By late in the afternoon on January 26, Governor Bone had made his decision. He had weighed the risks of the new technology against the old and now he knew what had to be done. The serum would be brought to Nome on dogsleds. But instead of sending one team to meet Leonhard Seppala midway on the trail, he would set up a relay of the best and fastest drivers in the Interior. The teams would travel night and day with no rest, no matter how bad the conditions, until they met up with Seppala at the halfway mark.
Bone sent off one message to Dan Sutherland telling him of his decision and another to Edward Wetzler, the U.S. Post Office inspector in Nenana who had maintained daily contact with the drivers.
Please engage relay dog teams to carry [antitoxin] to Tanana and thence to Ruby there to be met by team from Nome stop Please expedite Situation reported serious stop Territory will meet expense.
The governor dictated a separate message to Dr. Welch informing him of the decision to go with the dogs:
Inspector Wetzler instructed to hire dog teams by relay to Ruby stop You will please hire dog team immediately and start it to Ruby stop This office doing its utmost to expedite delivery. 2
2. The references to Ruby in Bone's telegrams are confusing: Seppala had been asked to meet the relay in Nulato, 100 miles west of Ruby.
The Northern Commercial (NC) Company was the main trading concern in Alaska, with posts in every town along the territory's major rivers. The company had the mail delivery contract between Fairbanks and Unalakleet and was the only operation in Nenana capable of locating drivers in the Interior on such short notice. Wetzler walked over to the home of Tom Parsons, the local NC Company agent, and asked him to get the best drivers up and onto the trail.
The call went out across the Interior by telephone and telegraph, and the men in the Signal Corp cabins put down their coffee mugs and set out to find the boys of the NC Company.
At the roadhouse in Minto, a tired twenty-one-year-old Athabaskan Indian named Edgar Kallands was resting after a long haul. He had been en route to Nenana, thirty-one miles away, and now he was being ordered to turn back to Tolovana to take his station there and prepare for the journey to the village of Manley Hot Springs. He had been looking forward to seeing "the big city" and taking a long rest. But before the sweat on his gloves had dried, he was up again and ready for the call.
Fifty-nine miles to the west, another Indian by the name of Johnny Folger was instructed to take the serum to Tanana, the geographical center of Alaska, where the Yukon and Tanana rivers converged. From there, the message was relayed down the line to the villages along the Yukon—Kallands, Nine Mile Cabin, Kokrines, and Ruby—where other men were ordered to prepare. Sam Joseph, a stocky Athabaskan, hitched up his dogs and moved out to take up his post. Harry Pitka, a mail driver born in a spruce bow tent and raised by a medicine man, learned of the relay as he sat watching his wife make a new pair of moccasins. His job would be to cover the thirty-mile leg to Ruby, and he hooked up his string of seven dogs without a moment's hesitation. Pitka was twenty-seven, and he had had a tough life. He was severely short on money, but he did not think twice about this volunteer mission.
While the mushers made hurried preparations to reach their stations, Thompson learned of Bone's decision and was furious. Marching off to his typewriter, he banged out a shrill editorial:
"Governor Bone has evidently taken charge," "Wrong Font" wrote in the January 27 issue of the News-Miner. "...Fairbanks is standing by, ready with airships and men, to cut Nome's waiting time in half if Washington wires the orders 'go...' Fairbanks, only four hours away by airship...must sit by the fire and vision [sic] the Nome babies and their pioneering parents strangling and dying most horrible deaths, and no help for them. It almost makes a pioneer 'see red.' "
Thompson would have been the last person to sit idly by. In a secret vow to himself, he swore that if Fairbanks Airplane could not deliver the first batch of 300,000 units, then the company would deliver the second batch of 1.1 million units. He geared up for a protracted fight, determined not to let any official, politician, or Mother Nature stand in the way. He took aim at Bone in particular, regarding him as a traitor to the Alaskan pioneering spirit. As one acquaintance once said in a reference to Thompson's tenacity and appetite for battle: "Woe unto the public official who in his public duty was false to his trust. It were better he had not been born."
