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

by Gay Salisbury

  Demand for Eskimo clothes supported two separate populations of craftsmen. Each summer, the Eskimos from the rocky King Islands arrived on the east side of town to sew garments and carve ivory curios such as cribbage boards and miniature dog teams. Even the more sedentary residents preferred the Native far parkas and boots to their own wool and leather clothes. By 1908, the high school's white basketball team was wearing uniforms consisting of short Native parkas with intricate designs. The Eskimos' influence was widespread: during celebrations such as the Fourth of July, Native games competed with the brass bands and parades; there were kayak races in the Snake River and a blanket toss on the tundra, in which a huge swath of walrus skin was sewn together and held taut while a contestant was hurled into the air. Traditionally, Natives used the blanket toss as a tool for spotting whales.

  Gradually, Eskimos integrated into Nome's community, where interracial marriages were not uncommon. Yet, under federal law, Natives went to separate schools and some residents recalled Natives sitting in their own section in the town's only movie-house, the Dream Theatre, or occupying their own side of the church for Sunday mass.

  With the end of the All Alaska Sweepstakes and the coming of World War I, Nome settled into a quiet routine. By 1925, the population was significantly lower than in the years after the first of the cold feets had fled. There had been storms and fires, and the war had led to an inflation that tripled the cost of mining. Many operations throughout Alaska went out of business. Since about 60 percent of Alaskan society was dependent upon the industry in one way or another, thousands of people throughout the territory migrated south. Nome was no exception. The town's population was reduced to 975 whites and 455 Eskimos or interracial residents.

  The glamour of the gold rush days and the excitement of the sweepstakes era were gone and many of the buildings were vacant or decaying. It was still possible to make out a faded advertisement for a lawyer or a saloon left over from the gold rush. Whenever a resident spoke about the good old days to a newcomer, the "places seemed to straighten up on their old foundations and come alive with history." Tony Polet, Nome's grocer, built his kitchen and living room in what had once been the Discovery Saloon. There were abandoned miners' cabins still equipped with their barrel stoves, and one could still find a pair of trousers and a jacket hanging on the wall, as if a miner had stepped out for a moment. Mining equipment sat rusting on the tundra and along the beach, and nothing was thrown out. You never knew when you might have use for the wood or the metal. Gold remained a principal industry in Nome, but now it was controlled by Hammon Consolidated Gold Fields, a conglomerate from the states. The company had bought up all the claims and water ditches of Pioneer Mining Company, the firm that had been started by the Lucky Swedes.

  Before Hammon's arrival, Pioneer miners used jets of pressurized water to blast away gold-laden gravel banks and wash the material through giant wooden sluice boxes that separated the gold from the silt. Hammon spent good money to upgrade the equipment, and miners now worked with huge, electric-powered dredges that sat like houseboats out in ponds in the gold fields. A conveyor belt of buckets dug up the thawed earth while a chute spat out a steady stream of stones, gravel, and dirt. The dredges were mobile and moved slowly and destructively across the tundra, taking the ponds with them as they filled in the water behind them with tailings from the chute. Inside the housing, the gold was separated by revolving screens and captured by sluices that ran alongside the machine.

  To one first-time visitor from the states arriving in the 1920s, the town looked "like last year's bird nest." But from a purely Alaskan perspective, Nome was a smart and bustling outpost. Lula Welch, arriving with her husband, Dr. Welch, in 1919 from the Candle mining camp on the northern side of Seward Peninsula, felt an immediate charge of excitement.

  "It was so big and bright, I felt it must be New York City," she said.

