4: Gone to the Dogs
Veterans of the Trail: Leonhard Seppala and his trusted lead dog Togo. (Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum, Nome, Alaska)
"Any man can make friends with any dog but it takes a long time and mutual trust and mutual forbearance and mutual appreciation to make a partnership. Not every dog is fit to be partner with a man; nor every man, I think, fit to be partner with a dog."
- Archdeacon Hudson Stuck
Leonhard Seppala was forty-seven and by rights he should have been slowing down. But he was as strong as the day he arrived in Nome to search for gold in the summer of 1900, and even after a quarter century living and working in the cold, he was as agile and graceful as a gymnast. At five foot four and about 145 pounds, the King of the Trail didn't quite look the part. He had a rugged, youthful face and light brown hair thick with boyish waves that rode back over his head, as if perpetually blown by Nome's northern winds.
He was a rare natural athlete, a man of unusual strength and endurance who would have had no trouble keeping up with most professional sportsmen. While the majority of the dogsled drivers would have considered thirty miles to be a hard day's drive, Seppala often traveled fifty, sometimes even one hundred miles, weather permitting, logging twelve hours on the trail with a full load. One winter alone he covered 7,000 miles by dogsled.
In the summer, when most of the dogs were idle, Seppala would hitch his team up to a wheeled cart he called the "Pupmobile," and head out to the gold fields to do his job. He drove along an abandoned railway track and checked on a vast system of ditches that supplied water to thaw the ground ahead of the dredges. All year round, he stayed close to the animals.
His friends called him "Sepp," a peppy moniker for the cheerful Norwegian immigrant. He was something of a show-off, known to flip double back handsprings just for laughs and land with a somersault. He would walk down Front Street on his hands, his back arched and his mukluk Eskimo boots almost brushing his tousled head, and the schoolchildren would laugh and clap their hands.
Over the years, the only visible change was the number of wrinkles on his face, burnt into the skin by the cold, the trail winds, and the sun. When he smiled, which was often, the lines deepened and furrowed beneath the cheekbones and around the mouth, and radiated out from the eyes.
There had been relatively little snow this year, and so the dogs were not in their usual prime condition. Ever since Mark Summers's call for help, Seppala had been training with the team in the treeless hills that stretched away to the Sawtooth Mountains. The plan was for Seppala to travel more than three hundred miles to Nulato, almost midway between Nome and Nenana. It would be a long haul. So much was at stake, he thought, that at first he hesitated. This was not in character for the usually confident Seppala.
He had decided to train with twenty of the thirty-six Siberian Huskies in the kennel. This was a relatively large string for such a light load, but the dogs could turn sore-footed on the hard run to Nulato and some might even tire out. Seppala planned to drop several off at the villages along the trail, so that he could have fresh replacements for the return.
The trail between Nulato and Nome was one of Alaska's most hazardous. Much of it ran along the windswept, blizzard-prone coast of Norton Sound, and the most dangerous stretch was a forty-two-mile shortcut across the sound. Depending on the conditions under which the sound froze, the shortcut could be either a long stretch of glare ice—a slippery sheen that had been ground down by wind and blowing sand—or a course littered with giant pieces of ice rubble, crevices, and long avenues of tiny spears of ice that could shred a dog's paws into bloody ribbons.
The biggest risk in taking the shortcut, however, was getting separated from shore: with little warning, the ice could break up and carry a team away into the Bering Sea in silent, counterclockwise circles.
On and off the trail, the dogs required constant attention, and Seppala poured time and money into his huskies. He had raised each of them from the time they were pups and he knew them as well as he knew his wife and child. He fed and cared for them and sometimes ate with them, tearing off hunks of dried salmon with his teeth.
"The dogs always came first in importance," Constance, his wife of fifty-two years, told a newspaper reporter in 1954. "...Our living room was often a place of utter confusion, littered with mukluks, harnesses, dog sleds, tow lines, ropes and other equipment being repaired and spliced and generally worked over."
