January 22, 2022 • 30 mins
This 2014 episode covers the 1925 diphtheria outbreak in Nome, Alaska that put a community in grave danger -- without the proper supplies to fight the disease. A daring sled-dog relay was mounted to deliver needed medicine to small community and their only doctor.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Today is the anniversary of Dr Curtis Welsh
sending an urgent telegram asking for dip theory of serum
to be sent to Nome, Alaska. That was on January
twenty second, and it prompted the Gnome serum run. I
dithered for a while about choosing this episode as a
Saturday classic because it's about a highly contagious disease that
(00:25):
was deadly among children, and we are in a pandemic
that has seen a big spike in pediatric cases over
the last few weeks. But this episode is also about
a huge, coordinated, and ultimately successful effort to get an
outbreak under control, so ultimately it's a hopeful one. And
this episode originally came out on December sevent Welcome to
(00:52):
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello, and Welcome to the five Gas. I'm
Tracy Wilson. I'm Holly fry So. Today's episode is a
listener request from a whole lot of people, but I'm
pretty sure the first person to ask for it since
(01:13):
you and I came on the show. Holly was Emily
and a dog named Balto became famous for leading a
team of sled dogs in Nome, Alaska, in delivering desperately
needed life saving medicine to the city, which at that
point was completely ice bound. There's a statue of this
(01:34):
dog in New York City Central Park and another one
in Anchorage near the starting line for the Iditarod. He
was the subject of a highly fictionalized animated film that
came out in and the dog himself was mounted by
a taxi or missed after his death and is now
an exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. But
(01:55):
Balto was just one of the lead dogs that relayed
serum across Alaska. To know. All in all, there were
more than twenty mushers with more than twenty teams of dogs,
and they ran a six hundred and seventy four mile
route which took them nearly five and a half days
to finish. And that is the story that we are
going to tell today. And as a fair warning, this
(02:17):
is it's got some very sad elements. The entire crisis
in Nome, Alaska started with the deaths of children from diphtheria.
And if this episode were made into a movie, which
it has been, as we just said, uh, the the
website does the dog died dot com would have the
crying puppy because not all of the dogs made it
(02:42):
to the end unfortunately. So if those things cause you distress,
this is your fair warning. Yeah. When Tracy started researching
this episode, she shot me and I am and said,
will you be able to handle this? So the answer
is hopefully yeah. Well, and because there's so much this
(03:02):
this could have been a multi part episode, but it
is not. And uh, because there's so much other stuff
to talk about as as part of the story. Fortunately,
that is not the majority of what we will be
talking about today. So we don't hear much about DIP
theory nowadays because in most of the world it is
prevented through vaccines. World Health Organization member states reported fewer
(03:26):
than five thousand cases, although there were certainly some that
existed outside that number that just went unreported. Most of
these were in developing nations and in places where there's
some sort of strain on the health care infrastructure, such
as wars or other strife going on that are preventing
vaccinations or health care from happening. But this was not
(03:46):
the case at all before a vaccine against DIP theory
was developed in the nineteen twenties. In nineteen twenty one,
more than two hundred thousand people got dip theory and
more than fifteen thousand people died of it. In the
United States alone and without treatment, the mortality rate for
dip theoria was up to fi and it's a terrifying
(04:08):
disease that often strikes children under the age of ten.
It starts with a sore throat in a fever, just
like numerous other relatively harmless illnesses, but as it progresses,
dip theoria produces toxins that cause a membrane and sores
to develop in the throat, and so the throat slowly
closes off until the patient can no longer breathe. This
(04:31):
is why the very dreadful nickname of this disease is
the strangling Angel of children, and diphtheria also affects other
mucous membranes. It's not just the throat, so even when
doctors started intibating patients to maintain their airways, sometimes the
patients would still die as other parts of their bodies
shut down in the wake of the toxin. The first
(04:54):
effective treatment for dip theory was antitoxin, which was developed
in the eight nineties, and essentially doctors figured out that
the blood of animals that had been exposed to dip
theoria contained substances that prevented the toxin's effects. Emil von
Bearing won the Nobel Prize for this discovery in nineteen
o one. In five, when this story takes place, there
(05:17):
was already a vaccine for diphtheria in the United States.
It was a combination of serum toxin and anti toxin. Usually,
children would be given a test called the Ship test
to see if they had already been exposed to dip
theorius at some point in their past. If not, they'd
be injected with a combination of toxin and anti toxin,
which gave them immunity for a few years. However, the
(05:40):
vaccine had not become widely used. Yeah, like many new
major medical developments, it just took a while for it
to catch on. And the ship test was a lot
like if anyone remembers getting a TV time test. Um.
I know a lot of us got them as children,
and teachers continue to get them because they're around children.
It was a lot like that. They would stay q
(06:00):
and if it turned red, then they knew that you
had been exposed So now for a little context about Nome, Alaska.
The Native Alaska and Upiak people had lived in northern
Alaska for thousands of years, and then prospectors from Europe
and other parts of North America just flooded to the
area during a gold rush in the late eighteen nineties
(06:22):
and the town's population just exploded. The promise of gold
as far as the eye could see did not turn
out to be true, though, so many of these people
moved on and left Nome. By the nine twenties, Nomes
population was left only a couple of thousand, but those
who stayed and lived there built a close knit community.