  It was the first time in twelve years that the Welches had seen an electric light. The Welches first landed in northwestern Alaska in 1907, disembarking from the Victoria at Nome. They headed straight for the rough, inland mining camp of Council, where Welch had bought a private practice from a friend just months after the clinic he and Lula ran in Oakland was destroyed by the San Francisco earthquake. They had intended to stay for only a year, but they remained in Council for eight years. Welch worked with a portable operating table in a three-bed ward about 20 feet long and lit by a kerosene lamp. "If there happened to be a patient in the ward he could watch the operation or turn over and look the other way," he wrote in a brief memoir. In 1915, the couple moved to Candle, an outpost even more remote and primitive. Nome felt like a luxurious new beginning for them. It had its own weekly newspaper, the Nome Nugget, bakeries, two restaurants, social halls, a library, a U.S. Marshal's office, and the Dream Theatre, "a hall as run-down as its old movies of the pre-1920 days."

  There was a jeweler and a dressmaker. One could join social and literary groups and take singing and dancing lessons. Nome took itself seriously as the region's commercial center and laid its streets out in a grid, adding to the air of importance. For a place so very handicapped by its location, there was a remarkable array of services available.

  In winter, Ed the Scavenger Man picked up the garbage and carted it out to the town dump, which was marked by a line of red flags along the frozen Bering Sea. "Honey buckets" placed beneath the outhouses were picked up and replaced. If a resident needed water, he put out a green cardboard "W" sign in his front window and his 5-gallon drum would be filled. In summer, water was piped down from the natural springs outside town.

  Despite the ramshackle surroundings, Nome's residents managed to maintain a sort of windswept cosmopolitanism. Strangers and misfits mixed easily. The children took singing lessons and their parents put on plays and dances at Eagle Hall and the Arctic Brotherhood Hall. It was like living on an island, a close-knit community whose very architecture seemed designed for intimacy. The houses were built about two-thirds normal size to save on heat and building costs. What they lacked in space, they made up for in intricate woodwork. The homes had arched doorways, detailed moldings, cornices, fancy staircases, and wainscoting.

  Still, life was hard enough. Mining remained a cold, wet profession, and dog driving was exhausting and dangerous and required weeks away from home. The wives and children often had to help out with the family finances. Some wives cooked in the canteens run by Hammon or did laundry for a restaurant or one of the wealthier families. Children also did chores around the house or took odd jobs. Joe Walsh, whose father was a miner, added to the family income by selling fresh milk from a sled pulled by his dog, Turk. Walsh owned the only two cows in town. They were hard to keep in the cold, so Walsh visited them every night in the abandoned miners' cabin he had turned into a stall and made sure they had enough blankets.

  Nome relied on a spirit of cooperation and good citizenship, a surprising transformation in light of the town's recent and sordid history. It seemed as if every citizen had an unofficial duty, and each took it very seriously. The trails were maintained in part by volunteers who made sure wooden stakes marking the route were kept in place, and the widow Rattenburg, who worked as a seamstress and dressmaker, sewed the red cotton pennants that marked the trail for miners heading out to Hammon's dredging sites. Shopkeepers kept their stoves well stoked in case a traveler needed to warm up, and Dr. Welch treated his patients whether or not they could afford to pay.

  Over the years, several people had wandered out into the tundra and frozen to death, so the town fathers built an eight-foot electric cross on the steeple of St. Joseph's Church to serve as a beacon for lost travelers.

  It still remained an inauspicious place to build a town. One would be hard-pressed to find a single foot of arable soil or a tree for protection against wind and sun. Burying the dead was hard work: beneath a foot of topsoil was permafrost that never thawed. It would take hours to dig a shallow grave, and the bodies sometimes drifted into town, washed up by the season
al floods. And yet, aside from the exigencies of its location, Nome functioned much like any other American community of the 1920s. There were contentious school board meetings and internecine civic squabbles of one sort or another.

  Nome's residents knew exactly how much coal to order and how many turkeys, cans of evaporated milk, eggs, and medical supplies they needed for winter. They knew how to plug up their keyholes to protect against blizzards and how to reach the doctor or hospital if their children became ill. But they enjoyed a false sense of security, for the town's isolation could quickly turn an average crisis into a catastrophe. If the weather turned suddenly, or there was a fire, or if a cargo ship sank, they might as well be on the dark side of the moon.

