On this day in 1925, the Great Race of Mercy concluded with the arrival of the first doses of diphtheria serum in Nome, Alaska.
If you're not familiar with the Nome serum run, here's my brief amateur summarization of what happened...
Diphtheria was a highly contagious and deadly disease in the early 20th century, especially for children. (Look up the symptoms – it's truly terrifying.) After several cases were diagnosed in the town of Nome, Dr. Curtis Welch – the only doctor in a town of ~1400 people – discovered that his only supply of antitoxin was expired, which meant that the possibility of an epidemic was very real. A quarantine was declared and officials started figuring out how to get the lifesaving serum from Anchorage up to Nome.
The ports were frozen over, and the weather was too poor for 1920s planes to fly safely. The serum was sent by rail to Nenana, and from there twenty mushers – many of whom were contracted mail carriers – and about 150 dogs carried it to Nome in five and a half days, a distance of 674 miles. Mushing 25 miles in a day was generally considered to be pretty extreme, but some teams traveled more than twice that distance in a day, pushing hard through high winds, near-blizzards, and temperatures below -60 degrees Fahrenheit to get the medicine where it needed to be. It was terribly urgent because the serum had to be kept from freezing, and was not expected to last more than a week under the rough conditions on the trail.
A musher named Gunnar Kaasen and his team, led by Balto, were the ones to actually arrive with the serum and thus got a lot of attention from the media (including the 1995 movie starring Kevin Bacon) – although there's some controversy about the accuracy of the reporting, and some historians believe Balto never led the team at all.
But the true heroes of the relay were Leonhard Seppala and his lead dog Togo, who was 12 years old at the time of the serum run. They had a remarkable career together and Togo saved Seppala's life on several occasions.
Seppala and Togo traveled 170 miles just to pick up the serum, which they carried for 91 miles over the most dangerous stretch of the journey – often through whiteout conditions, when Togo's sense of smell was their only navigation. Seppala, an award-winning musher, was himself a resident of Nome, and his daughter was among the children who had already been infected. He was specifically assigned to the hardest part of the relay due to his experience and the skill of his team.
The serum run is one of my favorite historical events (I recommend the book The Cruelest Miles by Gay and Laney Salisbury if you want to learn more), and I find the story even more poignant in a time when vaccines of all kinds have become political talking points instead of a simple matter of public health. A diphtheria vaccine had been developed in 1923, and the publicity surrounding the events in Alaska helped along the inoculation campaign in the United States.
Also, it's very much worth mentioning that the majority of mushers who participated in the run were Alaskan Athabaskans, who received much less credit and praise than their white colleagues, and that the Native population of Nome and the surrounding area had a much higher risk of contracting diphtheria because they had no natural resistance to the disease. Less than a decade before, the influenza epidemic had wiped out 8% of the Native population of Alaska and nearly 50% of the Natives in Nome.
A story of brave people willing to risk their lives for the sake of public health just hits a little different in the 2020s. I cry when I think too much about it.
And by the way, Seppala also owned Balto, but had left him off his main team and leased him to Kaasen. Seppala was ultimately bitter about the attention Balto (and to a lesser extent, Kaasen) got from the press after the conclusion of the relay, feeling that Togo never got his fair share of the credit. But Togo lived another four years and enjoyed a relaxing retirement in Maine, and his offspring laid the foundation for the modern Siberian Husky breed. In 2011, Time magazine named him the most heroic animal of all time.