(06:42):
Counting outlying villages and mining camps, there were probably about
ten thousand people in that area of Alaska, so it's
a pretty wide area we're looking at at this point.
Although there were a number of marriages between the newcomers
and the Inupiak, in the two communities, things were are
largely segregated. In the nineteen twenties, many of the Inupiak
(07:04):
made their homes at a camp along a stretch of
waterfront that was known as the Sand Spit, and in
Gnome had exactly one doctor, and his name was Dr
Curtis Welch. He and four nurses staff to hospital that
provided care for Gnome and the surrounding population, So all
of those people had five healthcare providers total. Yeah, and
(07:27):
the hospital was the most well equipped in all of
northern Alaska. But well equipped in this sentence is extremely relative.
The electricity was not particularly reliable, and the hospital didn't
have a lab or an incubator for growing cultures, so
they couldn't take a culture of a sample to figure
out whether anything particular is growing in it. They just
(07:48):
did not have the means to do that. And Gnome
was also completely ice bound for several months of the year,
so once the last supply ship for the season dropped
off its cargo, that was it. The It's the end
of the the end of the supply line. Anything else
would have to come by the mail, which was carried
across Alaska by teams of sled dogs. So in the
(08:08):
summer of nineteen twenty four, Dr Welch had noticed that
the hospital's supply of dip diphtheria anti toxin had expired.
He wrote to Juno Alaska to request more of it,
but none of it came on the last supply ship.
To stop in Gnome before the water froze completely over.
(08:29):
Dr Welch hadn't seen a confirmed case of diph theoria
and all the time that he had been working in Nome,
so he thought it would probably be okay. Unfortunately that
changed pretty quickly. But before we get into that part
of the story, do you want to take a word
from a sponsor, let's do that. In December of Dr
(08:56):
Welch treated a child for a sore throat which he
thought was probably tomsilitis. And part of this conclusion was
because diphtheria is highly highly contagious, and so he would
expect that if he saw one case of diphtheria, he
would also see more of them. And so since there
was only one child who got sick, he did not
(09:17):
think diphtheria was the cause. But then more children did
get sick, and some of them did not survive. He
started to see the membranes and lesions were that were
the telltale signs of diphtheria. The first case he was
sure of with the diphtheria diagnosis was a three year
old named Billy Barnett. Dr Welch was afraid that using
(09:38):
expired anti toxin could just make the boy worse, but
Billy did die regardless. The next confirmed case of diphtheria
he encountered, Dr Weltch did try the anti tooxin, but
unfortunately that trial that child died also. And so at
this point uh Dr Welsh is realizing that the situation
was quite serious. So on January twenty two, he sent
(10:02):
this telegram to towns all over Alaska and to Washington,
d C. Quote, an epidemic of diphtheria is almost inevitable here.
Stop I am in urgent need of one million units
of diphtheria anti toxin. Stop mail is only form of transportation.
Stop I have made application to Commissioner of Health of
(10:22):
the Territories for anti toxin already. He then called the
town's leaders together to discuss what to do. They acted
immediately to implement a quarantine. All the public gathering places
were shut down and anyone who was displaying symptoms of
diphtheria was kept at home with a quarantine sign posted
on the door, and Dr Welch and his nurses made
(10:44):
daily rounds around Nome and through the sand spit. They
were tracking new cases, a ministering care where they could,
and they were comforting the families of children who had died.
Particularly important in this work was head nurse Emily Morgan,
who was born in Kansas and had come to Alaska
as part of a mission. Even though he was still
really worried about its efficacy, Dr Welch did started using
(11:06):
his limited supply of expired anti toxin, and he knew
that if the outbreak spread at all, they were going
to completely run out. So basically the Gnome area was
brought to a standstill. On top of the seriousness of
the outbreak itself, the nineteen eighteen influenza pandemic was still
a very recent memory, and as we talked about in
(11:28):
our episode on that pandemic, it had been absolutely devastating
to the Alaska Native population. They had no natural immunity
to it whatsoever. The Alaska Native population also had no
natural immunity at all to diphtheria, so Dr Welch, his staff,
and everyone else knew that without effective treatment, the Innupiac
population would probably be destroyed. Fortunately, the powers that be
(11:52):
also recognized that this was a crisis. Health personnel around
Alaska and the Pacific Northwest started gathering up all the
anti tip so that they could find Mark Summer, who
was the superintendent of the Territorial Board of Health Alaska
was not a state yet, concocted a plan to get
the anti toxin where it needed to go. They would
(12:12):
gather up all the anti toxin and send it to Anchorage, Alaska,
and then it would go by train to Nanana, Alaska,
and then a musher with a team of dogs would
set out from there while another musher left from Nome.
They would meet in the town of Nulatto and then
hand over the serum and go back the way they came.
And these names I looked for pronunciations of they look
(12:36):
very obvious how they should be pronounced, and I did
not find audio files pronouncing them. So very much apologize
if we have gotten any of them wrong. So Leonard's
Spaula was an experienced musher and a three time winner
of the All Alaska Sweepstakes, which is a long distance
dogsled race, and he was selected to go from Nome
to Nilatto and back. Governor Scott Bone, who was an
(12:59):
appoint it official and not an elected one at this
point in Alaska's history, expanded on the original plan by
turning the dogs led delivery into a relay using many
of the same mushers who carried the mail. The total
distance would be the same, but since each musher and
his dogs had less distance to cover, they could easily
(13:20):
make better time because they could push themselves harder. They
worked with Edward Wetzler, who was the postal inspector, to
put this plan into place, and throughout all of these
preparations and plans, there was an entire second plan that
was running in the background, and that was to try
to deliver the serum by air. However, air travel in
(13:41):
and around Alaska was in its infancy at this point.
