Alaska Dogs and Iditarod Mushers Read online

  ISBN 978-1-59433-042-1

  eBook ISBN 978-1-59433-132-9

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006900701

  Copyright 2006 by Patricia Chargot

  —First Edition—

  All rights reserved, including the right of

  reproduction in any form, or by any mechanical

  or electronic means including photocopying or

  recording, or by any information storage or

  retrieval system, in whole or in part in any

  form, and in any case not without the

  written permission of the author and publisher.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Dedication

  For Per, my sweet Viking.

  Acknowledgement

  With special thanks to Steve Misencik of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History for his generosity in sharing Balto's story. His enthusiasm sparked mine.

  Thanks, too, to Martha Thierry for capturing Balto's essence for the cover of this book.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgement

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 Down and Out in a Dime Museum

  Chapter 2 Back to the Beginning

  Chapter 3 Goodbye, Alaska

  Chapter 4 Hello, Seattle!

  Chapter 5 Back to Alaska, Sort of

  Chapter 6 Balto Goes Hollywood

  Chapter 7 What Serum Run Is This?

  Chapter 8 A Song, a Dance, a Dog Act

  Chapter 9 Balto Becomes an Artist's Model

  Chapter 10 Seppala and Togo Show Up

  Chapter 11 Kaasen, Go Home!

  Chapter 12 Does Anyone Want Seven Brave Dogs?

  Chapter 13 The End of the Trail

  Chapter 14 The Rescue

  Chapter 15 Read All About It!

  Chapter 16 All Aboard the Balto Express

  Chapter 17 The Dogs Become Zoomates

  Chapter 18 Cleveland Celebrates “Balto Day”

  Chapter 19 The Dogs Receive Their First Visitors

  Chapter 20 Moving Day

  Chapter 21 A Great Heart Falters

  Chapter 22 The Aftermath

  Chapter 23 The Epilogue

  Sources

  Accompanied by his master, Gunnar Kaasen, and Mrs. Kaasen, Bal-to, the famous Alaska trail dog, on arrival in Seattle, Washington aboard the steamship Alameda, and was given the freedom of the city. Then, he soon left for Mount Rainier to become a motion picture star. Courtesy of Special Collections, Cleveland University Library.

  Introduction

  Balto. The great Alaska sled dog has been dead since 1933. But he still stands larger-than-life on Dogdom's Mount Olympus, where the world's great canines are immortalized.

  He's up there with Barry, the brave Saint Bernard that rescued mountain travelers buried by avalanches in the Swiss Alps. He shares a golden kennel with Hachiko, Japan's favorite dog, that faithfully searched for his dead master for years outside a Tokyo subway station. His name echoes down the long dog run of history with the brave Newfoundland Tang's, the Earth-orbiting Laika's, the loyal Skye terrier Greyfriars Bobby's.

  Yet few people know Balto's true story. Only one small part has been told, and even it has been distorted.

  Over the decades, several Balto books have been written. There's even a Balto animated movie, but it, too, is largely fiction. (Balto was NOT part wolf!) Like the books, the movie leaves off where this book begins — and tells the best part of the story.

  Balto was only three years old when he helped carry serum across Alaska from Nenana to Nome to save the town's children from diphtheria. As leader of the last dog team in the life-saving relay race, he became an overnight sensation — a BONEa fide international celebrity.

  But so much more happened after that. Balto lived for eight more years, experiencing the happy surprises and unexpected sadnesses found in every long life — animal or human.

  His days unfolded like a sled expedition to the North Pole, carrying him in an exhilarating rush over smooth snow one minute, an icy hummock the next. And how does the new story end? With a heart-thumping surprise that you can't imagine and neither could have Balto.

  So hook up your harness, step into Balto's booties — the little fleece socks sled dogs wear to protect their feet — and mush off to Chapter One.

  Whoosh.

  Nome about the time of Balto's historic run.

  Courtesy of Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum

  Chapter One

  Down and Out in a Dime Museum

  The dogs’ whimpering was too soft to be heard from the street. Outside the old storefront, the party decade was roaring — not just in Los Angeles, but across the country.

