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

by Gay Salisbury

  Balto and the serum run team would live out their remaining days at the zoo. Fox, Moctoc, Tillie, Alaska Slim, and Billy were the first to die. Then, at the beginning of March 1933, the zookeeper announced that Balto was ailing and had little time left. He had become blind and was partially deaf, and the zookeeper turned the dog over to a local veterinarian and trustee of the Balto Committee, which had helped to oversee the care of Balto. A few days later, on March 14, Balto died.

  Although the newspapers reported that he was eleven, he may in fact have been as old as fourteen. (Seppala had once claimed that Balto was six at the time of the run.) His body was preserved and displayed at Cleveland's Natural History Museum, where to this day it forms a part of the collection.

  Now Sye was the only remaining member of Kaasen's serum run team. The old dog took his teammates' departure hard and there were reports that he howled out of loneliness. A year later, on March 25, 1934, Sye passed away. He was seventeen.

  For the most part, the other drivers in the serum run returned to their everyday lives once the intense publicity faded. Wild Bill Shannon, who had been on a brief tour with Blackie, continued to drive the mail, hunt, and run his traplines. His hands and face were still blackened and scarred by the cold, and he once said during a visit to the states: "This hero business is big blah...I want to get back [home] where they shake hands and know how to fry bacon."

  A few years later, he was attacked and killed by a bear. Anna Shannon moved to Healy, a small village on the railroad, and there she set up a general store and continued to live the life of a pioneer.

  "I wouldn't take a million dollars for the things I have done, and that I have learned," she once said.

  Relatively little is known about the Native drivers who covered nearly two thirds of the run. Few reporters or movie-makers wanted to hear their story. For the most part, Alaska's Natives were considered a part of the landscape, regardless of the fact that they spoke the same language, held down jobs, and contributed to the economy. They were capable of the same acts of great and simple heroism as the white man, and they were not boastful about it. By and large, they were quiet and humble people who would go out of their way to help another human being in distress. Their Native tradition put a premium on cooperation.

  For many of the Natives, a simple thank-you was sufficient. "I got more in gratitude from one lady at Nome City than I ever would have got in money from that race," said Charlie Evans, who ran through the ice fog and lost two dogs in the sprint from Bishop Mountain to Nulato.

  "During the serum run I was just over 20," said Edgar Kallands, whose hands were frozen to the sled on his run from Tolovana to Manley Hot Springs. "Time stands still at that time, the prime of life. It was just an every day occurrence as far as we were concerned."

  In the 1970s, during a surge in interest to preserve Alaska's history, stories about the Native drivers' heroism began to emerge. By then, many of them had died and the memories of those still alive had faded. Nevertheless, their role in the run was acknowledged, and they began to gain the recognition that had eluded them for so many years.

  In the early years of the now-famous annual Iditarod race, reporters sought out the original drivers, and race officials bestowed on them the honorary "Number 1" position.

  In 1985, on the sixtieth anniversary of the serum run, President Ronald Reagan sent each of the three surviving drivers a letter of recognition: honors went to Charlie Evans, Edgar Nollner, and Bill McCarty, an Athabaskan-Irish driver who traveled the route between Ruby and Whiskey Creek.

  Together with 19 others, you traveled across some of the world's cruelest miles to accomplish the impossible—and you did it in the name of humanity. 3

  3. The wording seems to have changed. This was the way it was reported in the Alaskan press. The actual text of Reagan's letter reads: "...after crossing some of the world's most forbidding miles..."

  They had, indeed, been the cruelest miles.

  At the time of the run, the Interior was experiencing the coldest weather in twenty years. For many of the drivers—most of whom were barely twenty years old at the time and some as young as eighteen—the weather was far worse than anything they had experienced.

  Edgar Nollner, who shared the run.from Whiskey Creek to Bishop Mountain with his younger brother George, said he would not have gone out "if the situation had not been so dire. There is nothing to go out for when it's that cold."

  In 1953, Edgar Nollner was once again called on to help, and he performed just as heroically. He had been gathering wood out in the wilderness with his dog team when he heard the crash of a U.S. Air Force plane. He discovered two injured crewmen next to the wreckage. It was 50 degrees below zero and they were both at risk of dying from hypothermia. Nollner built a fire for them, went back to get his friend Charlie Evans to help, and the two carried the wounded airmen to safety.

