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

by Gay Salisbury

  Thompson gathered up the crew of volunteer mechanics and ordered them to begin assembling the plane. He then went on a hunt for a mechanic to assist Darling during the flight and found Ralph Mackie, a resident of Anchorage who had flown with the Royal Flying Corps in Canada. Meanwhile, a former war pilot, who had been traveling in the Interior en route to Siberia to take photographs, learned of the epidemic, and sent a telegram to Thompson that he was heading to Ruby, a town along the mail route, where he would wait to help Darling refuel when he landed. Ruby had a depot of aviation fuel that had been left behind by the army for the pilots of the 1920 New York-to-Nome aerial expedition. The former war pilot could decant the fuel into canisters and be ready for a quick turnaround.

  For the first time, the plane seemed a real possibility: the craft was being assembled and Darling now had an experienced co-pilot who knew the country. Even the temperature had warmed by 10 degrees, to minus 39. But they still needed to get control of the serum, or all these preparations would be for naught.

  Thompson and Sutherland kept up the pressure on Governor Bone, urging him to approve the flight. Bone refused. They then turned to Edward Wetzler, the point man for the relay in Nenana, and pestered him to hand over the Juneau serum as soon as it arrived by train. Wetzler adamantly declined. His loyalties remained with the governor. Even the Surgeon General's office, which appeared to question Bone's decision, balked at ordering him around, requesting solely that Bone "use his discretion."

  Once again, the News-Miner editor was livid. "Nome looks to Fairbanks for life, and if there is not too much Red Tape interfering, Fairbanks will be in Nome in less than almost no time," Thompson wrote in his paper. "...Fairbanks is standing by, lashed to the mast. .. beating its Sourdough wings off trying to rush to the help of its friends, and restrained from doing it."

  Bone refused to budge. Despite immense pressure and a rising tide of calls from the press for a dramatic air rescue, he stuck with his decision, calling the proposition to dispatch icebreakers and cruisers to clear the way through the Bering Sea absurd and a flight that would overtake the dog teams even more so. Bone wired Wetzler, ordering him not to release the 12-pound package of serum from Juneau to anyone under any circumstances. The serum would stay in Nenana until a mail team could pick it up.

  But no man rises to the level of governor without some measure of political skills, and if Bone understood anything, as an ex-reporter and ex-PR man, he understood public opinion. To do nothing but stay the course would subject him to the criticism of stubbornness at best, and a callous disregard for human life at worst. There was also the possibility that to do nothing would hurt Nome. If the epidemic was gaining ground at the speed Maynard had warned, the relay, Bone realized, had to be sped up.

  Bone summoned his aide. He told him he wanted to call in more drivers for the final pan of the run between Nulato and Nome for the 300,000 units of serum. And for this he needed the help of Mark Summers, the superintendent of the gold company in Nome.

  The decision was both risky and shocking. In effect, Bone was risking cutting out the most important man of the relay—Leonhard Seppala. And he was asking Mark Summers, Seppala's sponsor, to do the cutting.

  The argument for the change made sense. Although Seppala was the fastest driver in Alaska, under the original plan he had 630 miles round trip to cover. Even traveling light, Seppala still had to pace himself in order to survive. As fast as he was, no one man could beat fresh recruits who had to travel only a short distance before they turned the serum over to someone else.

  But the change in plan did not take into account two very important factors. The first was that Seppala was still the best man to take the serum across Norton Sound, a dangerous shortcut but one that could save at least a day of travel. To preserve that part of the original plan, Seppala had to be informed that instead of driving all the way to Nulato, he should wait for the serum somewhere near Shaktoolik, on the southwest coast of the sound, for the oncoming driver.

  The second factor was that there was no longer any way to communicate with Seppala. The telephone lines in Nome went only as far as Solomon, fifty miles east of town. In addition, the Signal Corps system bypassed the villages along the coast by shooting across Norton Sound to St. Michael, where a relay station conveyed messages to Unalakleet and then up the Nulato Mountains and over the Kaltag portage to the Interior and beyond. While the new plan still assumed that Seppala would make the dangerous run back across Norton Sound, it relied upon the driver heading north to find Seppala. Two oncoming drivers could easily miss each other in blizzard-force winds. At times, the air was so thick with snow that one could not even see the large tripod stakes marking the trail.