  It was the wild, jazzy, fun-filled Roaring Twenties. Flappers in short skirts were kicking their legs and twirling the long strands of pearls they wore around their necks. The economy was booming — lots of people were making money and spending it on having fun.

  But there was no party going on at the storefront: no jumping, bellowing, yipping. No running, falling, tumbling. No enthusiastic barking — and not one note of joyful husky singing.

  The converted store was a “dime museum,” a cheap sideshow wedged among gambling dens, illegal drinking dives and other sleazy joints. For 10 cents, visitors — mostly out-of-town businessmen — could ogle an “animal curiosity” — seven famous Alaska sled dogs.

  The dogs were Balto, Fox, Alaska Slim, Billy, Sye, Old Moctoc and Tillie, the only female.

  Just two years earlier, in February 1925, the team had been heralded as heroes on the front pages of the world's newspapers for saving the children of Nome, Alaska, from a deadly diphtheria epidemic.

  In Washington, D.C., the U.S. Senate had suspended official business to listen to stories, poems and songs about the dogs and their young driver, Gunnar Kaasen.

  But now it was February 1927. Five of the team's original 12 dogs were gone, and Kaasen had mysteriously disappeared.

  The seven remaining dogs were has-beens — even Balto, the bear-like leader with the cute white markings that was known to children across America.

  Thousands of families had Balto bookends and used Balto dog food dishes or cat food dishes to feed their pets. But did they think of Balto?

  The brave dogs had been forgotten — some would say, shamelessly left to die. Small, hot and windowless, the dime museum was no place for dogs. But it was a nightmare for huskies, which are most comfortable in temperatures of 10 to 20 below zero.

  In Nome, the team had lived like other sled dogs — in a huge kennel in the middle of a snow-covered field. The snow was deep and made the dogs want to jump and run. The air was crisp and crystal-clear. It sharpened their already keen senses of taste and smell.

  But there was no fresh air in the dime museum, not a ripple of breeze or tiny icebox blast of chill. The stifling conditions were draining the dogs’ life force, almost as if some great invisible moose, their dreaded enemy back in Alaska, was slowly stomping them senseless.

  After weeks of confinement, the dogs were thin, weak and miserable. Their lustrous fur had dulled, and their once strong pulling muscles had shrunk. One by one, they had sunk into a lethargy, a state between wakefulness and sleeping.

  There was no stimulation of any kind, nothing to rouse their spirits. So they lay dreaming of faraway Alaska: of soft, sub-Arctic sunlight, sub-zero temperatures, the tantalizing scents of reindeer, fox and rabbit.

  They had come such a long way since the life-saving serum run. Now, they were unable to save their own lives. Tied to their beloved sled in a musty back room of the museum, they wondered: “Is this the end of the trail?”

  Chapter T
wo

  Back to the Beginning: Balto's

  Early Life and the Serum Run

  Leonhard Seppala (SEP-luh) loved Siberian huskies.

  It was 1922, and the friendly, easy-to-train breed hadn't even been introduced yet to the American Kennel Club in New York — let alone officially recognized.

  But up in Nome, the little gold town of the far north, Seppala already had raised and bred more Siberians than any other Alaskan musher.

  The small but strong Norwegian had been smitten by the small but strong dogs in the early 1900s, when a friend had given him 15 Siberian pups and adult females — all imported from eastern Siberia, a long, watery reach across the Bering Strait from Nome.

  Leonhard Seppala with a team of dogs. The dog on the far left is Togo, and the dog on the far right is Fritz. Courtesy of Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum

  But some Siberian huskies were better than others — smarter and faster, with greater endurance and better dispositions. Like other husky breeders, Sepp — as Seppala's friends called him — felt he could tell “A” dogs from “B” dogs as pups. “A” dogs were used for long-distance runs and races and bred; “B” dogs were neutered and consigned to hauling freight.

  Nome had been Seppala's home since 1900, but the frontier outpost had shrunk dramatically since those heady gold rush days. Then, 30,000 residents and visitors clogged the streets. Now, there were only about 1,450 inhabitants fewer people than sled dogs. Still, Nome was a metropolis compared with tiny Skjervoy (ski-YEAH-voy), the Norwegian fishing village where Sepp had spent his boyhood.

