Dr. Jackson issued instructions for missionaries and reindeer handlers to approach these reindeer with extreme caution. While harnessing the reindeer, Jackson warned, it is best not to touch them if you can avoid it. Simply hurl the harness over their neck from as far a distance as possible and then pull the rope back as if tightening a noose. One obedient missionary found the reindeer were reluctant to follow any orders. "With many misgivings I finally perched myself on top of the loaded sled behind the reindeer, which I was to drive," he wrote. "At first there was no trouble, but>as soon as I attempted to guide the deer, my efforts were treated with contempt. No matter how hard nor how often I pulled on the line he paid no attention to it, except by occasionally coming to a full stop and turning around to look at me in a manner that made me feel rather uncomfortable, for the front hoofs of the deer are formidable weapons."
Among the many people who decried Dr. Jackson's campaign against Alaskan sled dogs was Archdeacon Hudson Stuck, a missionary who believed that the Natives did not have to be remade in the image of white men. He preached that the Native languages, cultures, and traditions were worthy of honor and respect, and that no dog is a "savage beast...unless he happens to belong to a savage beast." Upon Dr. Jackson's urging, the government did try to deliver the mail on some Alaskan routes with reindeer, and a "deluded prospector" or two tried to use reindeer instead of dogs, but Stuck claimed it did not take long to see the absurdity of the plan. The reindeer "were soon abandoned on the mail trails, and the prospector, after one season's experience, slaughtered his reindeer and traded its meat and hide for a couple of dogs."
Writing in 1914, Hudson Stuck believed that it would be rash to predict that the dog team would ever be completely abandoned on the trails of Alaska. He thought that so long as the salmon swims and the prospector lives, so long as the Indians move about the great arctic wilderness, and so long as "quick travel over great stretches of country is necessary," then "so long will the dog be hitched to his sled in Alaska."
Eleven years later, the decision to go with the dogs to rush the serum to Nome would prove that Hudson Stuck was right.
7: The "Rule of the 40s"
The call of the wild. A team of howling sled dogs ready to run. (Anchorage Museum of History and Art/B72.88.44)
"It takes a Northman to survive the North. Not only the cold...but the terrible, silent menace of it, the soundless days without end, when the thought of being the only human in some vast stretch of its white wastes is too terrifying a thought for one companion-loving human to carry, and keep his mental balance."
- Bert Hansen, a U.S. Deputy Marshall of Alaska's Interior
Six hundred and seventy-four miles east of Nome, "Wild Bill" Shannon waited impatiently inside the two-room railroad station at the Interior town of Nenana. It was Tuesday, January 27, just shy of 9:00 P.M., and he had been awaiting the serum from Dr. Beeson in Anchorage. The locomotive had left Anchorage with the 20-pound package almost twenty-four hours ago and it was due to arrive at any moment. 1
1. Running a railroad in the Alaskan Interior was no easy endeavor. Blizzards often blocked the tracks, and the cold temperatures created frost heaves and an icy coat over the equipment. The old locomotives, built in 1906, were originally intended for Panama, so the engine car where coal was shoveled into the firebox was open and unprotected from the elements. "These storms are of such severity that they have often blown the windows out of the engine cabs and sent our men to hospitals for months with pneumonia," a railroader told reporters in January 1925. "Many times engine men have been lifted bodily from their open cabs, being so overcome with cold as to be incapable of moving" (Anchorage Daily Alaskan, January 31, 1925).
Nenana was the second to last town on the 470-mile-long railroad, which started at the southern port of Seward on a bay off the Gulf of Alaska and ended in Fairbanks. Long ago Nenana had been an Athabaskan Indian settlement at the confluence of two major Interior waterways, the Nenana and Tanana rivers, and a traditional gathering place for Indians to trade and hold their celebrations, or potlatches. 2 Over time, Nenana had its share of fur trappers, traders, and miners coming through, but it was the construction of the railroad, begun in 1915, that changed everything. By the time the railroad was completed in 1923, Nenana had become a major distribution point for goods and passengers between Alaska's southern regions and the Interior.