  Nollner was the last survivor of the drivers on the first serum run. On January 18, 1999, he died of a heart attack at age ninety-four. He was survived by twenty-three children and more than two hundred grandchildren. In 1995, he told the Associated Press that he was surprised at all the attention and had never expected to become famous.

  "I just wanted to help, that's all," he said.

  Authors' Note

  Gunnar Kaasen and lead dog Balto at the unveiling ceremony of Balto's statue in New York City's Central Park, December 16, 1925. The inscription at the base of the statue reads "Dedicated to the indomitable spirit of the sled dogs...ENDURANCE FIDELITY INTELLIGENCE." (Photograph courtesy of Brown Brothers)

  Most of us find it impossible to resist the face of a friendly dog, or the details of a good dog story, and the story of dogs and men racing serum to save the children of Nome from diphtheria in 1925 was the greatest dog story ever told. Proof of this can still be found in Central Park in New York City where every year thousands flock to find the statue of a dog.

  Balto was the dog who led the last relay team into Nome in 1925 under blizzard conditions, a feat that made him the world's most famous dog, next to the movie star Rin Tin Tin. Admiring dog lovers of New York who followed the extraordinary exploits of the dogs and men in the newspaper headlines commissioned a larger-than-life-size sculpture of Balto that was erected in December 1925, a short distance off Fifth Avenue near the entrance to the Children's Zoo. The plaque on the granite outcropping on which Balto stands dedicates the statue to the "indomitable spirit" of the sled dogs who ran to Nome: "ENDURANCE FIDELITY INTELLIGENCE."

  We are first cousins, who both grew up in the New York area and were among the millions of children who loved to climb atop Balto whenever we played in Central Park. The great affection that children have for Balto is plainly visible. The bronze surface has been polished down to a gold sheen in places where children have petted his head, rubbed behind his ears, and climbed upon his back. The caretaker of the Central Park Conservancy estimates that the statue has lost a quarter inch in size during the many years that children have been riding on Balto's back. Though we knew no more about Balto than any other kids, we had heard frightful stories about diphtheria. One story in particular haunted us as children.

  Our grandfather Dr. Edward Salisbury, a noted specialist in tropical diseases, was a physician at a rural outpost on the shore of the Caribbean Sea in eastern Costa Rica, where our fathers grew up together in the 1930s. When Gay's father, John Salisbury, was four years old, he contracted diphtheria, and our grandfather found himself with no antitoxin on hand, and none .available anywhere in the entire country—die identical situation that Nome's only physician had faced less than nine years earlier. John's condition was so serious that everyone expected him to die within hours. The hospital nurse, Dorothea Boothe—to whom this book is dedicated—never left his side. At the last moment, however, Dr. Salisbury and his pilot flew to Panama, where they located a fresh supply of serum and, battling a severe tropical storm, arrived back at the remote hospital in time to save the child. No matter how many times we heard the sto
ry from our grandfather, grandmother, or from Dorothea herself (a woman for whom our family had the deepest love and respect), the most chilling details were that before the antitoxin arrived the priest had already administered the last rites, and the workers had constructed a child's coffin, less than four feet long, in preparation for the funeral.

  The inspiration for this book came when we read an eloquent obituary in The New York Times of Edgar Nollner, the lone surviving 1925 musher, who died in January 1999 at the age of ninety-four. "Hero in Epidemic," read the headline, though the Times explained that Nollner always claimed that the twenty-four-mile stretch he mushed, in a blizzard so thick he could not even see his dogs, was "simply a day's work." According to the Times, Nollner was the last link to "one of the great cliffhangers of the 20th century, one that held a nation in white-knuckled thrall for more than a week in 1925 as the world wondered whether a supply of life-saving serum would make it to icebound Nome, Alaska, in time." Now the story was becoming a "fading memory," but Nollner had once helped to "carve a legend in the snow."