The only airplanes available were of the open cockpit variety,
and they would have to be flown in fifty degrees
below zero temperatures in a blizzard. Uh they were water
cooled and consequently unreliable in temperatures that were that cold.
Some of the people advocating for this place and also
wanted to kick start the air industry in Alaska, so
(14:03):
they definitely had an agenda behind pushing for the air delivery.
And the reason that we're not going to go into
all of that part of the story, which is its
own little encapsulated drama, is that this particular event that
we're talking about is really about the dog race. Yeah,
all of the resources that I read kind of had
this running parallel tangent of what was happening with the airplanes,
(14:24):
and basically there was continual talk about airplanes that did
not work out. So to some all that up before
we talk about the actual dogsled relay, Let's take another
brief moment for a word from a sponsor. Yes, please.
(14:46):
The dogs led relay from Nanana to Gnome became known
as the Great Race of Mercy, and it got kind
of a rolling start when three hundred thousand units of
serum from the Alaska Railroad Hospital departed Anchorage by train.
They were packed in a cylinder and wrapped in a
quilt for insulation. Another million units were also on the
(15:08):
way from Seattle, but it was going to take a
lot longer for them to arrive. So in Casey's numbers
sound insane to you, Uh, it sounds like a lot
when we're talking about millions and three hundred thousands, But
a dose, a single dose, actually included thousands of units,
so it wasn't single unit, single dose. So when we're
talking about all of these thousands, it's really not enough
(15:31):
dosage for a whole lot of people. So the weather
for this relay was horrible. A lot of the running
of the dogs took place in wide out blizzard conditions
with temperatures well below fifty degrees below zero. I cannot
even imagine how cold that is, knowing how much I
hate cold, You can bet I cannot imagine it either. Yeah.
(15:55):
I feel like the coldest I have personally experienced has
been like in the teams below zero, and that was
just a freak occurrence. It hurt me to be outside. Yeah,
it was utter misery the one time I've been in
that as well. So I can't imagine below Yeah. So
a lot of the route was marked. It ran along
(16:17):
the Iditarod Trail, which was a marked and used trail. Uh.
There were roadhouses that had been built by the Northern
Commercial Company along the way where people could rest and
take shelter the going. The going was still going to
be extremely rough for all of the men and the
dogs involved. Uh Musha. William Shannon, also known as Wild Bill,
(16:39):
and his lead dog Blackie met the train in Nanana
and they hit the trail at nine pm on January
The going was immediately rough. There's a rule of thumb
called the rule of forties in the world of sleddogs,
and that rule is that you don't run a dog
team when it's colder than forty below or warmer than
forty above of zero fahrenheit. The temperature as wild Bill
(17:04):
left the train station was at least fifty below, but
it really had no other choice. He had to carry
the serum fifty two miles to tal Avanna, where he
would pass it off to another musher named Edgar Kellen's.
On his way to tal Havanna, wild Bill realized that
he was getting hypothermia. He started taking steps to try
(17:25):
to keep himself warm. He was moving his arms around,
he was jogging beside the dog sled, doing anything he
could think of to try to keep his body temperature up.
But by the time he got to a roadhouse in Minto,
his face had become so frost bitten that his skin
had turned black, and four of his dogs had blood
around their mouths. He thought himself out, and he thought
the serum by the fire. It was a comparatively warm
(17:48):
fifties degrees in the roadhouse, and he tried to get
everything working again before moving on. I will pause to say,
as I was reading an account of this, I was
sort of imagining him walking into a place that's what
I think of is warm, which is like between sixty
eight and seventy two degrees in the winter, and so
(18:10):
learning that this warm place he had gotten to take
refuge was only fifty degrees kind of made my heart
hurt a little bit. So before a whild Bill continued
on on his leg of the relay, he had to
unhook three of his dogs from the harnesses they were
suffering from a condition that mushers called lung scorching, which
(18:30):
actually has more to do with the effect of really
cold air on their lung tissue, and he left them
behind to return for them later, but unfortunately they didn't survive.
At about the same time, Leonard Suppala and his lead
dog Togo left no and they were on route to
the rendezvous point to pick up the serum. His planned
route was around three fifteen miles each way, and it
(18:53):
included one of the most dangerous parts of the route,
the nor Norton Sound. He set off with his dogs
Harna sing more than he needed so he could leave
some at roadhouses along the way so that he could
trade them out on the way back. Norton Sound was
for the most part frozen over at this point, but
the currents under the ice meant that the surface of
(19:14):
the sound was constantly shifting and rebuilding itself. Entire chunks
of the sound could break off and float away, and
big chasms in the ice could open unexpectedly. So Paula
had to cross over this twice, once in each direction.
I mean he could if he really wanted to go
around parts of it, but that was going to add
(19:34):
a significant amount of time to the journey. Meanwhile, the
inbound serum shipment continued to pass from musher to musher,
some of them completing their leg of the journey more
easily than others. While all of this was happening, things
in Nome got a lot worse. The disease was just
spreading really quickly. People were extremely ill and alarmingly. One
(19:57):
of the new cases was someone who had been wor
working in a neighboring town shortly before she developed symptoms.
