In the world of dog-sledding, probably the most famous dogsledding event is the Iditarod. Named for the town of Iditarod, Alaska. The race runs from Willow to Nome, Alaska and is one of the most physically dangerous and exhausting races in the world. The race is 1,800+ km (over 1,160mil) long and can take anywhere from nine days to up to nearly three weeks to complete in the worst conditions. The sledders and their dogs frequently race through blizzards, whiteouts and sub-zero temperatures that can freefall down to a teeth-chattering -100 degrees farenheit, or -73 degrees celcius.

The Iditarod, officially called the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, was started in 1973. The race actually has two different routes, a northern trail run on even-numbered years, and a southern trail run on odd-numbered years. As of today, the fastest race-time was eight days, twenty-two hours, forty-six minutes and two seconds. This record was made in 2002 by Swiss competitor Martin Buser.

While the Iditarod has remained a popular race for almost the last forty years, its origins are rather obscure today. This article will tell how what is today simply a bit of fun and competition, had its roots in one of the most significant medical emergencies of the 20th century, which almost ended in disaster.

The Great Race of Mercy

The year is 1924. In the tiny mining town of Nome, in northern Alaska, a steamship, the S.S. Alameda, steams out of Nome’s harbour, the last ship to leave the town before the weather gets too cold and the water in the harbour freezes, leaving the town isolated from the rest of the world. It is December and the weather is freezing cold. Once the water in the harbour solidifies to ice, no ships will be able to sail in or out of the harbour. Blizzards and snowstorms would make the roads impassable to even the hardiest hikers, cyclists, skiiers and motorists. The whiteout conditions would make it impossible for airplanes to fly in.

Over the next few weeks, through December and leading into January of 1925, Nome’s resident physician, Dr. Curtis Welch, would be contacted several times by townsfolk, as well as by the local inuit eskimoes who live in villages nearby, to examine sick children. Dr. Welch suspects that it’s just the common cold, influenza or an irritating sore throat, easily treated with common sense and conventional medicines. As the weeks pass, though, Dr. Welch realises that it’s something more serious. He finally makes the correct conclusion that an epidemic of diptheria is gradually spreading throughout Nome and the surrounding villages.

Diptheria is a highly contagious respiratory disease, spread through physical contact. It starts off with a sore throat a fever and dizziness, all symptoms identical to the common cold, which is what caused Dr. Welch’s earlier misdiagnoses. In severe cases of diptheria, the lymph nodes swell up, causing breathing difficulties and partial paralysis. As the disease worsens, the patient could suffer heart-failure and liver-failure and die.

Fortunately, diptheria was a fairly prevelent disease during the early 20th century, so prevelent that medical science was able to create medications to deal with it. In the 1920s, the main form of diptheria control was dosing the patients with diptheria antitoxins which combated the toxins already in the body to cure the patients of their ills.

Unfortunately for Dr. Welch, no such antitoxins existed in Nome at the time. A small stash of it (8,000 units) was discovered at the local hospital but it was considered too out-of-date to be of any practical medical benefit, having expired the previous summer. Dr. Welch was not willing to risk the lives of children by using potentially lethal medicine. With the roads cut off, the skies declared a no-fly zone and the oceans frozen-over, the only way out of Nome was via the telegraph. Welch sent urgent telegrams to every single town which had radio contact with Nome, hoping against hope that another hospital had a ready supply of diptheria antitoxin. On the 22nd of January, Dr. Welch sent the following telegram to the United States Public Health Service in Washington DC:

An epidemic of diphtheria is almost inevitable here. Stop.
I am in urgent need of one million units of diphtheria antitoxin. Stop.
Mail is only form of transportation. Stop.
I have made application to Commissioner of Health of the Territories for antitoxin already. Stop.
There are about 3000 white natives in the district. Stop.

By February of 1925, the number of cases was rising fast. As many as seventy people could be infected and with the disease so contagious, Welch feared a full-scale outbreak that could kill the community’s approximately 10,000 inhabitants.

