It was time to start the engine. The serum was due by train some time soon.
Mackie and Darling heaved themselves into the open cockpit. A crowd had gathered to watch them. A volunteer mechanic by the name of Richard Lynch moved toward the front of the plane to spring the propeller.
It was about 40 below. Lynch, who had borrowed Mackie's new overcoat to help keep him warm, stepped up to the propeller, swinging the blade down hard. Unexpectedly, the propeller caught on the first try and the engine sprang to life. (It was a rare event for the propellers of the Fairbanks fleet to catch at the first try.)
Caught off guard by his success, Lynch, in trying to back away, slipped on the snow and got Mackie's overcoat caught in the first revolution of the blade. He was hurled 10 feet into the air. Luckily, Mackie's coat ripped and Lynch came crashing down to the ground, injuring his knee and breaking $10 worth of new tobacco pipes that had been in Mackie's coat pocket.
The engine roared to life and kept roaring. Mackie spent several minutes trying to idle it down but he could not. A mechanic standing at the back of the plane, holding down the tail while the engine ran at full speed, began to suffer from frostbite on his face. The slipstream created by the propeller was causing air to condense, forming a coat of ice on the fuselage and the tail, as well as on the mechanic's face.
In the cockpit, Darling's feet grew numb while Mackie, fiddling with the engine, lost feeling in his hands. The problem preventing them from regulating the engine was a broken radiator shutter, which caused the engine to overheat.
They would have to improvise another shutter, but that would take time, and the light in the sky was fading. The decision was made to call off the flight for the day. As the pilots and mechanics unloaded the provisions from the plane and began to work on a new shutter, a musher by the name of A. C. Olin left Nenana at 5:00 p.m. by dog team, headed for Tolovana. Packed in his Sled were half of the 1.1 million units of antitoxin.
Despite the day's fiasco, Mackie and Darling were not dismayed. The two men told reporters that evening that they would be ready to take off the next day and land in Nome before Wednesday.
On Monday morning, the radiator again was troublesome. Not enough alcohol and glycerine had been added to the water in the radiator and it had frozen.
But Mackie remained confident.
"Our plane will pass the dogs before we have been in the air for two hours," he predicted. But on Tuesday the pilots again failed to get off" the ground.
Finally, News-Miner editor Thompson, for whom the daring air rescue had meant so much, faced the truth. There would be no air rescue. And in that decision, Governor Bone was vindicated.
To his credit, Bone had not relied uncritically on the information being fed him from Fairbanks. From the first news of the epidemic, the governor had been receiving only glowing reports from Fairbanks on the plane's condition and the pilots' experience. Roy Darling had personally told Bone that the flight would be "no great difficulty," adding that "in the event of a forced landing we would expect nothing more serious than the delay incident to reaching nearest point of communication." But few forced landings were smooth in Alaska, especially at 50 or 60 degrees below, in blizzard conditions.
There was more than just a healthy skepticism influencing Bone's decisions. Despite the fears of Welch and others that the epidemic was not close to being under control, and that it might yet spread beyond the environs of Nome, Bone had quietly met with his health adviser, Harry DeVighne. After looking at all the information coming in from Nome, he concluded that the number of recoveries was beginning to outpace the number of new cases in Nome. 2 The situation was not dire enough to warrant the extreme risk of total failure involved in the flight.
2. The precise number of deaths from the Nome epidemic remains a matter of conjecture. Some documents put the official death toll at six, others at five. Welch once said he thought it was probably seven, with a total of seventy confirmed cases overall. But in an interview with his hometown New Haven newspaper, he indicated the death toll could have been much higher.
"There must have been many more," Welch told a New Haven Evening Register reporter, October 9, 1925. "I imagine there were at least a hundred cases among the Natives and no telling how many deaths in the Eskimo camps outside of the city. The Natives have a habit of burying their children without reporting the death."