  2: Outbreak

  Front Street nearly abandoned upon news of the outbreak. (Authors' collection)

  "All by ourselves. The last boat has gone and we are, to use the homely phrase, 'alone with ourselves'..."

  - Nome Nugget

  Dr. Welch remembered each year according to whom he'd treated and how they'd fared: some memories were stronger than others, and some years stood out. One summer there was an infection attributed to mosquitoes, another year there were a number of minor injuries out at the mining camps.

  He remembered Bobby Brown fairly clearly. It was 1917 and at the time Welch was living in Candle. Brown had been raced in from a mill by dogsled with internal bleeding and one leg nearly severed at the muscle. He had been mangled in the course of his work, and Welch managed to keep him alive long enough to see his family one last time.

  No doctor could forget the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, though Welch should have been thankful he had seen only the tail end of it in Nome. He had felt useless as a physician and was unable to keep many from dying.

  This year, ever since the Alameda sailed off, there had been one tonsillitis case after another, including the strange case of the young Eskimo child from Holy Cross. And just this morning, December 24, Welch had another sick child on his hands. She was a seven-year-old Eskimo Norwegian girl named Margaret Solvey Eide, who had a severe sore throat and a slight fever.

  Welch though she might be suffering from follicular tonsillitis, but her mother, perhaps guided by her Native superstitions, wouldn't let him examine her. Her husband had gone Outside—beyond the territory—on a business trip.

  Welch told the girl to stay in bed for the holidays and rest up, and afterwards he walked home through town. For weeks, the shop windows along Front Street had been filled with skates and sleds, dolls and Erector sets for Christmas.

  But Welch wasn't feeling much of a holiday spirit. There had been so many children suffering from colds, and he had been out on so many house calls that no man in his situation could have been in high spirits or had much energy. Then again, it was no secret that Welch was a complicated man, who often traveled under a cloud.

  Other residents were in a jollier mood. It was, after all, a special time of year, and in the mid-1920s the highlight was Christmas Eve at Eagle Hall. Every year, many of the town's two hundred children filed into the cavernous wooden structure which had served, during the town's boom days, as a venue for minstrel shows and boxing matches. Nome tried its best to celebrate the holiday in the traditional way, trees and all, which was no mean feat given the fact that the nearest evergreen was ninety miles away—at least a two-day trip—to the southeast near the village of White Mountain. The trees may have seemed stunted to an outsider, but to the children and parents of Nome, who were used to the low-scrub views of the tundra, the White Mountain evergreens seemed huge. Nome's volunteers headed out on their dogsleds with axes and saws: they brought back a little tree for the hospital, another for the school, and a third for Barracks Square. The best was reserved for the Community Christmas Eve celebration at Eagle Hall.

  Set up center stage, the Christmas tree was "a-sparkle with tinsel, aglow with lights," and red and green crepe paper billowed down from the balcony. The fireplace crackled; there was hoarfrost on the windows and stockings hung from the mantel bulging with Cracker Jacks, candy canes, pencils, and fresh oranges and apples, delicacies which had arrived on the last ship in the fall and were set aside for the holiday.

  The choir from the Eskimo church came down the aisle with candles in hand and sang carols in their native tongue, and the other children came out on stage and reenacted the story of Christmas. Toward the end, they could hear the faintest jingle of sleigh bells outside, and soon the heavy double doors of Eagle Hall swung open and there was Fire Chief Conrad Yenney in his Santa suit, driving a black cutter sleigh pulled along by two skittish reindeer wearing red and green pom-poms and silver bells. The animals bucked and strained and had to be held in check by a handler, while Yenney leapt off the sleigh, bounded up to the stage, and handed out the stockings. When he was done, he drove back out into the night. Coffee and cake were served and "the whole town was alive, gossiping and carrying on."