"Fairbanks could help Nome or its people would smash trying to," Thompson wrote in his paper,
...if Washington could listen to Delegate Sutherland and realize that the Friendly North has passed from the dog team stage into the airship class...The dog's a noble animal, man's best friend. He sticks and he'll go through with everything he has in him but along some lines he has his limits. He will haul himself blind and misshapen for man, his master; work for nothing and steal his food, anxious to serve and loyal all the time. But it is demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that in cases of great emergency the dog should be allowed to sit by the fire and dream old days over again, while gasoline and flying machines do the work that kills him.
By deciding in favor of a musher and his dogs and against an air rescue, Bone had chosen to bet against the modern age, a choice that not only went against Thompson but pitted the governor against the Zeitgeist. At a time when American innovation and ingenuity were changing the world with production lines and radio communication, Bone had put his faith in the folk wisdom of Alaska's Natives. The vast majority of mushers who would have to risk their lives were Athabaskans and Eskimos, and the rest were white men who had taken almost all their survival cues directly from the Natives.
By 1925, most Native Alaskans had made their pact with the modern age. They still hunted, fished, and traded on occasion, but their bread and butter was in hauling supplies and carting the U.S. mail along the trails. These were skills handed down to them by their parents and their grandparents.
If the serum could rescue Nome from the ravages of an ancient plague, then its safe arrival by dogsled would be a testament to the hard-learned survival skills and spirit of the Athabaskans and Eskimos.
6: Hunters of the North
A portrait of an Eskimo hunter harpooning a seal. The ingenious adaptations of Alaska's Native inhabitants were the secret to survival in the north. (Glenbow Archives/Lomen Collection/NC-1-48)
"Only those who go to the Eskimo country find that they have to submit to the discipline arctic nature enforces, and in the end they become, in some ways, like the Eskimo."
- Alaska Naturalist Sally Carrighar, Moonlight at Midday
The decision to go with dogs to bring relief to Nome revealed a fundamental truth about Alaskan life: In 1925, the machine had not yet been built that could match endurance, speed, and reliability of men and dogs. The airplane might be the way of the future, but for the people of Nome the dog team was the only hope for the present. If the epidemic was to be stopped, the rescue effort would have to rely on one of the oldest methods of transportation eve developed, along a network of footpaths and dog trails first blazed by the ancient peoples of the Arctic.
Dogsledding had evolved in the Arctic over thousands of years as an integral part of an aboriginal culture well suited to the harshest climate and living conditions on earth. Isolated and unknown to the rest of the world, both the Athabaskan Indians of the Interior and the Eskimos along the coast learned to survive by utilizing all of the limited resources at their disposal. The land, sea, and ice provided their food, clothing, tools, and shelter. Making much out of virtually nothing, their remarkable innovations in this most unforgiving environment and ingenuity.
When outsiders first arrived with the vast riches of Western technology, some naive whites were convinced they had nothing to learn from "primitive savages" barely beyond the Stone Age. Careful observers knew otherwise. In 1921, Vilhjalmur Stefansson published a best-selling account of his five-year expedition in the Arctic, The Friendly Arctic. His theme was a simple one: the Arctic could be as friendly and hospitable as vir
tually any place on earth if one only learned to adapt to local conditions and adopt local clothing and technology that had successfully evolved over thousands of years. His common-sense idea was to profit from the lessons of thousands of years of arctic evolution. This simple but profound notion is a key to the history of the modern exploration of Alaska and the Arctic: the explorers who learned Native ways of survival were most likely to survive. The reverse was equally true.