2. Some sources say that the word Nenana means "a good place to camp between the rivers" in the Athabaskan language.
Nenana had been picked for the start of the serum run because it was at the junction where the railroad met the mail trail to Nome. The serum's 300-mile journey by train from Anchorage would shorten the trip by days, but once the serum arrived in Nenana, it would still have to travel the 674 miles west to Nome, clear across the territory, and there was only one way to traverse this part of Alaska in winter: by dogsled.
Lanky and fair-haired, Wild Bill was a jack-of-all-trades and, like so many other men in the territory, master of quite a few of them. He was a mail driver, miner, trapper, and fearless dog driver, who was known to have the fastest dog team in the area. His skills as a driver, combined with a combustible mixture of hot temper, sharp wit, and willingness to take risks on the trail, no doubt accounted for his nickname. Not coincidentally, he had also become a scholar of the deep freeze. Tonight, his hard-acquired knowledge and skills would be tested, perhaps as never before.
On his way to the railroad station, Shannon had sensed that the temperature was dropping well below the minus 30- to 40-degree mark that was typical for that time of year. When it was this cold, your breath formed into ice crystals and the air pinched your nostrils as you drew it in. It was like the sting of a bee, and the pain cut short every deep breath. Even inside the railroad station he stayed bundled up, his bearskin parka down nearly to his knees.
Had the decision been left to Edward Wetzler, the governor's man in charge of overseeing the relay, Shannon would not have set off until daybreak. By then the sunlight would have warmed the trail slightly and given the driver a clear view of it. Even so, Shannon would still be violating a rule of survival that many mushers were reluctant to challenge, but often did. Wild Bill Shannon was about to break the "rule of the 40s." The rule warned against running a dog team in temperatures below minus 40 degrees and above 40 degrees. At 40 degrees and over, a husky can get overheated and suffer from dehydration. 3 At 40 below, 2 degrees below the point at which mercury freezes, there is little room for error. Even the U.S. Army stationed in the Interior village of Tanana had forbidden its soldiers from going out on patrol when the temperature dropped so low. 4
3. Panting is one way a dog can try to cool down. The hotter a dog gets, the more heavily it will pant. Panting circulates air over the mouth and tongue, which are moist, and allows for evaporation and thus heat loss. But without a sufficient amount of water, panting will work for only so long and a dog can dehydrate and overheat.
4. In the mid-1920s, Alaskans most commonly used alcohol-filled thermometers, which were often handmade and unreliable. During the Klondike gold rush, one popular pioneer trader named Jack McQuesten set outside his popular trading post four bottles, placed in the order in which they froze: quicksilver, whiskey, kerosene, and Perry Davis Pain Killer. Pioneers said that when the Perry Davis Pain Killer froze, it indicated a minimum of minus 75 degrees. Instructions for the painkiller were said to warn a traveler not to move away from the fire when the product had frozen.
Tonight, it was 50 below zero.
"Traveling at 50 below is all right as long as it's all right" was a proverb known to many Alaskans. At this temperature, Alaska was a different world, a land with its own peculiar physics. A cup of boiling water flung into the air, for example, would become, as if by magic, a ghostly cloud of vapor. Steam rose from every finger on a bared hand as the vapor that passes continually through the pores became more visible. Spit froze, and opening the door to a warm cabin was an invitation to the phantoms. As the cold air rushed i
nside, moisture on the walls and floors would form into a chain of ice crystals, like tiny chandeliers in a woodshed. Outside, where the super-cooled air sucked out any lingering moisture, the landscape took on a fragile, glass-like quality. Objects would come into sharp focus arid the landscape would fill with the fine, glittering crystals of hoarfrost.
