracted any expansion of the serum by using rubber and cork stoppers on each ampoule.

  News of the serum's arrival had spread through town, and the first order of business was to treat the most severe cases. Welch went first to the Winters and McDowell households. John Winter's wife was very ill; she had contracted the disease from her young daughter two days earlier, on January 31, and her condition had deteriorated over the past few hours. Now her husband had come down with the disease.

  Robert McDowell, the United Press reporter, had also developed symptoms. His throat was red and swollen and the doctor could see the beginnings of a membrane, so he gave McDowell an initial shot of 5,000 units. The newsman's reports had played an important role in getting the Nome story out to papers across the globe. But now, with his twenty-four-year-old wife and infant daughter under quarantine and suspected of having been infected, he had become the story.

  Nurse Morgan, meanwhile, headed over to the Sandspit to give each member of the Stanley family several thousand units of antitoxin. She went on to visit several other families and immunized each of them.

  By early afternoon, more than 10 percent of the 300,000 units had been used up. Many of the sa
me patients would receive a second round of injections, and later that evening several thousand more units of serum were gone. The 300,000 units would be exhausted long before the arrival of the second shipment of 1.1 million units.

  Of all the cases that had developed since the start of the relay, Margaret Curran's was the one that frightened Curtis Welch the most. She had developed symptoms earlier in the week, several days after her return to town from her father's roadhouse in Solomon. The implications had weighed heavily on Welch in the final days of the relay. If she had indeed contracted diphtheria, then every traveler who passed through the roadhouse would also have been exposed to the disease. It could be a matter of days before reports of new infections would begin to come in from communities along the coast. The 1.1 million units en route to the ice-free port of Seward had to reach Nome a lot faster than officials had planned.

  The shipment had left Seattle by ship on Saturday and it still had to travel by rail from Seward to Nenana before the regular mail could take it to Nome by dogsled. The medicine was expected to arrive in Nenana around the 8th, in six days. The regular mail route journey from Nenana to Nome typically took about twenty-five days.

  Time was not on Nome's side, especially if Welch's worst fears about the Curran case turned out to be justified.

  At a meeting of the Board of Health that Monday, Welch took a position he had not taken before. It was time, he conceded, to risk all and try to deliver at least half of the next shipment of serum by air, a dangerous gamble. "I should feel much safer if I knew that I would get additional shipment not more than ten days from date," Welch wrote in a telegram that was read by Surgeon General Gumming.

  As news of Welch's plight spread, it seemed that many officials now were in agreement that half the shipment should be diverted further up the railroad to Fairbanks, where a plane would be waiting to carry it to Nome.

  Everyone, except Governor Bone.

  With Welch's assent, Mayor Maynard brought Thompson and Sutherland up to date on the situation. Thompson must have gone right to work on it, for the following day Roy Darling and Ralph Mackie were in the cockpit of the biplane, taking it for a test drive down the main street of Fairbanks in minus-14-degree weather beneath clear skies.

  The test run was proof enough to everyone in town that both plane and fliers could take off at a moment's notice. Volunteers began to pack the aircraft with supplies. The excitement was growing in Fairbanks, and in Nome, Welch and the others heard the news with relief.

  There was even greater cause for relief when news spread that the 300,000 units that had been brought by dogsled relay seemed to be working. The repeated thawing and freezing did not seem to have damaged the serum's efficacy, and on February 3 it looked as if even those who were seriously ill would recover.

  The members of the Winters family were improving and Robert McDowell was on the mend just hours after receiving the medicine.

  "I'm carrying on," McDowell said in a dispatch to his colleagues in San Francisco. "My case is not considered serious."

  The reporter had to dictate the message to a friend because he was still under quarantine.

  But it was not all good news. Later that afternoon, Robert McDowell's daughter developed a grayish white spot in her throat, and his wife, Vera, also appeared to be ill. (Her name does not appear on the medical list of diphtheria patients.) At seven o'clock that evening, Vera drew her final breath, apparently the sixth victim of the epidemic.

  Vera McDowell was a prominent woman in Nome. She was the first white girl to be born during the gold rush days, delivered on March 16, 1900, and her loss was felt by many of the townsfolk. Some newspapers attributed her death to diphtheria, but Nome's death records stated the cause as venous air embolism and miscarriage. (Vera was four to five months pregnant.) An air embolism is an infrequent complication of pregnancy, and since she had no symptoms of a sore throat, Vera McDowell probably did not have diphtheria.

  But in the chaos of the epidemic, Vera's death was reported across the states, and officials in Washington and the public at large shuddered at the news. The San Francisco Chronicle's headline read: "Six Dead As Plague Gains Added Force."

  On Friday, February 6, Vera's parents and close friends got permission to hold a private funeral and led a small procession by horse-drawn hearse to the Belmont Point Cemetery, where the body was placed in a vault until proper burial could be made after the ground had thawed in the spring.