So Dr Welch was terrified that the outbreak was going
to spread beyond Gnome and into the outlying community. Because
of the worsening conditions in Nome, there was another change
of plans, which was the addition of more mushers to
(20:18):
the relay in the hopes that they would be able
to get the serum to Nome just a little bit faster.
The trouble was there was no way to reach so Paula.
Much of his route didn't go past roadhouses that were
equipped with telegraphs or telephones, so everyone just had to
hope that someone would be able to flag him down
at the handoff point. And meanwhile, the relay continued. On
(20:41):
its third day, Charlie Evans around it arrived at his
rendezvous point with two of his dogs dead in the basket.
They had both died of exposure. So Paula found musher
Henry Ivanov not long after he made his first crossing
of the Norton Sound. Ivanofs dogs were fighting after having
gotten wind of a dear and at first Spaula thought
(21:02):
he was just another musher. He didn't think that he
had time to stop and help. As he was racing by,
Ivanof yelled that he had the serum. Fortunately, Sopaula heard him.
He stopped his team, He turned them around, loaded the
serum onto his sled, and after learning that his plan
was no longer to go all the way back to Nome,
(21:22):
but to hand his cargo off to other measures. He
continued the relay to Nome without otherwise stopping to take
much of her breath there. So Paula handed the serum
off to Charlie Olsen in Golovin in Bluff Olson handed
it off to Gunner Cousin, who whose lead dog was Balto,
the famous name that we've all heard, Balto was actually
(21:44):
one of Leonard's to Paula's dog, so Paula had loaned
some of his dogs to Cosson, although he had said
specifically that Balto was not cut out to be a
lead dog. At this point, the weather had become so
bad that Dr Welch tried to call halt to the relay.
The blizzard was causing complete white out conditions and the
(22:05):
temperature was about seventy degrees below zero, so Cassan put
off his departure for about three hours. He was hoping
that the snow would subside and maybe it would warm
up a little bit, but it didn't, and eventually he
got to the point that he was like, if I
don't go now, I'm going to be stranded here and
not able to make it through, and because of the
(22:26):
complete white out conditions and drifts that blocked the trail,
Cassan wound up relying on balto to find the way
for much of his leg of the relay, and then
when he reached his handoff point at Solomon, he didn't stop.
His reasoning for not stopping was that his eyelashes were
literally frozen shut with all of the snow and ice,
(22:46):
and he physically could not see that he was at
the handoff point. He was right, relying completely on balto
to lead this lead the team of sled dogs in
these treacherous conditions. Um sled dogs, as I have learned
from searching this, they're actually pretty amazing creatures. And lead
sled dogs, Uh. There are amazing, amazing stories of just
(23:08):
feats of heroism, which is kind of anthropomorphizing, but I
don't know how it's to describe it on the part
of lead sled dogs, a sort of taking charge when
they're they're human riding in the sled. Uh would have
made a treacherous or deadly decision because I also didn't stop.
At the next rendezvous point. When he got there, the
(23:30):
musher who was supposed to take over was asleep, and
because I thought that it would take longer to wake
him up and get his dogs into their harnesses than
it would take for him to just continue on with
his own tiring team. Later on, when Balso became a
famous household name, there were people who accused him of
just having been a glory hound and having bypassed the
(23:51):
last hand off on purpose. I don't even know how
to respond to that, like, could you have to be
a really serious glory hound to put yourself at that
level of risk? I think the whole thing was nearly
for not. And on that final leg, the winds were
so incredibly fierce that at one point they blew the
sled completely over and the serum was actually knocked out,
(24:12):
so Cassan's fingers were frost bitten by the time he
found it and actually was able to get it maneuvered
back into the sled. Finally, the anti toxin reached Gnome
on February second, at five o'clock in the morning. Had
taken more than twenty mushers, including both Alaska natives and
non natives, and more than a hundred and fifty dogs,
(24:33):
and they had been running for more than five days
and seven hours. The normal time for the mail to
be taken over this route was between fifteen and twenty days.
The serum was actually frozen when it arrived, but after
being thought out, it fortunately worked. Dr Welch and his
nurses started giving the serum to the sickest patients. First.
(24:57):
Ten percent of those three thousand units were used up
that first afternoon. A second and slightly less desperate relay
delivered those other million units of anti toxin later on
after following the same basic route from Anchorage to nome H.
In spite of all of that effort to have some
(25:18):
delivered by air that never worked out, the quarantine in
nome was lifted on February one. At least six children
died in the epidemic. The numbers are not exact because
Dr Welch actually suspected some of the Alaska Native families
did not report their children's deaths to him. There were
at least twenty seven confirmed cases and at least eighty
(25:39):
other people known to have been exposed. Even though Leonard
Soapala's dog Togo led a team for the longest part
of the journey and some of really legitimately the most
treacherous miles of the journey, Balto's heroic run into Nome
became famous. Both dogs eventually did die of old age,
and Togo was aly already twelve years old when he
(26:02):
ran the Serum Run. Sometimes people call the Serum Run
the inspiration for the Editorad Dog Sled Race, which is
kind of an oversimplification of the situation. And although the
Serum Run did go from Anchorage to Nome, which is
also where the Iditarod starts and ends, and both the
Serum Run and the Iditarod are tied to the Editorad Trail,
(26:22):
which has existed for more than a hundred years, it's
not entirely accurate. Yeah, dog sled racing was really well
established in Alaska even before the Cerum Run took place.