In any weather condition, mushing was a dangerous profession and a driver could torture himself just thinking of ways he might die on the trail. A sweeper, or low-hanging branch, might knock out an unsuspecting driver. A moose might suddenly appear around a bend and, startled by the onrush of dogs, charge in and kill. A driver could fall and be stranded without food or supplies. He could get wet, soak his matches, and not be able to build a fire in time before the deadly freeze set in. Death waited on every stretch of river and every dip in the trail, but at minus 40 and minus 50 degrees, the chances of losing one's life increased substantially.
Stories traveled from town to town of those who had defied the cold, reminders to all who ventured out on the trail how quickly one could lose a hand or a foot. At 50 below, one driver explained, "a lost glove means a lost hand." Within minutes, an exposed hand or cheek could freeze, and a numbing toe could turn into the texture of wood. Life on the trail became a mental game against fear, a struggle between one's skill at managing the elements and the fierce determination of nature to have its way with you. Survival required a relentless vigilance, fueled by a stubborn refusal to stop fighting. To give in to weariness, to give up, meant almost certain death.
A few years earlier, along the very same trail Shannon was about to take, a trapper named Meyers had accidentally gotten his feet wet, and he had nearly paid with his life. It had been 50 below and Meyers was within a mile and a half of the telegraph station in the small settlement of Minto when he suddenly fell through the ice. Within seconds, his feet began to freeze. Soon he started to shiver uncontrollably and could not strike a match to light a fire. He ran down the trail, hoping he could somehow make it to Minto, but his pace grew slower and more erratic. He lost feeling in both feet and began to stumble over every small obstacle. He dragged himself up each time he fell, until he finally reached the telegraph station. Inside the cabin, the operator could hear the door open behind him and then "a sound as of someone pounding...two by fours down violently on the floor." He suddenly thought, "only one thing can make a man's feet sound like that—to be frozen solid."
Meyers survived the ordeal, but only barely—he lost both feet.
Now Shannon would be making a much longer run, half of it along the same trail that nearly killed Meyers. Ahead of him lay fifty-two miles of rough terrain over a frozen river and along steep banks to the roadhouse in Tolovana, where another dog driver would be waiting. Normally, the Nenana-Tolovana run took two days, with an overnight stop at Johnny Campbell's roadhouse in Minto. Shannon was told to cover the route in a single spurt. This would have been a challenge for any musher at any time, but in Shannon's case it was especially dangerous, because he would be working with a team of relatively inexperienced dogs.
The leader in Shannon's nine-dog crew was Blackie, a five-year-old husky with a white cross on his chest. Shannon once boasted that Blackie was the grandson of a timber wolf, which suggested a romantic combination of the wild and the tamed, with both elements working in perfect alliance. Jack London himself described such a breed, but the very notion was impractical. Wolves hunted; they did not pull. A few miners may once have succeeded in breeding a sled dog to a wolf in an attempt to produce an heir with tougher pads, more speed, and a keener sense of trail. But the wolf-dog crosses would not have been much use. Although there may have been a team or two in Alaska composed of wolf dogs, most experts agree that such hybrids were a myth. Wolf dogs tend to be intractable, aggressive, and territorial, and would have posed a danger in a team. 5
5. The aggressiveness in wolf dogs does not necessarily come from the wolf heritage. In his book The Company of Wolves (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), Peter Steinhart writes that wolves tend to back off from fights and retreat from danger. Wolves will rarely bite a pack member. A pack would not survive constant aggression and therefore conflicts are usually resolved before they reach that stage.
The myth of wolf sled dog teams continued into the 1900s in Alaska and was perhaps perpetuated by breeders and drivers trying to sell their sled dogs for top prices, particularly to beginners in awe of the idea. Wolves, however, are not stronger than sled dogs, nor do they have greater endurance. The biologist and sled dog enthusiast Raymond Coppinger writes in Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior and Evolution (New York & London: Scribner, 2001) that breeding a sled dog to a wolf "would be at least an evolutionary digression, if not a degradation in the behaviors of both. Wolves have not been selected to be sled dogs." Contrary to popular myth, a sled dog team does not run like a pack of wolves. "A pack," writes Coppinger, "is about chasing something. Sled dogs are running because other dogs are running." It is the sole motivation. "There is a rhythm to their run and they can hear that rhythm and they run to it," Coppinger adds. "When you stand on the back of a sled, you can feel it. It is powerful."