Food was a constant concern for the drivers of Alaska. The dogs' diet had to include enough protein and fat to keep them healthy and warm for winter travel, and the drivers needed to stock huge quantities. The most common food source was salmon. A musher would build fish traps out of wood and wire and lay them out in the river to catch the salmon runs. 1 Then he would cut up the fish and hang them out to dry on racks. The job could take a whole summer; each year the driver would stock about 5,000 pounds of the vitamin-rich meat.
1. Many of the drivers used a fish wheel, which had two baskets attached to a long wooden axle. As the wheel turned in the current of the river, migrating fish were scooped up by the baskets and dropped down a ramp that led into a compartment. The fish wheel was held in place by an anchor on shore or by posts driven into the riverbed.
The dogs' health and attitude had to be monitored on a daily basis, whether the animals ran or not; an unchecked virus could easily spread and wipe out an entire kennel. On the trail, every dog's paws had to be checked and, when necessary, treated, and the relative strength of each animal taken into account. One dog's special trait could be a boon on a particular section of the trail but a hazard on another. A good driver had to put his dogs' needs ahead of his own.
Mushing was the easiest part of the job. After a ten-hour day on the trail, the animals were the first to eat, and preparations could take two or three hours. Wood had to be chopped and holes hacked through the ice for water, which was then hauled up to the camp pail by pail—a gallon for each dog. If there was no water, a driver had to go through the tedious process of melting snow in a pot; it took 4 quarts of snow to produce a single quart of water.
Along the coast, the driver would feed the dogs strips of dried salmon, bones included, and if there was enough wood around, he would cook up a thick fish soup (some drivers preferred beaver meat, which was also rich in fat) with rice or oatmeal. On the trail, each of Seppala's dogs was given a pound of dried salmon and a third of a pound of seal blubber a day.
Once the feeding was over, the animals' sore muscles were massaged and boughs of spruce were cut down for their bedding. The smell and feel of it was a comfort to the animals, whose well-being was an important factor on the long hauls. A tired and discouraged animal could turn a simple trail into an obstacle course. The dogs seemed to appreciate every act of kindness, and they relaxed and settled down after their meal. This was followed by a ritual the mushers referred to as "the thank-you howl."
It began with a single dog's high-pitched, dreamlike wail, which was picked up by a second and then a third dog. Soon, every dog had its nose up, joining in a full-throated cacophony. The singing would end as suddenly as it began, and the dogs would begin to turn in ever-tightening circles, pawing at their bedding until they were comfortable. Then they would cover their noses with their tails and fall asleep. Finally the driver would have a few moments to take care of his own needs.
Seppala had loved the work from the moment he first stepped behind a sled in his early twenties, during his first winter in Nome. Jafet Lindeberg, one of the Three Lucky Swedes, had lured him to Alaska to work for his mining company, and had sent him out to look into rumors of a gold strike ninety miles northeast of town. Seppala had a clear recollection of that first run: he was mesmerized by the sway of the sled and the feel of runners gliding through the snow.
It took a good deal of strength to jerk the heavy sled around sharp curves and compensate for a slanted trail, and a fair amount of stamina to pedal the sled along flat ground and jog behind it, mile after mile, up
sharp inclines and over rock and tundra.
It was wearing and often bone-crunching work, but occasionally it lent itself to reverie. A driver would be the only human being for miles, an extension of the landscape, and as he pedaled in rhythm to the dogs' gait, he became an extension of the team.
In the vast silence, Seppala could hear the patter of the dogs' feet on the crusted snow and their steady pant as they pulled ahead in the cold. There was something soothing about the sound of the sled in motion: the creak of the wood like the rigging of a schooner under full sail, the rub of the rawhide lashings, the swish of the runners on the snow. This was a broad terrain, an empty ocean, and when the weather behaved, the sled would glide easily over the trail's swells. The only marks left behind were two parallel lines in the snow and the clouds of the dogs' exhalations, which lingered over the trail for a moment.
"The birchwood runners of my sled make tracks so deep in my memory I can see them to this day," Seppala once said of his first dog team. "All [the dogs] asked at the end of a grueling day was to be fed."
The first rule of survival was to hang on to the team, because without the dogs you were dead.