Uh As we said, Leonard Sappala had actually won several
long distance dog sled races. This was a pastime that
already existed and not something that came about because the
(26:43):
ceremon had happened. Later on, in nine five, the Kelly
Act was signed, and this allowed private aviation companies to
bid on mail delivery contracts in Alaska. And before the
Kelly Act, dogs and dog sleds were one credit called
to the Alaskan way of life and to moving people, mail,
and basically anything else in the winter. By the time
(27:06):
the Iditarod started in ninety three, snowmobiles were overtaking dog
sled as a as a way to move around in
the wintertime. So while there are some ties to the ceremonon,
the Iditarod was also founded in part to preserve that
way of life, the way of life of running with
dog sleds, and to preserve the Iditarod trail itself. Um,
(27:27):
not even just dog sleds. If if you look at
the history of northern Alaska, dogs go all the way
back to the first arrival of humans. They're like, there's
all kinds of study about how humans could not have
survived in that part of Alaska for thousands of years
without dogs to help them, Like, there are so many
(27:48):
incredible dog stories. One of the books that I read
to research this episode is called The Cruelest Miles, The
Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race against
an Epidemic, and I highly recommended in part because of
all these amazing dog stories. Like I was reading it
on the airplane on the way back from Thanksgiving, and
there were times when my jaw would literally drop at
(28:09):
a story of like, then, what happened with a sled dog?
Most of these stories were ancillary to this specific story.
They were sort of stories of things these particular dogs
had done at other points in their lives, but super incredible.
So I know there's a lot of debate about the
iditar Rod uh as an event, but sled dogs themselves
(28:30):
are amazing creatures. Um. And there's an I Did It
by two immunization campaign that is now tied to the
iditar Rod. It's a program that stresses the need for
children to get their childhood immunizations for diseases active theory
by the time they're two years old. So there are
connections there. But that's a little a little bit oversimplified
(28:51):
to say we have the iditar Rod because of the
gnome serum run and much more of a cat person
than a dog person. But all the dog sled stories,
like all these amazing stories about the heroic acts of
sled dogs made me really happy to read about. I
felt very sad for the dogs who did not make it.
(29:12):
They're incredible animals, they really are. I am a dog
incap person, So this is um. You know, as we said,
at the top Tracy warn't me. They're all said, thanks
so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this
episode is out of the archive, if you heard an
(29:32):
email address or a Facebook U r L or something
similar over the course of the show, that could be
obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at
i heart radio dot com. Our old hell stuff works
email address no longer works, and you can find us
all over social media at missed in History. And you
can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast,
(29:56):
the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. M Stuff You Missed in History Class is
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Happy Saturday. Today is the anniversary of Dr Curtis Welsh
sending an urgent telegram asking for dip theory of serum
to be sent to Nome, Alaska. That was on January
twenty second, and it prompted the Gnome serum run. I
dithered for a while about choosing this episode as a
Saturday classic because it's about a highly contagious disease that
(00:25):
was deadly among children, and we are in a pandemic
that has seen a big spike in pediatric cases over
the last few weeks. But this episode is also about
a huge, coordinated, and ultimately successful effort to get an
outbreak under control, so ultimately it's a hopeful one. And
this episode originally came out on December sevent Welcome to
(00:52):
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello, and Welcome to the five Gas. I'm
Tracy Wilson. I'm Holly fry So. Today's episode is a
listener request from a whole lot of people, but I'm
pretty sure the first person to ask for it since
(01:13):
you and I came on the show. Holly was Emily
and a dog named Balto became famous for leading a
team of sled dogs in Nome, Alaska, in delivering desperately
needed life saving medicine to the city, which at that
point was completely ice bound. There's a statue of this
(01:34):
dog in New York City Central Park and another one
in Anchorage near the starting line for the Iditarod. He
was the subject of a highly fictionalized animated film that
came out in and the dog himself was mounted by
a taxi or missed after his death and is now
an exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. But
(01:55):
Balto was just one of the lead dogs that relayed
serum across Alaska. To know. All in all, there were
more than twenty mushers with more than twenty teams of dogs,
and they ran a six hundred and seventy four mile
route which took them nearly five and a half days
to finish. And that is the story that we are
going to tell today. And as a fair warning, this
(02:17):
is it's got some very sad elements. The entire crisis
in Nome, Alaska started with the deaths of children from diphtheria.
And if this episode were made into a movie, which
it has been, as we just said, uh, the the
website does the dog died dot com would have the
crying puppy because not all of the dogs made it
(02:42):
to the end unfortunately. So if those things cause you distress,
this is your fair warning. Yeah. When Tracy started researching
this episode, she shot me and I am and said,
will you be able to handle this? So the answer
is hopefully yeah. Well, and because there's so much this
(03:02):
this could have been a multi part episode, but it
is not. And uh, because there's so much other stuff
to talk about as as part of the story. Fortunately,
that is not the majority of what we will be
talking about today. So we don't hear much about DIP
theory nowadays because in most of the world it is
prevented through vaccines. World Health Organization member states reported fewer
(03:26):
than five thousand cases, although there were certainly some that
existed outside that number that just went unreported. Most of
these were in developing nations and in places where there's
some sort of strain on the health care infrastructure, such
as wars or other strife going on that are preventing
vaccinations or health care from happening. But this was not
(03:46):
the case at all before a vaccine against DIP theory
was developed in the nineteen twenties. In nineteen twenty one,
more than two hundred thousand people got dip theory and
more than fifteen thousand people died of it. In the
United States alone and without treatment, the mortality rate for
dip theoria was up to fi and it's a terrifying
(04:08):
disease that often strikes children under the age of ten.