  Skjervoy had stamped Seppala with a fierceness that rivaled the Alaska winter itself. By any standard, winter was harsh in Nome, 140 miles south of the Arctic Circle. But it was even harsher in Skjervoy, 500 miles north of the Circle, near the Arctic Ocean. And Seppala had felt the full impact of that harshness, like a lion tamer who has seen the inside of a lion's mouth.

  Seppala was only 11 when he was first sent to his father Isak's winter fishing grounds. That first winter, he stayed on shore baiting hooks, helping in the cooking galley, scrubbing the mens’ clothes and bunking in a small, drafty cabin.

  By 14, the young Viking was working aboard his father's beloved boat, the Leviathan — handling the ropes and rigging with raw, reddened hands, hauling up huge nets filled with thousands of squirming cod; sweating one minute, shivering the next.

  At night, every bone in his small body ached. He listened to the men tell stories about terrifying sea monsters, and boats and men that had been lost at sea — and felt grateful not to be among them. He returned home to Skjervoy a man, not a boy — with a man's appetite for daring and adventure.

  He found both in Nome — first as a gold prospector, then as a sled dog racer. Sepp and his Siberians had won every big race in Alaska, including the 408-mile All-Alaska Sweepstakes three years in a row. He almost always won the “condition prize,” too, for finishing the race with dogs that were in better shape than his opponents’. He had a reputation for taking good care of his dogs.

  “That man is superhuman,” one competitor said of Seppala. “He passed me every day of the race, and I wasn't loafing any. I couldn't see that he drove his dogs. He just clucked to them every now and then, and they would lay into their collars harder than I've ever seen dogs do before.

  “Something came out of him and went into those dogs with that clucking. You've heard of some men who hold supernatural control over others? Hypnosis, I guess you call it. I suppose it's just as likely to work on dogs. Seppala certainly has it if anyone has.” *

  Sepp's No. 1 leader in 1922 — the year Balto was born — was Togo, a nine-year-old gray male with ice-blue eyes, that was small even for a Siberian. Alaska's top husky weighed only 50 pounds! But Togo was “fifty pounds of muscle and fighting heart,” as Seppala liked to say. He was a natural born leader that, in Sepp's opinion, had the temperament of genius: Ambitious even as an eight-month-old puppy, he repeatedly broke out of his kennel and followed after Sepp and the big dogs until they finally let him join their team.

  On the very day that Sepp hitched him up for the first time — close to the sled so he could keep an eye on him — Togo performed so well that after only a few miles, he was promoted up the line. Soon afterwards, he was made co-leader — alongside old Rusty.

  Togo had boundless energy and endurance and an unerring sense of the trail, even in the most blinding of blizzards. Named after Togo Heihachiro, a famous Japanese admiral, he was respected by all the dogs in Sepp's kennel — 32 other noisy, frisky Siberians, including the young Balto.

  Balto was one of the lesser huskies, in Sepp's opinion — definitely a member of the “B” team. He was considerably larger than Togo and more ruggedly built, but he was a much slower runner. Sepp had named him for Samuel Johannesen Balto, a famous Sami (SAH-me) and fellow Norwegian who had lived in Alaska for 24 years and had died shortly before Balto was born. (The Sami are an Arctic herding people who live in the northern reaches of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.)

  Seppala's boyhood hero had been Fridtjof (FRITCH-uff) Nansen, the great Norwegian explorer, and Samuel J. Balto had accompanied Nansen on the first crossing of the Greenland Ice Cap. Balto's lively sense of humor had buoyed the moody Nansen's spirits on the long trek across endless snowdrifts and ice floes. But Balto also had been temperamental, complaining and even whining when he felt deprived of some food or exhausted by the grueling journey. Like Nansen, who eventually tired of his Sami guide and declined to invite him on future expeditions, Seppala quickly lost interest in Balto's canine namesake. Unimpressed with what Sepp called the husky's poor work attitude, Seppala neutered him at six months and relegated him permanently to the “B” team.