Coppinger discusses one zoologist and wolf expert who as an experiment tried to train hand-raised, nearly one-year-old wolves to pull a sled. Despite months of training, the wolves would not fully accept being harnessed together in such close quarters. They became territorial and when they got tired they simply lay down. They refused to take directional commands. And finally, when a robin landed among the wolves while at rest, they began to climb over each other, entangled their chains, and fought. The experiment was a failure. The zoologist ended up pulling the sled home. Basically, wolves are not suited to run in a team. Being independent-minded, they ran at their own gait and were more concerned about defending their personal space than moving forward. These traits would compromise the effectiveness of the team and the safety of the driver.
Shannon had adopted Blackie after leaving the army, where he had served time as a blacksmith in the Alaskan Interior. Over the past few years, the dog had helped him deliver the mail, carry goods and supplies to his copper claims, and run the traplines in the nearby woods. By now, Shannon knew the dog's quirks, strengths, and weaknesses as well as the animal knew Shannon's.
But the eight other members of the team, all two-year-olds, were a different story. They would need close monitoring. There was Solly, a Siberian Husky with ice-blue eyes; Jimmy, the grandson of Blackie; also Princess, Cub, Jack, Jet, Bear, and Bob. They were all good, strong dogs and Shannon had raised and trained them, but they were young and relatively inexperienced. This was their first twelve-hour run in such cold temperatures, and Shannon knew the animals could become a danger to him as well as to themselves.
It would have been wiser for Shannon to wait at least until morning, as Wetzler had argued, especially given the falling temperatures. But in these parts, a man did not carry the name "Wild Bill" without having earned it, and he was prepared to risk all. Across the river from the Nenana railroad station, on the steep riverbank, stood the white crosses of forty-six Athabaskan Indians who had died here during the influenza pandemic seven years earlier, a quiet reminder of how vulnerable Native Alaskans were to the white man's diseases.
"Hell, Wetz," Shannon had told the Post Office inspector. "If people are dying...let's get started."
Shannon would pick up the serum as soon as it arrived and cover his share of the run tonight, no matter how cold. By early the next morning, he would either be fifty-two miles further west in the safety of the Tolovana roadhouse, or in serious trouble.
The distant chugging of the steam locomotive could be heard well before Shannon and the dogs saw the train. In this temperature, every sound reverberated through a tunnel formed between the warm air above and the heavier cold air below, traveling twice as far. Although Shannon could not see anything, the train sounded as if it were just around the corner. When it emerged from the darkness, steam gusted from the
locomotive. A small crowd had gathered on the platform, among them Shannon's wife, Anna, who had come to see him off. She was a tough pioneer woman with deep blue eyes and brown hair, and she had often in the past accompanied him in his travels.
The crowd's excitement was infectious, and the dogs strained and leapt in their padded leather harnesses, tugging at the sled. Even before the train came to a complete stop, conductor Frank Knight jumped onto the platform with the 20-pound package of serum and ran over to Shannon.
Shannon took the precious cargo and tied it down in his sled. He double- and triple-checked the harnesses and lines and made certain that the emergency supplies were all in order. Any musher worth his salt carried certain bare necessities: an ax, a blanket, a knife, rations, a tarpaulin for setting up camp, and tools for making a fire. In one pocket, he would have a waterproof container with matches, and in the other, wood shavings and dried twigs or a piece of camphor.
Satisfied that everything was in order, Shannon mounted the runners, released the sled, and took off, bolting along the tracks, down the bank to the Tanana River and into the cold, dark Interior. He had never had such a large audience watch him start a run, but tonight there was no time to think about anything but the job ahead.
High above the endless spires of spruce and birch, the stars shone with cold brilliance and the moon was a sliver in the sky, less than a quarter full.
The Cruelest Miles: the Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic Page 15