It starts with a sore throat in a fever, just
like numerous other relatively harmless illnesses, but as it progresses,
dip theoria produces toxins that cause a membrane and sores
to develop in the throat, and so the throat slowly
closes off until the patient can no longer breathe. This
(04:31):
is why the very dreadful nickname of this disease is
the strangling Angel of children, and diphtheria also affects other
mucous membranes. It's not just the throat, so even when
doctors started intibating patients to maintain their airways, sometimes the
patients would still die as other parts of their bodies
shut down in the wake of the toxin. The first
(04:54):
effective treatment for dip theory was antitoxin, which was developed
in the eight nineties, and essentially doctors figured out that
the blood of animals that had been exposed to dip
theoria contained substances that prevented the toxin's effects. Emil von
Bearing won the Nobel Prize for this discovery in nineteen
o one. In five, when this story takes place, there
(05:17):
was already a vaccine for diphtheria in the United States.
It was a combination of serum toxin and anti toxin. Usually,
children would be given a test called the Ship test
to see if they had already been exposed to dip
theorius at some point in their past. If not, they'd
be injected with a combination of toxin and anti toxin,
which gave them immunity for a few years. However, the
(05:40):
vaccine had not become widely used. Yeah, like many new
major medical developments, it just took a while for it
to catch on. And the ship test was a lot
like if anyone remembers getting a TV time test. Um.
I know a lot of us got them as children,
and teachers continue to get them because they're around children.
It was a lot like that. They would stay q
(06:00):
and if it turned red, then they knew that you
had been exposed So now for a little context about Nome, Alaska.
The Native Alaska and Upiak people had lived in northern
Alaska for thousands of years, and then prospectors from Europe
and other parts of North America just flooded to the
area during a gold rush in the late eighteen nineties
(06:22):
and the town's population just exploded. The promise of gold
as far as the eye could see did not turn
out to be true, though, so many of these people
moved on and left Nome. By the nine twenties, Nomes
population was left only a couple of thousand, but those
who stayed and lived there built a close knit community.
(06:42):
Counting outlying villages and mining camps, there were probably about
ten thousand people in that area of Alaska, so it's
a pretty wide area we're looking at at this point.
Although there were a number of marriages between the newcomers
and the Inupiak, in the two communities, things were are
largely segregated. In the nineteen twenties, many of the Inupiak
(07:04):
made their homes at a camp along a stretch of
waterfront that was known as the Sand Spit, and in
Gnome had exactly one doctor, and his name was Dr
Curtis Welch. He and four nurses staff to hospital that
provided care for Gnome and the surrounding population, So all
of those people had five healthcare providers total. Yeah, and
(07:27):
the hospital was the most well equipped in all of
northern Alaska. But well equipped in this sentence is extremely relative.
The electricity was not particularly reliable, and the hospital didn't
have a lab or an incubator for growing cultures, so
they couldn't take a culture of a sample to figure
out whether anything particular is growing in it. They just
(07:48):
did not have the means to do that. And Gnome
was also completely ice bound for several months of the year,
so once the last supply ship for the season dropped
off its cargo, that was it. The It's the end
of the the end of the supply line. Anything else
would have to come by the mail, which was carried
across Alaska by teams of sled dogs. So in the
(08:08):
summer of nineteen twenty four, Dr Welch had noticed that
the hospital's supply of dip diphtheria anti toxin had expired.
He wrote to Juno Alaska to request more of it,
but none of it came on the last supply ship.
To stop in Gnome before the water froze completely over.
(08:29):
Dr Welch hadn't seen a confirmed case of diph theoria
and all the time that he had been working in Nome,
so he thought it would probably be okay. Unfortunately that
changed pretty quickly. But before we get into that part
of the story, do you want to take a word
from a sponsor, let's do that. In December of Dr
(08:56):
Welch treated a child for a sore throat which he
thought was probably tomsilitis. And part of this conclusion was
because diphtheria is highly highly contagious, and so he would
expect that if he saw one case of diphtheria, he
would also see more of them. And so since there
was only one child who got sick, he did not
(09:17):
think diphtheria was the cause. But then more children did
get sick, and some of them did not survive. He
started to see the membranes and lesions were that were
the telltale signs of diphtheria. The first case he was
sure of with the diphtheria diagnosis was a three year
old named Billy Barnett. Dr Welch was afraid that using
(09:38):
expired anti toxin could just make the boy worse, but
Billy did die regardless. The next confirmed case of diphtheria
he encountered, Dr Weltch did try the anti tooxin, but
unfortunately that trial that child died also. And so at
this point uh Dr Welsh is realizing that the situation
was quite serious. So on January twenty two, he sent
(10:02):
this telegram to towns all over Alaska and to Washington,
d C. Quote, an epidemic of diphtheria is almost inevitable here.
Stop I am in urgent need of one million units
of diphtheria anti toxin. Stop mail is only form of transportation.