Seppala tensed up as he prepared for the trip to Nulato. He was apprehensive about the run, and the huskies could sense it. "Every time the telephone rang," Seppala said, "the dogs would hear it in the kennels and all tune up in an expectant howl..."
Seppala was one of few Alaskan drivers who depended almost exclusively on Siberians. As far as Seppala was concerned, no other dog could equal the speed and stamina of his animals. He may have seen his reflection in the dogs: they were just as driven and competitive as he was, and they were smaller and lighter than their peers. The dogs could be playful and amusing; they could also be tough and unrelenting. A resident of Nome once found Seppala at work training his dogs, and remembered that one moment he was on the sled runners pedaling with his feet and throwing snowballs at them, and the next he was running beside them "like a reindeer." He and the dogs shared the same color eyes, the piercing, bluish-white of glacier ice. To be the object of Seppala's gaze could be an unsettling experience.
The present-day Siberian Husky came from east of the Lena River in Siberia, where Natives had used dog teams to hunt for fur-bearing animals, seal, and polar bear for centuries. 2 By the late seventeenth century, after the Russians had moved into the region to colonize it, dog driving in Siberia had become fairly sophisticated. The Natives were forced to pay taxes to the Russians, who often accepted dog-driving services in lieu of payment. Villagers were called on to transport officials to their fortified towns and outposts and carry goods to distant communities. Trading fairs also began to play an important role in the economic life of the region and many villagers had to travel distances of more than i,000 miles with loaded sleds to barter for goods.
2. Seppala—and many current Siberian owners—referred to the breed as "Siberians." "Husky" is a generic term for all double-coated, prick-eared breeds and was given to the Siberians when the American Kennel Club granted the dogs official recognition. According to Russ Tabbert's Dictionary of Alaskan English, the term Husky "developed in the 19th century from a shortened variant of 'Eskimo' used by English speakers as a name for Canadian Eskimos. Eskimo dogs were therefore known as 'Husky Dogs' which was shortened to 'Husky'" (p. 204).
Traveling over mountain ranges, rivers, and tundra for a period of several decades, the dogs grew stronger and faster. Many of the Native groups practiced selective breeding: they would geld the inferior males, and only the elite—the fastest, strongest, and hardiest— were allowed to mate. By the late nineteenth century, the Siberian had become a tough cross-country dog, bred and built to cover long distances.
The Siberian dog was twice as fast and could travel at least twice as far as its cousins on the other side of the Bering Strait. During a race between a merchant and a Russian officer in the Kolyma River region in 1869, one team covered 150 miles in fifteen hours; the other made it in sixteen hours. The malamute teams of Nome, which were bred for freighting heavy cargo, rarely went faster than five miles an hour.
The dogs of eastern Siberia caught the eye of the anthropologist Waldemar Bogoras, who traveled to the region around the turn of the century. Bogoras wrote about the Natives' training and disciplining of their dogs. Their training began as early as two months, and the puppies of a litter were often hitched up behind the mother to help them learn the commands. The teams of eastern Siberia had as many as fourteen dogs, hooked up in pairs on either side of the gang line. Bogoras noted that a strong and well-rested team could travel five hundred miles in ten days. After just two days' rest, they could get back on the trail with the same energy and survive on a daily ration of "a piece of blubber measuring two inches each way, and some shreds of putrid walrus meat or whale skin."
"The dogs," Bogoras said, "are quite unwearying."
When they were not working, the animals lived on even less. In the spring, when the maritime catch was less abundant, they were let loose to forage for scraps and to hunt, and this encouraged their feral nature. They hunted for mice and ground squirrel, and sniffed out and devoured dead salmon on the southern shores of the Bering. Only the strongest and those with the slowest metabolism survived.