  Still, Bone's order had to be followed. Summers immediately tracked down Ed Rohn, a dog driver whose claim to fame was that he had once beaten Seppala in a race, and ordered him to drive twenty-one miles to Port Safety and wait there at the roadhouse for further instructions. He then called out to the kennels at Little Creek, got Gunnar Kaasen, another Hammon dog driver, on the phone, and requested that he put together a dog team and drive to the mining village of Bluff, about thirty miles east of Safety. Kaasen went to the kennels, looked over the team, and began to harness up the dogs that had been left behind. Before he left, Seppala had made it clear that if Hammon needed a team for company business, Fox, a brown-and-black-furred husky, should be the leader. Kaasen, who worked closely with Seppala at the gold fields in the summer, had apparently always admired another dog from afar. The dog was stocky for a Siberian, black as night except for a white right foreleg. His name was Balto. One by one, Kaasen brought the dogs to the gang line. When it came time to clip in the leader, he ignored Seppala's direction, and brought Balto to the position.

  It was a decision that would forever leave a strain in the relationship between the two colleagues.

  When Kaasen reached Bluff, he was to enlist roadhouse keeper Charles Olson, a bachelor and old-time sourdough, and tell him to hitch up his rig, drive twenty-five miles further east to the trading post at Golovin, and wait for the serum.

  While the drivers prepared to take up their positions, Summers reached the storekeeper in Unalakleet via the Signal Corps system and told him to "spare no expense" in posting more teams on the trail. At least two more teams were placed, one in Unalakleet and another thirty-eight miles up the coast at Shaktoolik.

  All told, 20 men and about 150 dogs would now be taking part in the race to save Nome. As for Seppala, all that could be done was to warn the new men on the route that in addition to carrying the serum toward Nome, they should keep a lookout for the Norwegian and his team of Siberian dogs. Should they meet up with Seppala, they were to stop him and hand the serum over to him. Summers had already calculated that the most likely place for a hand-off would be somewhere near Shaktoolik.

  With the new plans in place, there was little more that Bone could do but wait. It was probably clear to him that if the dogs failed, there would surely be hell to pay, given his stubborn refusal to allow a daring air rescue.

  All Nome could do was also wait and perhaps pray that the weather would continue to hold. Welch maintained his vigilance of the sick. By tomorrow, his supply would be exhausted. But he wasn't ready to give up. Later that day, Welch walked over to the Signal Corps and sent a telegram to his concerned sister back home. "We are working night and day," he wrote, "and are going to keep at it until we get the best of it."

  Two days earlier, on Wednesday, January 28, the young Edgar Kallands, who had taken the 300,000 units of serum from an exhausted Wild Bill Shannon, completed his run to Manley Hot Springs with relatively few mishaps. The weather had been a brutal 56 degrees below and, according to one newspaper report, Kallands's gloved hands froze to the sled's handlebar: the trip from Tolovana had taken more than five hours and the roadhouse owner had to pour boiling water on the birchwood bar to pry him loose. Kallands stayed overnight in Manley, and he and the dogs finally got the rest they needed. Then they began the fift
y-four-mile journey to their home in Tanana, the geographical center of Alaska. At Tanana, Kallands and his fellow townsfolk would listen to the progress of the serum run by telephone over the old telegraph line between Tanana and Ruby that the Corps had abandoned when it went to wireless communications. Names of fellow Athabaskans like Sam Joseph, Titus Nickolai, Dave Corning, Harry Pitka, and George and Edgar Nollner would crackle across the wire over the next two days as each continued the westward relay across the Interior to meet Seppala.

  At 3:00 a.m. on Friday morning, January 30, Charlie Evans, the twelfth driver in the relay, was waiting at Bishop Mountain when he heard a dog team approaching in the distance. The driver was George Nollner, Evans's close friend, and he was humming an Athabaskan love song, thinking of the woman he'd married a few days earlier. George had split his run, between Whiskey Creek and Bishop Mountain, with his older brother, Edgar, in order to speed the serum down the trail. When George arrived, he unwrapped the package and the two went inside the cabin to sit by the stove and warm the serum. They stayed inside for nearly an hour, worried that the deepening cold would freeze the medicine and render it useless.

