Siberian huskies.
Siberian huskies pulling a sled. Gunnar Kaasen brought the first shipment of serum into Nome around 5.30am on Monday 2nd February, 1925, following a bruising 55-mile mush led by dogs Balto and Fox. Owing to chest-deep snow and the bright glare of the ice, Kaasen was often unsure of the trail and relied on the dogs to navigate, and he drove two stages back-to-back in order to make it before the serum spoiled in temperatures approaching -30° celsius. Understandably, Kaasen and Balto won the lion’s share of media attention, but the run had been a series of relays involving twenty mushers and their dogs. Many believe that when the whole operation is taken into account, Leonhard Seppala’s dog Togo should share in Balto’s glory. Every dog was a hero in the serum run.
THREE cheers for dogs! Again they have proved their dependability. For days the dogs racing to the rescue of Nome have held front-page space and absorbed attention.
Winter-bound, shut off from the world except over deep-covered trails, Nome has an epidemic of diphtheria. The only serum was five years old, and it is supposed to be effective only six months. They used the old serum for what it might be worth and sent out a call for aid. With the temperature running to 30 degrees below zero, it was thought no airship could survive.* Anyhow — “we know what dogs can do, we don’t know about airplanes.” So the dog teams started, and as this is written one of them, after a record-breaking race, has reached Nome with the precious antitoxin.*
At any minute Roy S. Darling, a former navy flyer, may dare the dangers and start with another consignment of serum. Five have died in Nome, thirty are suspected of having the disease and fifty others have been exposed.
* Air transport was still barely out of its infancy in 1925. The civilian authorities were keen to try it, but experienced pilots told them it was madness in the freezing storms raging about Nome.
* The first consignment of serum, 300,000 units in all, arrived at Nome at around 5.30am on Monday 2nd February, 1925, brought in by Gunnar Kaasen and his thirteen-strong team of dogs. In all, there were twenty mushers (sled-drivers) working their dogs in relay, in theory carving up the 674-mile trip into 25-mile stages, regarded as an extreme day’s mush. Time was of the essence: not only were children dying, but the fresh batches of serum were not expected to survive more than six days on the trail owing to the plunging Alaskan temperatures. The dogs and their mushers brought it home with half a day to spare.
Précis
In 1925, diphtheria broke out in the Alaskan town of Nome. The town had no usable antitoxin, but the grip of winter was so brutal that the only way to bring in more was by dogsled. After a record-breaking sprint over hundreds of miles, the first vials of serum were delivered, and one women’s paper gave ‘three cheers for dogs’. (59 / 60 words)