Even more important, Bone had recently received a telegram from an aide in Anchorage who had done some research into Darling and the plane. The message made clear that the last time Darling had been in the air was after his crash, six years before. In addition, the Anchorage's engine had six hundred hours of service life, more than half of which had already been used up. Partly because the motor had so many hours on it, the plane was capable of doing only 60 mph. This meant it would take several hours longer than Thompson had anticipated to reach Nome and would require more than one stop to refuel, increasing the risk of an accident on landing or takeoff.
This information had been crucial in Bone's decision to avoid using the Anchorage in any but the most desperate situation. It is unclear even today why he finally capitulated. Perhaps by that point he was already convinced that whether or not the plane made it, the epidemic was winding down and the half of the second shipment that would be going by dogsled might be enough to wipe it out altogether. Or perhaps he knew that the Anchorage would never get off the ground.
In defeat, Thompson was neither defiant nor dismissive of the great accomplishments of his opponents. To his credit, he struck just the right tone.
"We believe in the airship and we believe in the dog...," he would write in a News-Miner editorial that evening.
We know that even an ordinary airship can make 60 miles an hour and we know that a dog cannot. Where the dog has it over the airship is that the dog...knows nothing about horizons, visibilities, temperatures, gasoline—all he knows is to obey his master's voice and marche...The burden of proof is today on the airship. The dogs are running and every hour getting closer to the goal. The airship will go when it can, but the dog seems to go whether he can or not. We take our hat off to THE DOG.
Indeed, by the time Thompson's editorial appeared, the second relay—which included many of the drivers from the first—had already safely left the town of Ruby, a little over a third of the way to Nome. The second run had also been difficult, with heavy snowstorms. The drivers were forced to break trail for much of the way.
Finally, on February 15, in the middle of a blizzard, Ed Rohn brought the second shipment of serum to Nome after a ninety-mile run. His lead dog, Star, was in the basket of his sled. Star had fallen through a fissure while crossing Golovin Bay and was badly injured.
Thompson could be magnanimous in defeat because the setback could only be temporary. The day of the dogs would soon pass into history. The race to save an arctic town did for Alaska what he could never have done with all his harangues—it focused the attention of the entire country on his territory.
On February 2, the same day that Gunnar Kaasen drove his team into Nome, President Coolidge signed the Airmail Act of 1925, otherwise known as the Kelly Act. The legislation, which had been introduced three years earlier by Representative Clyde M, Kelly of Pennsylvania, had accelerated through Congress in the past few weeks. Private air companies would now be allowed to bid on contracts for mail delivery.
Airplane companies in Alaska were free to compete against the dog teams for mail contracts. Over the course of the next several years, technology on the ground and in the air improved and, increasingly, the small aviation companies that began to spring up in Alaska beat out the dogs in the bidding wars for the mail.
Within a decade of the serum run, there were several permanent air-mail runs. In 1938, Charlie Biederman marked the end of an era on the upper Yukon River when he delivered the last batch of contract mail by dog team. His sled would eventually be donated to the Smithsonian's Postal Museum. "Now the Dog and the Driver have arrived at the End of the Trail—
the new way, the Airplane and the Pilot, takes over the task," said one Alaskan postmaster at the time. "The Dog has had its day. May the Airplane and the Pilot be as faithful."
By 1941, planes covered fifty-six routes while dog teams covered only ten, and by the early 1960s only a single dog route remained in Alaska: it was on St. Lawrence Island, about 150 miles off the coast in the Bering Sea. The postman was Chester Noongwook, who drove his team fifty miles to the landing strip where the air-mail plane touched down. His last run took place in January 1963.
Commercial aviation expanded in Alaska along with the air-mail routes. Operators took in extra income by flying passengers along with the regular mail. One of the first companies in the area to discover the potential windfall was Fairbanks Air. In June 1925, Noel Wien made the first round-trip commercial flight between Fairbanks and Nome. Wien flew an "aerial limousine," a five-passenger Fokker with an enclosed cabin that had upholstered seats and curtains.