Away from the impending disaster, US. government officials debated the best way to get what diptheria serum they had to Nome on time. Waiting for the weather to change so that a ship could steam the medicine up the US. western seaboard was considered too much of a waste of time. Driving through the snow was impossible and while flying the medication in via airplane was considered, the airplanes available were old-fashioned, WWI-style biplanes, with exposed cockpits and engines of questionable mechanical ability. If the pilots didn’t freeze to death in their cockpits, the fuel in the engines would solidify from the cold and cause the planes to crash to earth! At any rate, even if the planes made it to Nome, there would be nowhere for them to land.

In an age before helicopters and snowmobiles, the only other way to get medicine to Nome would be by dogsled.

On the 26th of January, a supply of 300,000 units of diptheria serum were found in the Anchorage Railroad Hospital. While nowhere near the one million units that Dr. Welch had so desperately telegraphed for, it would have to do. John Beeson, head of surgery at the Anchorage Railroad Hospital prepared the medicine for its journey. To prevent freezing and to stop the delicate glass phials of antitoxin from shattering from the bumpy dogsled ride that was coming up, they were packed into a cylinder with plenty of padding to stop them bumping around. They were then wrapped with canvas and fur to provide even more padding as well as much-needed warmth. Beeson transported the medicine from the hospital to the nearest railroad station where conductor Francis Knight was waiting for him.

Knight took the precious package and travelled 200 miles north from Anchorage to Nenana. From Nenana to Nome was another 675 miles, a distance that would have to be covered by dogsled alone. Ships wouldn’t be able to travel that far in the stormy artic seas and planes and cars would only freeze in the sub-zero temperatures. It would be a long and bumpy ride for the 20lb parcel of medication.

A total of twenty mushers (dog-sled men) and over 150 dogs sent the serum on a bumpy, rattly, shaky journey across the Alaskan interior on an around-the-clock run. The mushers were all warned in advance and they were all waiting at the various towns along the route to participate in the most important relay race they’d ever run in their lives.

The last musher, Gunnar Kaasen and his lead dog, Balto, came sliding into Nome’s Front St, at 5:30 in the morning on the second of February after travelling dozens of miles through whiteout conditions to get there. During the journey, Kaasen had suffered frostbite from the snow and his dogsled had been flipped over by the powerful, freezing winds that threw the parcel of serum off of his sled. He had to stop the dogs and dig through the snow in pitch black to find it before recommencing his journey.

The medicine was thawed out once it reached Nome and Dr. Welch successfully used it to inject several of Nome’s residents afflicted with diptheria. It wasn’t enough for everyone, but it allowed Nome’s residents to survive long enough for a second dogsled relay, carrying more serum, to arrive in Nome a few days later, with enough medication for the whole town. While the official death-toll for the outbreak of diptheria was listed as seven, Dr. Welch estimated that it could have reached over a hundred deaths in the eskimo villages outside of Nome, where records of fatalities were harder to keep.

Kaasen and his dog, Balto, were hailed as heroes throughout the United States. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, Balto shared a level of canine fame which some believe even outstripped that of famous moving-pictures dog Rin Tin Tin. There’s even a statue of Balto in Central Park in New York City. In the 1990s, an animated film, simply titled “Balto”, was made to tell the story of the famous 1925 dogsled-run (I watched it myself when I was a child). Balto died on the 14th of March, 1933.

Balto’s statue in Central Park

A plaque underneath Balto’s statue in Central Park reads:

Dedicated to the indomitable spirit of the sled dogs that relayed antitoxin six hundred miles over rough ice, across treacherous waters, through Arctic blizzards from Nenana to the relief of stricken Nome in the Winter of 1925.
Endurance · Fidelity · Intelligence

Today, over eighty years later, the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race is run every year from Willow (near Anchorage) to Nome, to commemorate this historic event.