  No roads have ever led to Nome, Alaska, a small community of about four thousand people on the coast of the Bering Sea, 2 degrees south of the Arctic Circle. For more than a hundred years, since its birth during the gold rush of the 1890s, Nome has been one of the most isolated communities on earth. Nome is icebound by a frozen ocean for at least seven months each year. "We are prisoners in a jail of ice and snow," one newspaper editor lamented in November 1900. In good weather, airplanes now link Nome to the rest of the outside world in any season, but still there are no roads that go anywhere, and even today driving to Nome is about as practical as driving to Hawaii. Unless, that is, you're standing behind a team of dogs.

  Every March the nearly 1,200-mile Iditarod Trail Dog Sled Race takes place from Anchorage to Nome. Billed as "The Last Great Race on Earth," the Iditarod is a dash across the Alaska wilderness that combines elements of the Kentucky Derby and the Daytona 500. It features the world's fastest dogs and dog drivers in a grueling contest of skill, speed, and endurance. Organized in 1967 by Alaskans who wanted to preserve the traditions of dog mushing, the point of the Iditarod was to ensure that dog teams would always run along the trails of Alaska. A salute to Alaska's pioneers who connected isolated communities, the race was also intended to keep alive the memory of the most heroic dogsled race in history, the 1925 diphtheria serum run to Nome.

  Numerous children's books have been written about Balto and the serum run—it was even the subject of a popular animated movie by Steven Spielberg—yet the only previous history of the events of 1925 was a fine book written nearly forty years ago, Kenneth A. Ungermann's brief account, The Race to Nome. In the years since, government documents, new oral histories, family records, medical archives, newspaper accounts, and unpublished photographs have surfaced, all of which have been instrumental in providing the complete story of what happened during those crucial six days in 1925 when the world was pulling for the dogs. The true story is more tragic and inspiring than any child could imagine, and it begins where the Iditarod ends, on the icebound shore of the Bering Sea.

  APPENDIX A

  Charlie Evans was Edgar Nollner's neighbor and brother-in-law, as well as an active member of the community. When the government neglected to send a teacher into town, Evans took the job. Asked what it was that he had taught, he replied, "right and wrong." In 1986, Evans donated his medal and certificate to the University of Alaska Museum. He died the following year, on July 22, at age eighty-four. He and his wife had thirteen children, six of whom died in early childhood.

  Myles Gonangnan remained in Unalakleet all his life. He drove the mail from Unalakleet to Kotzebue for several years and helped interpret for the pastor at the local church. He died in April 1967 at the age of eighty-one.

  Henry Ivanoff, who passed the serum to Seppala outside Shaktoolik after his dogs got into a fight, would die a few years after the serum run. He drowned at sea in 1934 after a storm wrecked the mailboat he was piloting north of Nome. His grandson, Henry "Gus" Johnson, ran the Iditarod in 1980, finishing twentieth in a field of sixty-one.

  Gunnar and Anna Kaasen never had children but lived their remaining years in Everett, Washington, close to their great-nieces and -nephews. Gunnar led a quiet life, highlighted by long walks and trips with the children to buy vanilla ice cream at the store. He rarely spoke to them about the serum run, despite a constant peppering of questions. "I'm going to tell you this once and once only," he told one great-niece, Janice Weiland. "If it wasn't for Balto, I wouldn't be alive today."

  Although he rarely referred to the run, his relatives were sure that Kaasen was proud of his role and that of Balto. Throughout his life, he kept on the living-room wall an old movie poster from his Hollywood days that showed him standing in his trail clothes next to Balto. Kaasen died of cancer in Everett in 1960, at the age of seventy-eight.

  Edgar Kallands also stayed in Alaska. He carried mail, ran traplines, traded his beaver skins for fish for his dogs, and worked during the summer on the steamboats. Knee surgery in 1958 put an end to his work with the dogs. As a child, Kallands's best friend had been a puppy, and his dogs had often been his closest companions. When his knee went bad, he had to say good-bye to one of his greatest passions: "You had to be able to walk with dogs. Because if there's lots of new snow, you have to put on snowshoes and walk ahead of the dogs for long hours. When you get on snowshoes it means lots of work."

  His last lead dog was Rover, a dog so attached to Kallands that he refused to pull for anyone else. Kallands died in December 1981 at the age of seventy-seven. He had four children and several grandchildren.