On a flat map Alaska appears to be at the end of the earth, but historically it lies at the crossroads of one of the great migration routes in world history. Most scientists believe Alaska to be the gateway through which humans came to populate America. As recently as fifteen thousand years ago, during the last Ice Age, the Bering Strait and much of the Bering and Chukchi seas were dry land, and a land bridge perhaps at least 1,000 miles wide, called Beringia, connected Siberia with Alaska. It was over this land bridge that many scientists believe the earliest subsistence hunters entered North America. These bands of "Paleo-Indians" slowly expanded across Beringia, generation by generation, hunting the large Ice Age mammals that stalked the tundra: wooly mammoths with enormous tusks, musk oxen, giant bison, moose, lions, and saber-tooth cats. Descendants of these wandering hunters eventually traversed across the entire length and breadth of the western hemisphere, reaching the tip of South America, if not even farther, as recent evidence suggests, in roughly a millennium, and are considered to be the ancestors of present-day American Indians.
Later waves of hunters included first the ancestors of the Athabaskan Indians, who today inhabit most of the boreal forest of Interior Alaska and northern Canada, and then the Eskimos, who spread across the entire Arctic as far as Greenland. These two great arctic peoples, Athabaskan hunters of the northern forest and Eskimo hunters on the treeless tundra, for generations waged the coldest of cold wars against each other, their territories separated by a no-man's-land that either side would cross only at their peril. As one early explorer reported, in one Eskimo band in northern Alaska, "every man who had slain an Indian was tattooed at the corners of the mouth as a mark of distinction."
An oft-repeated and widely believed myth is that the word "Eskimo" is a derogatory Indian term meaning "eaters of raw flesh." As a result, Canadian Inuit have since the 1970s considered it a racial slur. In fact, the word "Eskimo" was apparently originally an inoffensive reference to snowshoes, and is still widely used in Alaska. 1 Nevertheless, the language of both sides reflects the ancient rivalry. "From Hudson Bay to Alaska," wrote the anthropologist Wendell Oswalt, "the word Eskimos applied to Indians usually meant 'Lousy People.'': The forbidding Interior of Alaska belonged to the Athabaskans, where the climate is characterized by long, dark winters and short, hot summers. 2 Cutting across the great swath of boreal forest is the Yukon River, which runs 2,300 miles from its headwaters in Canada's Pacific Coast range. It meanders across Alaska, and at the Arctic Circle it shifts dramatically from northwest to southwest, ultimately spilling into the Bering Sea.
1. In Alaska, the word "Eskimo" does not have the same negative connotations that it does in Canada. For reasons of both convenience and clarity, "Eskimo" is still widely accepted in Alaska. Alaska Eskimos include both "Inuit"or Inupiat speakers, and "Yuit" or Yupik speakers. Almost two thirds of Alaska Eskimos are Yuit. The two languages are mutually unintelligible, roughly analogous it is sometimes said to English and German. The linguistic and cultural borderline between the two great Eskimo nations lies near Unalakleet, southeast of Nome, and the Seward Peninsula, with the Inuit to the north and the Yuit to the south.
2. The range of temperature in the sub-Arctic between summer and winter can differ by as much as 180 degrees. The lowest temperature ever recorded in Interior Alaska is 80 degrees below zero and temperatures in the 50- to 60-below range are not uncommon. In the brief summer, the thermometer can hit nearly 100 degrees above zero. In the winter, snowfall tends to be relatively light—in many areas the sub-Arctic is as dry as the Sahara Desert—but due to the extremely low temperatures, what falls in September will not melt until the following April or May, so the ground is usually blanketed by several feet of snow.
Athabaskans were semi-nomadic hunters, gatherers, and fishermen who moved from one seasonal camp to the next throughout the year in their constant search for food. The year-round subsistence cycle often included spring salmon fishing, summer berry picking, fall and winter moose and caribou hunting. Thundering herds of caribou and the elusive moose were moving targets, however, and these hunters and fishermen of the Great Northern Forest often lived precariously close to the edge of starvation. In fact, for most of the small bands, starvation was a regular part of life; the worry was not whether food shortages would come, but when. Families had to travel hundreds of miles each year in order to live off the land.