  The temperature had warmed slightly over the past day. But it had been only a brief reprieve. By early morning, a troubling cold had begun to set in. Outside the cabin, when Evans looked up at the sky, the green and white lights of the aurora borealis danced a slow, graceful waltz. Like so many of the mushers, Evans was half Athabaskan on his mother's side. Descended from a long line of powerful Koyukon chiefs, he came from a tradition of helping people through times of need. For many Athabaskans, the northern lights were the torches of spirits to guide travelers on their journey to heaven. All one had to do was whistle, and according to their legend, the spirits would come down out of the sky to one's aid. But Evans knew not to be lulled into a false sense of security. The temperature was minus 62 degrees.

  Evans's run would begin at Bishop Mountain, a fish camp on the north bank of the Yukon River. Here, the Yukon makes a sharp S-curve around a 200-foot pile of stone. Most years, the ice is rough and uneven, the tortuous leavings of immense floes that have crashed and sheared against the sudden turn in the bank, wrenching free avalanches of dirt and rock. Evans knew this stretch of the Yukon the way a gardener knows every flower in a bed, every twist and turn, and every shift in its sandbars and shoals. In summer, the twenty-two-year-old dog driver piloted a riverboat, navigating the Yukon and the nearby Koyukuk tributary, which tumbles down from the Brooks Range. The two rivers meet ten miles west of Bishop Mountain at Evans's home village of Koyukuk. His father, John Evans, a gold miner from Idaho, ran a store there, and in winter Charlie helped out his dad transporting merchandise and furs by dogsled.

  It was about 4:30 a.m. when Evans finally started off on the thirty-mile trip from Bishop Mountain to Nulato. He had been up all night waiting for George and was already slightly tired. Just ten miles into his run, he ran into trouble. The suppressed waters of the Koyukuk had broken through the ice where the river converged with the Yukon and covered the trail for half a mile with overflow. The dogs managed to avoid the open water, but the relative warmth of the vapor rising up off the river created a thick, cottony wall of ice fog. The fog rose to Evans's waist and swallowed the dogs and the sled.

  Ice fog can be 30 to 60 feet thick and cover miles of ground. It creates a ghost world haunted by ice crystals shimmering and floating in the air, suspended like motes of diamond dust that part and close in when disturbed by a breeze or a person moving through it. Once into the fog, a driver can only feel his way over the trail. He has no way of gauging how far he has come or in which direction he is going. In this thick icy mist, no longer able to use the sight of a familiar trail to anchor him to reality, he can be overcome by a sudden sense of helplessness. "It would come over me all of a sudden," a driver once wrote, "a sort of helpless feeling, as if no matter how hard we struggled, we weren't getting anywhere...there were times out there that I thought I was going nutty."

  Evans didn't dare get off the sled. He drove blind through the fog, grateful when the thick mist ahead of him lowered enough to reveal the tips of the dogs' tails and the bobbing tops of their heads. All he could do was stand on the runners, hold on for bumps, and "let the dogs go..." Many dogs would balk in the blinding whiteness, but Evans's dogs "knew what they were doing. I trusted the dogs. They trusted me. They had a sixth sense, seemed to know what I was thinking." A light breeze had begun to blow, creating a wind chill, and Evans, on the back of the sled, began to stiffen up with the cold. The wind was blowing sand off the exposed portions of the steep bank; under such conditions the sand could feel like shards of glass when it hit a driver's face.

  Evans's two lead dogs faltered, misfiring their gaits. They were mixed breeds, a combination of bird dog and husky, and Evans had borrowed them to fill out his own team. But they had more bird dog in them than husky and were ill suited for such difficult pulling. Their hair was short and the harnesses were beginning to constrict their legs and chafe. Worse, Evans had forgotten rabbit skins to protect the dogs' groin area, which has little hair, and the two of them had already begun to freeze as they ran.

  Evans neared the village of Koyukuk where his father, John Evans, was waiting, straining for any sounds of his son. John heard the squeak of the runners against the cold snow and ran out to the bank to urge his son to stop, to come inside and warm up.

  "I can't stop," Charlie had shouted back from the river. "Them dogs would be hard to wake up."