Stop I have made application to Commissioner of Health of
(10:22):
the Territories for anti toxin already. He then called the
town's leaders together to discuss what to do. They acted
immediately to implement a quarantine. All the public gathering places
were shut down and anyone who was displaying symptoms of
diphtheria was kept at home with a quarantine sign posted
on the door, and Dr Welch and his nurses made
(10:44):
daily rounds around Nome and through the sand spit. They
were tracking new cases, a ministering care where they could,
and they were comforting the families of children who had died.
Particularly important in this work was head nurse Emily Morgan,
who was born in Kansas and had come to Alaska
as part of a mission. Even though he was still
really worried about its efficacy, Dr Welch did started using
(11:06):
his limited supply of expired anti toxin, and he knew
that if the outbreak spread at all, they were going
to completely run out. So basically the Gnome area was
brought to a standstill. On top of the seriousness of
the outbreak itself, the nineteen eighteen influenza pandemic was still
a very recent memory, and as we talked about in
(11:28):
our episode on that pandemic, it had been absolutely devastating
to the Alaska Native population. They had no natural immunity
to it whatsoever. The Alaska Native population also had no
natural immunity at all to diphtheria, so Dr Welch, his staff,
and everyone else knew that without effective treatment, the Innupiac
population would probably be destroyed. Fortunately, the powers that be
(11:52):
also recognized that this was a crisis. Health personnel around
Alaska and the Pacific Northwest started gathering up all the
anti tip so that they could find Mark Summer, who
was the superintendent of the Territorial Board of Health Alaska
was not a state yet, concocted a plan to get
the anti toxin where it needed to go. They would
(12:12):
gather up all the anti toxin and send it to Anchorage, Alaska,
and then it would go by train to Nanana, Alaska,
and then a musher with a team of dogs would
set out from there while another musher left from Nome.
They would meet in the town of Nulatto and then
hand over the serum and go back the way they came.
And these names I looked for pronunciations of they look
(12:36):
very obvious how they should be pronounced, and I did
not find audio files pronouncing them. So very much apologize
if we have gotten any of them wrong. So Leonard's
Spaula was an experienced musher and a three time winner
of the All Alaska Sweepstakes, which is a long distance
dogsled race, and he was selected to go from Nome
to Nilatto and back. Governor Scott Bone, who was an
(12:59):
appoint it official and not an elected one at this
point in Alaska's history, expanded on the original plan by
turning the dogs led delivery into a relay using many
of the same mushers who carried the mail. The total
distance would be the same, but since each musher and
his dogs had less distance to cover, they could easily
(13:20):
make better time because they could push themselves harder. They
worked with Edward Wetzler, who was the postal inspector, to
put this plan into place, and throughout all of these
preparations and plans, there was an entire second plan that
was running in the background, and that was to try
to deliver the serum by air. However, air travel in
(13:41):
and around Alaska was in its infancy at this point.
The only airplanes available were of the open cockpit variety,
and they would have to be flown in fifty degrees
below zero temperatures in a blizzard. Uh they were water
cooled and consequently unreliable in temperatures that were that cold.
Some of the people advocating for this place and also
wanted to kick start the air industry in Alaska, so
(14:03):
they definitely had an agenda behind pushing for the air delivery.
And the reason that we're not going to go into
all of that part of the story, which is its
own little encapsulated drama, is that this particular event that
we're talking about is really about the dog race. Yeah,
all of the resources that I read kind of had
this running parallel tangent of what was happening with the airplanes,
(14:24):
and basically there was continual talk about airplanes that did
not work out. So to some all that up before
we talk about the actual dogsled relay, Let's take another
brief moment for a word from a sponsor. Yes, please.
(14:46):
The dogs led relay from Nanana to Gnome became known
as the Great Race of Mercy, and it got kind
of a rolling start when three hundred thousand units of
serum from the Alaska Railroad Hospital departed Anchorage by train.
They were packed in a cylinder and wrapped in a
quilt for insulation. Another million units were also on the
(15:08):
way from Seattle, but it was going to take a
lot longer for them to arrive. So in Casey's numbers
sound insane to you, Uh, it sounds like a lot
when we're talking about millions and three hundred thousands, But
a dose, a single dose, actually included thousands of units,
so it wasn't single unit, single dose. So when we're
talking about all of these thousands, it's really not enough
(15:31):
dosage for a whole lot of people. So the weather
for this relay was horrible. A lot of the running
of the dogs took place in wide out blizzard conditions
with temperatures well below fifty degrees below zero. I cannot
even imagine how cold that is, knowing how much I
hate cold, You can bet I cannot imagine it either. Yeah.
(15:55):
I feel like the coldest I have personally experienced has
been like in the teams below zero, and that was
just a freak occurrence. It hurt me to be outside. Yeah,
it was utter misery the one time I've been in
that as well. So I can't imagine below Yeah. So
a lot of the route was marked. It ran along
(16:17):
the Iditarod Trail, which was a marked and used trail. Uh.
There were roadhouses that had been built by the Northern
Commercial Company along the way where people could rest and
take shelter the going. The going was still going to
be extremely rough for all of the men and the
dogs involved. Uh Musha. William Shannon, also known as Wild Bill,
(16:39):
and his lead dog Blackie met the train in Nanana
and they hit the trail at nine pm on January
The going was immediately rough. There's a rule of thumb
called the rule of forties in the world of sleddogs,
and that rule is that you don't run a dog
team when it's colder than forty below or warmer than
forty above of zero fahrenheit. The temperature as wild Bill
(17:04):
left the train station was at least fifty below, but
it really had no other choice. He had to carry
the serum fifty two miles to tal Avanna, where he
would pass it off to another musher named Edgar Kellen's.