  Still, there was no denying that Balto was cute, with his with long, thick, shiny brownish-black hair, white markings that looked like socks — one short and one long — and button eyes like a bear's. And he had a proud, regal bearing.

  He appealed to Gunnar Kaasen, a handsome young Norwegian and newcomer to Alaska who hadn't yet made enough money to buy his own dogs. When he needed a team, he borrowed one from Seppala, who was a mentor to the younger fellow countryman. Kaasen, 21, became the 48-year-old Seppala's assistant. He was a big, rugged man who liked big, rugged dogs. He liked big Balto.

  Seppala and Kaasen worked for a large gold mining company, driving dog teams with food and other supplies to the outlying gold camps. In addition to paying Seppala's salary, the company paid for his dog food. It was an important perquisite (PURR-kwi-zit) — “perk” for short, or bonus — because Seppala's real work was training for sled races. Without free dog food, he probably couldn't have kept such a large breeding kennel. His teams also carried sick and injured miners to Nome for medical treatment.

  But the serum run was Seppala's most urgent mission yet. When the message went out in January 1925 that children were dying of diphtheria in Nome, Alaskan officials quickly realized that the only way to deliver serum was by dog sled.

  Initially, Seppala was to play the major role. As one of the Territory's most skilled drivers, he was asked by Nome officials to set out for Nenana, 674 miles away, to meet the train carrying serum from Anchorage. Nenana was the end of the rail line. Seppala and his champion dogs were to mush back to Nome. The total trip was 1,348 snow-covered miles!

  But officials in Juneau, the Territory's capital, soon came up with a different plan — and a better one. They wired Nome officials to tell Seppala to set off from Nulato, the half-way point between Nenana and Nome. To save time, another musher would carry the serum from Nenana to Nulato.

  Then the plan was changed again: Twenty mushers would carry the serum in a relay race. By using fresh teams to cover distances of 18 to 53 miles, the serum was certain to arrive sooner than if two teams each ran more than 300 miles with only brief rest stops. Every minute counted.

  But Juneau wired the new changes too late. Seppala had already set off with his best 20 dogs, including Togo. He was out of reach, racing acr
oss the wilderness to Nulato.

  Before leaving, Seppala had told Kaasen to use the remaining 12 dogs for any hauling that needed to be done while he was gone — with Fox as leader.

  But Seppala never made it to Nulato. With 140 miles left to mush, he ran into Henry Ivanoff, another driver, who had just left the village of Shaktolik with the serum. Ivanoff's dogs were fresh, but both men knew that Seppala and his champion dogs probably would make better time to Golovin, 91 bitter miles away. So Ivanoff handed Sepp the serum, and Sepp turned his team around.

  Meanwhile, Kaasen was asked to join the relay race. He was to mush to Bluff, 53 miles from Nome, wait for the serum, then carry it 33 miles back to Point Safety, where another musher, Ed Rohn, would be waiting to make the final 20-mile sprint to Nome.

  He had no choice but to use Seppala's dogs — and he picked Balto as the leader! Kaasen knew Sepp wouldn't approve, but he felt he was a good judge of dogs, too, and had the right to pick the leader he felt would do the best job. Kaasen felt he saw something in Balto that Sepp had overlooked — a strength, a steadiness of character — qualities that had become apparent only with age and maturity. Balto was a late bloomer!

  The team set off. Like an understudy who has at last stepped on stage, Balto rose to the occasion, holding a straight course on the long, windy trip and even saving the team from running into icy water.

  Meanwhile, Seppala had decided to take a dangerous shortcut to Golovin across frozen Norton Bay. He knew the ice could break up at any moment and carry the whole team out to sea. But driving around the big bay would add hours to this near-last leg of the serum run. Nome's children were dying. Sepp put his trust in God and set off into the slippery darkness.

  At Golovin, Sepp handed the serum to Charles V. Olson, who carried it to Bluff. There Olson handed it to Kaasen, who was waiting for him at a cozy roadhouse. Driver and leader were resting contentedly — Kaasen in front of a wood-burning stove, Balto at his feet, tail thumping. The two clearly had become companions, even friends. They trusted and liked each other. The other dogs were tied up outside.