On his first return flight, Wien carried the latest issue of the Nome Nugget, wrapped especially for the occasion and marked: "First Trip Air Mail Nome-Fairbanks. Courtesy Fairbanks Airplane Corp."
The trip had taken seven hours. It was a proud moment for "Wrong Font" Thompson, the feisty editor and aviation advocate. This would be one of the last causes he would ever fight for Alaska.
On January 4, 1926, Thompson died of pneumonia. He was in his early sixties.
As air-mail and passenger service gradually expanded across the state, the network of trails that had once been the territory's pride became overgrown, roadhouses were abandoned, and many of the smaller towns vanished. In 1931, when Charles Lindbergh and his wife flew over the Seward Peninsula and landed in a sheltered harbor south of Nome, Anne Morrow Lindbergh noticed the sad state of the roadhouses along the coast. "Dilapidated shingled buildings they were," she remembered. "Fast becoming useless; for the airplane...is replacing the dog team. It is cheaper per pound to fly."
The death knell for the heritage of dogsledding in Alaska came in the late 1950s, when the modern snowmobile was invented. The vehicles quickly became popular in Alaska and the dog teams became almost a novelty in many villages. By the 1960s, the sled dog population in most Alaskan villages was smaller than the number of "iron dogs," according to one sled dog historian.
The introduction of modern technology made it much easier to get in and out of Alaska, but without the territory's vast network of trails, travel inside it was dependent on airline schedules and specific routes. A snowmobile could only go so far on a tank of gas. Besides, it weighed several hundred pounds, was hard to maneuver over ravines or across creeks, and the engine became cranky at 20 degrees below zero. Over weak ice, a snowmobile could be a dangerous vehicle, and very hard to free up once icebound.
By 1970, travel over most of Alaska's trails was a thing of the past. A local historian, Dorothy Page, had joined forces with a sled dog enthusiast named Joe Redington and together they decided to create a race that would serve as a tribute to the dogs and their contribution to early Alaska.
For years, they had been aware that the trails were disappearing, and that an entire way of life was being eradicated. They conceived of a dog team race like no other, a homage to a disappearing world.
The first race to go all the way from Anchorage to Nome took place in 1973, and it has since been held every year on the first Saturday of March. It is called the Iditarod. The race covers what had once been a vital freight route between Anchorage and Nome, passing through the old Iditarod Mining District. (The route had fallen into disuse over time, particularly after the completion of the Seward to Fairbanks Railroad.) 3
3. The first incarnation of the Iditarod was in 1967, in celebration of America's purchase of Alaska. That year also marked the death of Leonhard Seppala. Acknowledging his contribution to Alaska, the twenty-five-mile contest was called the Iditarod Trail Seppala Memorial Race.
Iditarod is the name of a river on which the town was built when gold was discovered in 1907, and the word comes from an Athabaskan Indian term that has been translated as "a distant place" and "clear water." The exact definition has never been very clear. The race travels across the westernmost portion of the serum route: from Ruby to Nome in even years and from Kaltag to Nome in odd years.
In 1975, Alaska again showed its enthusiasm for dogsledding by holding a reenactment of the serum run. Many of the sons of the original drivers took part in the relay, which took six days longer than in 1925.
Today, the Iditarod is a $4 million industry that enjoys the support of a number of corporate sponsors and uses high-tech equipment along a trail that is broken out every year by volunteers on snowmobiles. Where once it had taken a front-runner three weeks to reach Nome, it now takes between eight and ten days. Today, a team of Siberians would not even place in the irirming. The sled dogs that run in the Iditarod are mostly Alaskan Huskies, which are even smaller and swifter than the Siberian. The Alaskan Husky is not a registered breed but a bloodline of racing dogs, a hybrid bred for speed. (That speed has come at the expense of some cold-weather adaptations, which is why many of the dogs need coats and booties, as well as a greater amount of food, when they race.) The winning dogs of the Iditarod are generally crossbreeds of Siberian Huskies and other Native dogs mixed in with speedier Irish Setters, English pointers, and German shorthairs. According to Raymond Coppinger, professor of biology at Hampshire College, "when the distance is over ten miles, modern racing sled dogs are the fastest animals in the world." With a person and sled attached, these dogs can run 3.2-minute miles for nearly twenty-five miles over a varied terrain that includes hills, curves, and woods.