  When the bells of St. Joseph's Church rang out at midnight, they all walked to the service through the newly fallen snow, and when it was over, they headed home along Front Street and Steadman Avenue. The streets stretched out before them in drifts of snow that had been hardened by the wind and constant traffic of dogsleds and mukluks. Some of the drifts were as high as the second-story apartments above the shops.

  At home, the turkeys, which had been thawed out and soaked for hours in soda water and salt before being roasted, were devoured. Tomorrow, Nome would become a giant playground.

  In the days that followed, between Christmas and New Year's, they would play the games they always played during winter. They would put on their double-runner ice skates and go out on the Snake River and Bering Sea or slide down the steep banks of Front Street on their sleds and mukluks. Jean Summers-Wolf, the daughter of the superintendent of Hammon Consolidated Gold Fields, would always remember a game of "crack the whip" which ended with her sailing out over the ice for what seemed forever and landing unhurt in an Eskimo fishing hole.

  But one little girl missed the festivities that year. Margaret Eide's condition deteriorated as the days passed, and on December 28 Welch received notice that the young girl had died. Welch asked her mother if he could perform an autopsy, but again she refused to let him examine the body. The case bothered him. "Death from tonsillitis is rare, but nevertheless sometimes does occur," he wrote.

  The holiday season continued. The Rebekehas Women's Group held their annual New Year's Eve party for all the children in Nome at the Odd Fellows Hall and Hazel Modini's folks capped off" the season by throwing a party for their daughter's fifth birthday, events all duly reported in the Nome Nugget.

  By January 1925, there was more disturbing news: two other Native children out on the Sandspit had reportedly died. Welch began to suspect the worst.

  Then, on the afternoon of Tuesday, January 20, it all came to a head. As he was making his rounds at Maynard Columbus, Welch checked in on a three-year-old boy named Billy Barnett whom he had admitted almost two weeks ago after the boy developed a sore throat, swollen glands, fever, and fatigue. Within days of entering the hospital, Billy had presented a disturbing new symptom: thick grayish lesions in his throat and nasal membranes.

  The gray and bloody ulcers on Billy's tonsils and in his mouth cavity were characteristic of an ancient and dreaded bacteria, a centuries-old killer of young children which, for good reason, was often referred to as "the strangler." Its official name is diphtheria.

  Diphtheria is an airborne bacteria that thrives in the moist membranes of the throat and nose and releases a powerful toxin that makes its victims tired and apathetic. In two to five days, other, more deadly symptoms would appear: a slight fever and red ulcers at the back of the throat and in the mouth. As the bacteria multiplied and more toxin was released, the ulcers thickened and expanded, forming a tough, crusty, almost leathery membrane made up of dead cells, blood clots, and dead skin. The membrane colonized ever larger portions of the mouth and the throat, until it had nowhere left to go and adv
anced down the windpipe, slowly suffocating the victim.

  It was a slow, painful, and frightening way to die. The majority of victims were young children between the ages of one and ten years, and the "anxious, struggling, pitiful expression of impending suffocation" in child after child infected during one epidemic, as a doctor described it, deeply affected physicians.

  "The most distressing pictures covering the walls of the memory chamber of my brain," a nineteenth-century physician wrote in the aftermath of an epidemic in a Michigan village that had manifested "every possible complication and sequel" of the disease. Before the advent of antitoxin at the turn of the century, doctors could offer little comfort but their presence and prayers.

  But antitoxin, which was made from the serum of immunized horses, did cure the disease. The problem was that Welch had only a limited supply and it was old. He was concerned that the antitoxin had become unstable over time, and since the golden rule of any doctor is to avoid harming the patient, Welch decided not to inject Billy. 1 There was still a slim chance in his mind that Billy had not contracted the disease. "I didn't feel justified in using the [antitoxin]," Welch would write a few weeks later in his medical report. "I had no idea what effect it might have." He and his nurse also decided to keep their tentative diagnosis to themselves, fearing it might send the community into a panic.