  Bill McCarty trapped and fished most of his life in Ruby and raised ten children with his wife. Years after the serum run, he met a woman who had been in Nome during the epidemic and who recognized McCarty as one of the drivers. She thanked him for saving her life. "It made me feel good to know I had done some people good," McCarty said. In the 1950s, McCarty went blind from exposure to DDT and his lifestyle changed. Up until his death in 1989 at age eighty-five, the outdoorsman longed to return to the woods and to his subsistence lifestyle. According to his nephew, Bill always considered his role in the serum run as "a kind of normal operation."

  George Nollner, who had sung an Athabaskan love song as he pulled into Bishop Mountain, was not so lucky as his brother Edgar. In 1930, he broke through the ice near Galena while traveling across the Yukon River with his team of four dogs. The sled went under first, and then he disappeared.

  "They pulled them three dead dogs out and the sled, but my brother was gone," Edgar Nollner said. "They brought that one dog back but he hollered and hollered so bad because my brother went under they had to shoot him. Every night he hollered. It was my brother's lead dog."

  Leonhard Seppala retired from Alaska and moved to Seattle in 1947, but he remained tireless and agile. At the age of eighty, he drove a dogsled into the city for a March of Dimes publicity campaign, "smiling, hearty and proud as ever." The organization had planned to kick off the event with a hydroplane but a snowstorm got in the way.

  Seppala continued to extol the virtues of the Siberian Husky (their intelligence, speed, and stamina), and he was considered by many to be the patron saint of dogsledding. He donated his sled, his old gold-mining equipment, and his fur clothes to a museum near his hometown in Norway. He died on January 28, 1967, at the age of eighty-nine. In his lifetime, Seppala logged an estimated 250,000 miles by dogsled.

  In the years following the serum run, many of Nome's sourdough residents moved on. In 1928, Hammon superintendent Mark Summers and his family transferred to Fairbanks. Seppala and his family also moved to the Interior capital that same year for the company. Mayor George Maynard died in August 1939. He had been editor and manager of the Nome Nugget until the very end.

  Emily Morgan remained at her post, rising to the level of hospital superintendent. It is not known when she left Nome. Her role in the serum run had been praised in
the press and in the early 1970s one reporter described her as the "Angel of the Yukon." Morgan died on May 9, 1960, at the age of eighty-two.

  Curtis Welch and his wife, Lula, left Nome several months after the run, in September 1925. They had intended to stay Outside on vacation for a full year, but in early May the government called Welch back to take charge of a riverboat that was heading down the Yukon for a medical survey of the Natives living along the route. By September 1927, the Welches were back in Nome, where they stayed for two more years until Welch's health deteriorated to the extent that they had to move to a warmer climate. They settled in Santa Barbara, California.

  "Northwestern Alaska is a young man's country," Welch wrote in his journal; "...a physician's calls must be made on foot...a walk of a mile or two at night, in a blizzard, with the temperature 20 or 30 below zero...It is no job for an old man."

  Over the next few years, the Welches would return in the summer to fill in for the town doctor while he was on vacation or to see friends. In the states and in Alaska, the reluctant Welch continued to be hailed as a hero, as essential a figure as the drivers had been. "In spite of his protestations, Curt really did like the attention," Lula said.

  A close examination of Nome's medical crisis suggests that Welch erred by not identifying the disease early enough, and some blamed him for at least some of the deaths. Death records show that diphtheria was present in Nome as early as September 1924 with the death of a four-year-old boy named William Rothacker. Welch had written on the boy's death certificate that the cause of death was tonsillitis, which he later changed to diphtheria. If William Rothacker had indeed been diphtheria's first victim, this would predate Welch's official report and suggest that the disease had been present in Nome longer than the doctor had admitted to authorities. Had Welch tested the outdated serum on one of the earlier suspected cases, he would have known definitively that the serum was stable and effective, and he might have saved more lives. It should be noted, however, that diphtheria was hard to diagnose, more so without proper medical equipment, and Welch was certainly ill equipped. Just two months after the serum run, the U.S. Surgeon General offered to send him laboratory equipment so that he could diagnose outbreaks of diphtheria and other diseases.