  "She was known to every sourdough, miner and prospector in the early days on the Seward Peninsula," McDowell wrote in a terse obituary for the Seattle Star.

  By Friday afternoon, about one third of the serum had been used. Mayor Maynard, Hammon executive Mark Summers, and "Wrong Font" Thompson again bombarded Bone with messages demanding that he authorize an air flight from Fairbanks.

  "If this rate continues you can see how long this shipment will last," Summers said in his telegram.

  Bone acknowledged their concern but held his ground. Was it mere stubbornness that precluded him from dividing up the serum, allowing the pilots to make their daring rescue flight? Did Juneau and Washington simply not care enough to act decisively and sanction such a bold new move? It seemed so to Mayor Maynard.

  Maynard lost no time taking his complaints to the press. The headline for The Washington Post that day read: "Nome Mayor Attacks Capital for Inactivity."

  "This bureaucracy stands idly by while our people suffer and die and while red-blooded men are willing to fly airplanes to our relief," Maynard said. "If Nome is compelled to wait until the Governor of Alaska considers that conditions here are really serious, Nome might as well abolish its Public Health Board, to govern our life and death from Juneau..."

  Bone's health official, Harry DeVighne, bristled at the attack: "Alarming reports sent out from Nome in criticism of official agencies are wholly unjustified," he told reporters.

  "...The territory is alertly watching the situation and while I believe that the delivery of the larger supply from Seattle would be safer by dog team than by any airplane available in the territory, the flight will be authorized if warranted by a crisis."

  With that public statement, the governor's office sent a message to Wetzler directing him to round up more drivers for a second relay. Meanwhile, the train at Seward was ordered to idle at the station and wait for the serum, which was to arrive on board the Admiral Watson the next day, Saturday.

  The U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, and the airplane executives in Fairbanks, however, acting on an initiative begun by Maynard and perhaps fueled by news of Vera McDowell's death, continued to prepare for the flight. There was nothing the governor could do to stop them.

  In Fairbanks, mechanics fitted skis to the plane and tuned the motor. Pilots Darling and Mackie stowed an extra propeller on board, along with "as many spare engine parts as weight will permit," sleeping bags, rifles, snowshoes, and camp equipment.

  "If forced down," they told the North American Newspaper Alliance in an interview, "we will mush over the trail and connect with the dog teams [of the second relay]...The antitoxin will not freeze unless we do. We wi]l carry it in containers next to our bodies."

  The two may have known a great deal about airplanes, but they knew very little about traveling even short distances in the Alaska wilderness without dogs.

  In Seattle, at the behest of Washington officials, Commandant J. V. Chase of the Navy Yard at Bremerton ordered the minesweeper Swallow to prepare once again to head to the edge of the ice pack to aid the fliers in case they hit trouble on their way to Nome.

  "It is most gallant of Darling," said another official, Dr. George Magruder, the head of the Public Health Service in Seattle, who coordinated the shipment of the i.i million units to Alaska. "The flight under the best of conditions is extremely hazardous. With an old plane...and in the dead of winter it is a perilous venture."

  Although Chase's actions and Magruder's comments certainly encouraged those who argued on behalf of an air rescue, it was not clear
how a sweeper would help if and when the rescue actually began. But that may not have been the point.

  In addition, the army ordered the men of the Signal Corps to prepare fires along the route to guide the fliers, and in Nome, Captain Thomas Ross of the U.S. Lifesaving Crew began, with the help of his colleagues, to hack out a landing field on the Bering Sea in front of Nome. As far as Maynard, Sutherland, and Thompson were concerned, everything was in place for a flight—except Governor Bone's authorization.

  On Saturday, February 7, with the serum due to arrive by ship late that evening, Bone reversed himself and sent a message to Wetzler authorizing him to divert half of the 1.1 million units when it arrived by train the next day. It was clear that he was taking the action under duress, most likely as a consequence of a report of yet another diphtheria case. The officials in Nome were in "hysteria," Bone said in his message to Wetzler. "There is no emergency that justifies such a hazard. However, I sincerely trust that nothing will go wrong."

  Early Sunday afternoon, as the second batch of serum headed by-train toward Nenana and then on to Fairbanks, Darling and Mackie went to the hangar where the Anchorage was stored to make last-minute preparations for the flight. They were both wearing several layers of fur clothing, and on their faces they had smeared petroleum grease a quarter of an inch thick to protect them from the cold. They wore close-fitting chamois helmets, with peepholes for their eyes and nostrils, and between them they had a single parachute—a problem, one newspaper reported, that would be "solved between themselves."

  Finally, they packed two thermos bottles filled with hot liquid, a bar of chocolate, bullion cubes, beans, rice, flour, an ax, and extra fur robes.