The huskies, like many of the Native sled dogs of the north, such as the Malamute of Alaska and the Inuit dogs of Greenland, survived in the cold because of an extraordinary combination of physical features. They had two coats—an outer one made of long, coarse guard hairs that protected the skin against water, snow, and sun; and an undercoat of soft, dense, and wooly fur for warmth. The undercoat resembled the down found in parkas and was shed during the summer. The ability of northern sled dogs to retain heat is considerable: because dogs sweat through the pads of their feet, the chance of heat radiating through their skin and two thick coats is virtually nil. The tail is well furred and bushy, and curls over the dog's nose while he sleeps, providing protection from the cold. (The tail also protects the groin area, the one place on a husky where there is little, if any, far.)
The eyes tend to be almond-shaped, so there is less exposure to the wind and snow, and the ears are pricked and covered with soft fur on the inside to minimize heat loss. The paws are slightly oval and the pads tough and compact to minimize the buildup of ice, which can lacerate and cripple a dog. These dogs can withstand temperatures of minus 80 degrees.
It is difficult to say when the first Siberian dog stepped onto soil in North America. Trade between Siberian and Alaskan Natives was not uncommon, and it is probable that some dogs were included in trades. But it is believed that the first time these dogs were brought across the Bering Strait to race in North America was in 1908. The race was the All Alaska Sweepstakes. A fur trader in Nome named William Goosak heard about dogs in the Anadyr delta who could travel at nine miles an hour for eleven straight hours. Goosak journeyed across the Bering Strait and brought a team back for the competition in 1909. In Nome, the dogs quickly became the butt of jokes. They were puny compared to the local malamutes—nearly half the size—and looked more like foxes than wolves. They were docile, even timid, and were laughingly referred to as "Siberian rats." 3 Once in harness, however, they made a different impression. Although small, they were almost always identical in size, and their smooth, unified gait seemed effortless. Nome's malamutes, by contrast, had a more varied background, and it was harder to find a team similar in size and reach. The malamutes could not pull as efficiently at their top speed. Goosak felt confident that his Siberians could trounce the competition and he hired a driver to race them. Goosak, however, was alone
3. The Siberian Husky's relatively small size made it an efficient puller at fast speeds. Newfoundlands and Malamutes are too large to pull sleds quickly over long distances. Big dogs have proportionately less muscle and bone than small dogs and tire out more easily over long distances. In addition, they have more trouble getting rid of excess heat.
in his opinion. The odds weighed so heavily against
him in 1909 that had he won the race, it would have broken the bank in Nome. His team fared poorly against the twelve other competitors, a failure due in large part to the driver's racing techniques. The driver was not a skilled strategist and failed to choose the right times to pace, rest, and feed the dogs. When the team crossed the finish line, a few spectators noticed that the "rats" looked as fresh as when they had begun. Some of them even trotted up to people they recognized in the crowd, tails held high in the air with excitement.
Among those who were impressed was a wealthy aristocrat from Scotland named Fox Maule Ramsay. As soon as navigation opened in June, Ramsay chartered a schooner, sailed across the Bering Strait, and returned with some sixty Siberian Huskies "howling from every porthole." The dogs were from Markova, a Native trading center on the Anadyr River in northeastern Siberia.
In April 1910, Ramsay entered three teams in the third annual All Alaska Sweepstakes. A popular Finnish driver named "Iron Man" Johnson headed one of the teams, and few believed he stood a chance against Scotty Allan, Nome's most famous driver. "Iron Man" proved them wrong. Johnson crossed the finish fine well ahead of the seven other drivers, setting a record that still stands: 74 hours, 14 minutes, and 37 seconds. With more than one hundred miles to go before the finish line, the "Iron Man" had gone snow-blind and had to rely on his blue-eyed leader, Kolyma, to take him across Death Valley. At one point in the race he became so exhausted that he had to strap himself to his sled. When the Sweepstakes Queen placed the victory wreath around Johnson's neck, the burly musher struggled off the sled and burst into tears. Giving all credit to his dogs, he placed the wreath around Kolyma and cried: "I did not win the race. This leader won it."
Despite the huskies' performance in 1910, many remained skeptical of the breed. Allan's malamutes won in 1911 and 1912, beating out many of the Siberian Husky teams, but Seppala never lost faith in the dogs, whose small size and muscular compactness resembled his own.
The Cruelest Miles: the Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic Page 7