Like guerrilla warriors, the Athabaskans not only traveled far but also light. Constantly on the move, their shelters were among the simplest of any North American Indian tribe. Conical tents, or teepees, were made by sticking a circle of thin poles into the snow and covering the structure with hides of moose sewn together. Animal skins covered the floor of the tent. A circle of stones in the center of the floor was aligned with a smokehole where the poles came together. Once a fire was lit by the rubbing of sticks, it had to be tended carefully. The hot stones contained the cooking fire and radiated heat into the dwelling. When it was time to leave, the Athabaskans quenched the fire, lifted the poles, packed up their skins, and were swiftly on the move again. To break trails through the heavy snow, they wore snowshoes made from strips of rawhide stretched across birch or spruce frames. To carry their few belongings, they designed toboggans with runners that curved up like skis. These toboggans were sometimes 30 feet in length. To assist in the hunt and to carry additional supplies, families used dogs, but most could only afford to keep a few. They simply did not have enough food to feed large teams. Among the Athabaskans at that time dogs were not used for traction to pull sledges, but were instead mainly pack animals. Dogs carried packs on their backs with pouches on both sides stuffed full of supplies or meat from the hunt.
Winters in the Alaskan Interior are nearly eight months long, and the sun makes its appearance only a few hours a day, leaving few opportunities for the hunter to find anything alive. The Athabaskans, it was said, were always in a "rush to keep ahead of the darkness." Temperatures regularly fell to 50 below and snowstorms were not uncommon. Yet the snow, to an expert, was like a road map that revealed the faint movements and whereabouts of animal life. With one shot from his bow and arrow or a stone-pointed spear thrown through the heart of a moose, the hunter could feed his family through a winter. But more likely there would be few sightings of any animals in winter, and those sighted had their own adaptations to help them avoid becoming a convenient target. And so, to protect against starvation, the Athabaskans built caches on high wooden platforms and placed these strategically at different seasonal camps. Stored inside these caches were precious dried salmon and preserved moose meat.
Generation by generation, the wandering Athabaskan tribes built up a set of survival skills. They could tell you where to find every bend in hundreds of miles of river and where were the best places to catch salmon. They taught their children to test the thickness—and safety—of frozen river or lake ice by poking the point of a spear into the ice and judging the level of resistance. They created shortcuts through the Interior by using portages that served as overland connections between rivers. If you lost your way in the forest, your best chance of re-orienting yourself was to climb the tallest tree in hopes of spotting and recognizing a distant outline of a particular lake or the profile of a particular mountain. Many families simply disappeared without a trace. But danger or no danger, the Athabaskans entered the forests often. For there they found one of the resources most important to their survival: stands of spruce trees.
Besides being river dwellers, residents of the boreal forest were a people of the "spruce age," using the ubiquitou
s evergreen trees for their shelters, bedding, caches, canoes, drying racks, tent frames, sleds, snowshoes, snares, poling sticks, weapons, and lashing, as well as chewing gum, disinfectant, and medicinal soup. The spruce tree was the all-purpose construction material and energy source of the north; its most essential purpose might have been for firewood, providing both heat and light through the eight months of winter darkness. At 50 degrees below zero, heat was even more precious for immediate survival than food or water.
In light of its unparalleled importance, the spirit of the white spruce tree possessed a special power and significance. Among the Koyukon Athabaskans, the anthropologist Richard Nelson learned, the white spruce spirit was like an omnipresent fairy godmother protecting weary travelers and warding off evil spirits. A white spruce should never be cut down for a trivial reason, as its spirit was the equal "of the most powerful animals; but it differs in having mostly benign effects on humans...People can use the spirit power of white spruce trees in several beneficial ways," Nelson wrote. "The great old trees, with thick trunks and outstretched boughs, protect those who sleep beneath them."
Given their special relationship with trees, most Athabaskans were naturally fearful to be caught out in bad weather on the open tundra without a forest blanket for fuel, orientation, and shelter. For an Athabaskan, any tree was a welcome sight in a storm. Many Eskimos, on the other hand, had a much different view of life in the woods.
The Cruelest Miles: the Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic Page 12