  John Evans watched his son pull away. John had organized the drivers on this stretch of the Yukon, and when he told his son about the epidemic in Nome, Charlie did not hesitate to volunteer. Charlie's mother had died in 1908 when he was only five; John Evans then put everything he had into Charlie and his brother, teaching them the ways of the Yukon and sending them to Oregon to school for five years to learn the ways of the modern world.

  Five miles past Koyukuk, the river swung 90 degrees to the south southwest and ran along a ridge of densely wooded trees which rose 1,000 feet above the river. Nulato was about ten miles away.

  Some time after Charlie left his father behind, the legs of his two lead dogs turned blue and became swollen, burned raw by the cold where the harnesses had cut away the skin and fur. They had severe frostbite. The dogs stumbled on, until suddenly one of the lead dogs dropped to the ground. Then the other went down. The team stopped and Evans, chilled by the cold, staggered up to the front. Both dogs were crippled. Evans had no choice but to put both in the basket of the sled. According to one report, he moved to the front of the team, where he strapped a harness over his shoulder and helped the remaining dogs pull the sled over the last stretch of the trail to Nulato. 2

  2. The report does not make clear whether Evans said he had to move to the front of the team, and other sources make no mention of the issue. However, it is plausible that Evans had to take up the lead position, as he probably did not have another dog in the team capable of leading—or he would not have borrowed the two dogs. A swing or wheel dog cannot be graduated to the front position without proper training.

  A little before 10:00 a.m., Evans could see the outline of Nulato Island in the middle of the river, and a little ways beyond, off to the right, was Nulato. As Evans pulled in to the village, he carried the lead dogs into the cabin and slumped by the stove. Both dogs were dead. When asked about the run some fifty years later, Evans simply recalled: "It was real cold."

  The serum had been on the trail now for three days and had traveled 356 miles to the original meeting point. But now they had been told to go further. There were still 318 miles to go and the job of moving the serum 36 miles closer to Nome now rested in the hands of an Athabaskan Indian called Tommy Patsy, who had made a distinctive name for himself a few summers earlier when he and two other men had been chosen by their elders to take part in one of the last hunts of a grizzly by spear. The Koyukon elders had known that this might be the last time a young hunter would take a bear by spe
ar, because the tradition and the knowledge of the difficult task were rapidly dying out. Still, killing a grizzly by spear was considered among the Koyukon as the ultimate test for a man as well as a hunter.

  Patsy and the others trained in secret all summer for the hunt, strengthening their muscles, running, and practicing the pole vault. In the hunt, Patsy and another of the hunters, Sidney Huntington, would vault over the den with dried birch poles and use the poles to keep the "big animal" trapped inside, while a third hunter, opposite the den, steadied his spear in a small hole in the ground. When he was ready, the others would lift up their poles and free the raging bear. To test their pole-vaulting skills, Patsy and Huntington had to vault over a big fire of spruce boughs in fur parkas. If the parkas burned, they would be disqualified. They passed, and later that winter they successfully killed the bear by spear, perhaps the last of their people to do so.

  True to the tradition, Patsy never bragged about the hunt. To have done so would have brought bad luck upon his village. Nulato had had its share of troubles. The village was the site of a Russian fort and trading post in the Interior. In 1851, the garrison and most of the Natives living around it had been massacred by a band of warring Indians. Patsy learned of the massacre from his elders, who passed the story down through the generations. Not infrequently, residents walking around the site of the fort found buttons from the uniforms of the Russian soldiers.

  About half an hour after Charlie Evans arrived, Patsy secured the serum in his own sled and with the fastest dogs in the village set out on the trail, which followed the direction of the river southwest to Kaltag, a village that sat on a bluff overlooking the Yukon. At Kaltag, the trail left the Yukon River and headed over the mountains, where the weather grew worse. Kaltag was the start of the ninety-mile-long portage that linked the Interior with the Bering Sea coast. It began with a steep, fifteen-mile incline into the 4,000-foot Nulato Mountains before flattening out and descending to the coast. It was like a tunnel to a new, even more dangerous world. At the other end of the portage, at the Native settlement of Unalakleet, the relay would leave the relatively calm but cold Interior and enter the unpredictable conditions of the coast.