![]() Curtis Welch-Nome’s sole physician-and the town’s temporary Board of Health established a quarantine. Twelve-year-old Togo was Seppala’s lead dog and a local celebrity.īy January 25, 1925, soon after the first cases of diphtheria were diagnosed, Dr. The premier event was the All Alaska Sweepstakes, which ran annually in April from 1908 to 1917, and which was won in its final three years by a short, wiry Norwegian immigrant of uncommon strength, endurance, and competitive spirit-the legendary Leonhard Seppala. In the long winter months, sled-dog racing provided entertainment to the hunkered-down population. During the annual thaw from June till October, freight dogs transported supplies inland from the coast. With stopovers to rest dogs or change teams and drivers, the mail took between twenty-five and thirty days. Then they struck across the ice of Norton Bay or went around to finally reach Nome, almost seven hundred miles from Nenana. They passed over mountains and rode across the shorefast ice along the coast of the Bering Sea. Mushers followed trails established over centuries by the Athabaskan Indians to cross the Interior basin. From there dog teams carried mail and supplies to Nome. The only link to the outside world was distant Seward, an ice-free port in southern Alaska and the starting point for a railroad that wended its way north through Anchorage and on to the Athabaskan village of Nenana, not far to the west of Fairbanks. For nine months a year, it was practically unreachable. Lying along the coast of the Bering Sea, it is a mere hundred thirty-eight miles from eastern Siberia. Thompson was a tireless booster who thought he would be doing Alaska a big favor by bringing aviation up north. He was both editor of the Fairbanks Daily News-Minerand a founder of the Fairbanks Airplane Corporation. Thompson-nicknamed “Wrong Font” by detractors who capitalized on the cruel coincidence between his initials and printers’ notation for an incorrect type face. But powerful interests in Fairbanks and Nome lobbied for contracts to deliver mail by plane-or “airship.” The most efficient and reliable form of transport was still the dogsled. The white winter sky looked so much like the snow and ice on the ground that pilots compared the experience to flying around the inside of a milk bottle. When the first ship arrived in spring, great numbers scrambled aboard, and the population of Nome contracted sharply.Īviation was slow to catch on in Alaska-especially in the Interior, where winter temperatures routinely dropped to minus thirty or forty degrees Fahrenheit. Unprepared for the harsh winter, many died or resorted to stealing from Eskimos to survive. Few cheechakos ever found the “big pay streak”-as a good claim was called. They mixed uneasily with newcomers, the “cheechakos,” who carried with them dreams of easy riches. “Sourdoughs” were miners who had prospected in the last gold rush. And during the diphtheria epidemic, the same population would again prove terribly vulnerable. During the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, half the Eskimos and Natives in Nome died. ![]() The Eskimos lived separately from the white population, in shacks made from driftwood and lumber scraps. Nome was the “Dog Capital of the World.” Days were short, and as the sun went down a nightly ritual of howling began, a discord called the Malamute Chorus, arising from the edge of town where the mushers kept their kennels.Įskimos, members of the Athabaskan tribes, and interracial descendants made up a third of the population. By then, it had saloons, a dozen hardware stores, a couple of watchmakers, a masseuse, and bordellos. In 1900, Nome poured millions of dollars into the American economy. John Hummel, among the first to discover the yellow lucre, claimed he simply picked it up along the beach. Nome became a magical place in the American imagination, its reputation stoked by newspaper accounts of easy fortune. “Rush For Cape Nome Gold Fields Is On,” announced the San Francisco Call. The population soared to twenty thousand as prospectors streamed in. In 1899, gold was discovered in Nome, then a small coastal town. The one was named Togo, the other, Balto. They were Siberian Huskies who would play pivotal roles in the sled-dog relay that brought serum to Nome, Alaska, during the 1925 diphtheria epidemic.
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