"Siberians are kind of like racing an old sports car," says Bob Thomas, president of the International Siberian Husky Club. "You know the newer models are faster but there's just something special about driving that old classic."
EPILOGUE: End of the Trail
Every dog must have his day. A 1924 photograph of Carl Ben Eielson's plane captioned: "Alaska's Mail Service: Yesterday and Today." (Anchorage Museum of History and Art/B72.88.45)
"No, there is no gold; there is no purse for the winner. They don't get a cent...We give medals during the war for the taking of human life. So why not let Congress vote some congressional medals for these men who sacrificed to save the most precious of human life. A child!"
— Will Rogers, February 8, 1925
On Saturday, February 21, two weeks after Kaasen reached Nome with the serum, the quarantine was lifted. The Dream Theatre celebrated by inviting everyone in town over twelve to a free double bill of the Harold Lloyd comedy Grandma's Boy and Shirley of the Circus, a Shirley Mason five-reeler. James Clark, who ran the movie-house, decided to wait a few more weeks before letting the younger kids in.
Beyond Nome, the celebration began much earlier. Within hours of Kaasen's arrival, the local stringers for Associated Press, International News Service, Pathe News, and other news organizations had sent out dispatches over the radio and telegraph announcing the victory of man and dog over the worst that nature could throw at them. Despite the storm, they said, the serum had gotten through. 1 By the following day, readers all over the country were reading about the men and dogs who had been "goaded on to the last measure of their strength" to reach Nome.
1. Over the next few years, cases continued to crop up in Nome, but there was no longer any panic because the town had a fresh supply of serum on hand. Forty-three people contracted the disease in 1926 and there were about a dozen cases in 1928 and 1929.
"Science made the antitoxin that is in Nome today," cheered The New York Sun in an editorial, "but science could not get it there. All the mechanical transportation marvels of modern times faltered in the presence of the elements...Other engines might freeze and choke, but that oldest of all motors, the heart, whose fuel is blood and whose spark is courage, never stalls but once."
From the White House, President Coolidge sent out letters of commendation, while the Senate stopped its work to p
ay tribute to "that classic, heroic dog team relay that carried the life-saving antitoxin to the suffering, dying people of the little town of Nome, way out there on the bleak coast of the Bering Sea," as Washington senator Clarence Cleveland Dill inserted in the record.
The 1925 epidemic had held the nation in thrall for nearly two months, and the publicity surrounding the race helped to galvanize the national campaign to inoculate children against the disease. In 1924, a researcher at the Pasteur Institute created an acceptable diphtheria vaccine that provided several years of active immunity—as opposed to the shorter duration of a passive immunity. The vaccine involved disarming the toxin with a chemical while enabling the body to stimulate the natural production of antibodies. Before this, scientists had tried to stimulate the natural immune system with "toxin-antitoxin," a balanced blend of poison and attenuated toxin. The public was wary of the new vaccine, but accepted it eventually. The serum run had been a reminder of how unpredictable and dangerous the disease could be, and it had helped raise awareness nationwide.
The United States was finally able dramatically to reduce the number of diphtheria cases; by 1945, there were only about 19,000 cases a year, and by 1960, fewer than 1,000.
Today, there are a handful of cases a year, and the victims are almost always people who have fallen through the cracks of the national health care system and have not been properly immunized. American children are forbidden to attend school or day care without immunization; since the 1940s, the vaccine has been incorporated into the DPT shot, which also offers protection against pertussis and tetanus.
The Cruelest Miles: the Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic Page 25