Most know the story of Balto, the sled dog who carried a vaccine to the city of Nome, Alaska. And most know of the statue of Balto that stands in Central Park in New York City. But there is another statue of a generic sled dog just off W 4th Ave in Anchorage, Alaska commemorating the heroic exploits of Mushers and their dogs. And I, like many others don’t know the whole story. In fact, in researching this topic, several sources contradict one another.
It starts in the last part of the year of 1924. The single doctor in Nome, Curtis Welch, inventoried his supplies and found his entire cache of the diphtheria antitoxin had expired. He re-ordered more. In Nome, a lot of the supplies are delivered by ship but in the winter the port freezes over and becomes inaccessible. Supplies during the winter came via the Iditarod Trail and dog sled teams, some 938 miles from the port of Seward.
That winter Welch treated several young children with sore throats but ruled out diphtheria. Diphtheria is contagious and the number of cases were small especially not seeing the symptoms among others in the town. But it only took a few weeks for that to change and then four children died. Welch did try some of the expired antitoxins but it had no effect. A telegraph went out to all the major cities looking for the serum. Some were found in a hospital in Anchorage. But how to get it to Nome.
Aircraft were not an option for several reasons mainly the winter weather. Without many alternatives, it was decided to ship the serum via train from Anchorage to Nenana and then it would be up to dogs to carry the medicine to Nome. More than 20 teams of mushers volunteered for a relay effort. It was decided to split the journey into two parts with several teams on both parts. One to begin the trip from Nenana and the other from the town of Nome, where upon they would meet up halfway in the town of Nulato. But the serum was estimated to only last six days in the weather they would have to face as temperatures plummeted to lows never seen in the last 20-years, reaching sometimes to 40 below not counting the wind chill.
Several sled teams participated including Alaska Native musher who covered two-thirds of the journey and was mostly ignored by the media. But where does Balto and his team fit in all of this? Gunnar Kaasen as the musher and Balto as supposedly the lead dog were the last to carry the serum into Nome. Other teams had traveled much farther than Kaasen as his team only covered 53 miles.
One such team was Leonhard Seppala who ran 170 miles and some of the worst parts of the trip. His lead dog was Togo and Seppala just so happened to own Balto also. Gunnar’s whole team of dogs was Seppala’s backup dogs. Katy Steinmetz wrote in Time Magazine, “The sled dog who did the lion’s share of the work was Togo. His journey, fraught with white-out storms, was the longest… and included a traverse across perilous Norton Sound – where he saved his team and driver in a courageous swim through ice floes.”
Drivers and their dogs suffered. Whether hypothermia or server frostbite for the mushers to losing several dogs along the way. The death toll in Nome was counted as 6 or 7, but the toll may have been higher among the natives who didn’t general report deaths. All in all, the teams covered some 675 miles in around five days.
Balto became famous maybe for a variety of reasons. Maybe because he was up front in the last sled with the serum to enter Nome. I’m not sure of the reason but I consider Balto as the accumulation of all the teams and their dogs who faced a difficult situation with the lives of children in their hands.
Life after this was not kind to Balto and some of the other dogs. Balto toured in the U.S. and when in New York the statue in Central Park was revealed. Eventually, Balto and other dogs were sold to a novelty museum of which they were chained left in poor conditions.
George Kimble, a businessman from Cleveland, led a campaign to bring the dogs to Ohio. Balto and his companions lived in the then Brookside Zoo. Balto died in 1933. His body was turned over to a taxidermist and is displayed in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Balto has been on loan to several museums in Alaska.
I visited the statue of a sled dog in downtown Anchorage.
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