On his way to tal Havanna, wild Bill realized that
he was getting hypothermia. He started taking steps to try
(17:25):
to keep himself warm. He was moving his arms around,
he was jogging beside the dog sled, doing anything he
could think of to try to keep his body temperature up.
But by the time he got to a roadhouse in Minto,
his face had become so frost bitten that his skin
had turned black, and four of his dogs had blood
around their mouths. He thought himself out, and he thought
the serum by the fire. It was a comparatively warm
(17:48):
fifties degrees in the roadhouse, and he tried to get
everything working again before moving on. I will pause to say,
as I was reading an account of this, I was
sort of imagining him walking into a place that's what
I think of is warm, which is like between sixty
eight and seventy two degrees in the winter, and so
(18:10):
learning that this warm place he had gotten to take
refuge was only fifty degrees kind of made my heart
hurt a little bit. So before a whild Bill continued
on on his leg of the relay, he had to
unhook three of his dogs from the harnesses they were
suffering from a condition that mushers called lung scorching, which
(18:30):
actually has more to do with the effect of really
cold air on their lung tissue, and he left them
behind to return for them later, but unfortunately they didn't survive.
At about the same time, Leonard Suppala and his lead
dog Togo left no and they were on route to
the rendezvous point to pick up the serum. His planned
route was around three fifteen miles each way, and it
(18:53):
included one of the most dangerous parts of the route,
the nor Norton Sound. He set off with his dogs
Harna sing more than he needed so he could leave
some at roadhouses along the way so that he could
trade them out on the way back. Norton Sound was
for the most part frozen over at this point, but
the currents under the ice meant that the surface of
(19:14):
the sound was constantly shifting and rebuilding itself. Entire chunks
of the sound could break off and float away, and
big chasms in the ice could open unexpectedly. So Paula
had to cross over this twice, once in each direction.
I mean he could if he really wanted to go
around parts of it, but that was going to add
(19:34):
a significant amount of time to the journey. Meanwhile, the
inbound serum shipment continued to pass from musher to musher,
some of them completing their leg of the journey more
easily than others. While all of this was happening, things
in Nome got a lot worse. The disease was just
spreading really quickly. People were extremely ill and alarmingly. One
(19:57):
of the new cases was someone who had been wor
working in a neighboring town shortly before she developed symptoms.
So Dr Welch was terrified that the outbreak was going
to spread beyond Gnome and into the outlying community. Because
of the worsening conditions in Nome, there was another change
of plans, which was the addition of more mushers to
(20:18):
the relay in the hopes that they would be able
to get the serum to Nome just a little bit faster.
The trouble was there was no way to reach so Paula.
Much of his route didn't go past roadhouses that were
equipped with telegraphs or telephones, so everyone just had to
hope that someone would be able to flag him down
at the handoff point. And meanwhile, the relay continued. On
(20:41):
its third day, Charlie Evans around it arrived at his
rendezvous point with two of his dogs dead in the basket.
They had both died of exposure. So Paula found musher
Henry Ivanov not long after he made his first crossing
of the Norton Sound. Ivanofs dogs were fighting after having
gotten wind of a dear and at first Spaula thought
(21:02):
he was just another musher. He didn't think that he
had time to stop and help. As he was racing by,
Ivanof yelled that he had the serum. Fortunately, Sopaula heard him.
He stopped his team, He turned them around, loaded the
serum onto his sled, and after learning that his plan
was no longer to go all the way back to Nome,
(21:22):
but to hand his cargo off to other measures. He
continued the relay to Nome without otherwise stopping to take
much of her breath there. So Paula handed the serum
off to Charlie Olsen in Golovin in Bluff Olson handed
it off to Gunner Cousin, who whose lead dog was Balto,
the famous name that we've all heard, Balto was actually
(21:44):
one of Leonard's to Paula's dog, so Paula had loaned
some of his dogs to Cosson, although he had said
specifically that Balto was not cut out to be a
lead dog. At this point, the weather had become so
bad that Dr Welch tried to call halt to the relay.
The blizzard was causing complete white out conditions and the
(22:05):
temperature was about seventy degrees below zero, so Cassan put
off his departure for about three hours. He was hoping
that the snow would subside and maybe it would warm
up a little bit, but it didn't, and eventually he
got to the point that he was like, if I
don't go now, I'm going to be stranded here and
not able to make it through, and because of the
(22:26):
complete white out conditions and drifts that blocked the trail,
Cassan wound up relying on balto to find the way
for much of his leg of the relay, and then
when he reached his handoff point at Solomon, he didn't stop.
His reasoning for not stopping was that his eyelashes were
literally frozen shut with all of the snow and ice,
(22:46):
and he physically could not see that he was at
the handoff point. He was right, relying completely on balto
to lead this lead the team of sled dogs in
these treacherous conditions. Um sled dogs, as I have learned
from searching this, they're actually pretty amazing creatures. And lead
sled dogs, Uh. There are amazing, amazing stories of just
(23:08):
feats of heroism, which is kind of anthropomorphizing, but I
don't know how it's to describe it on the part
of lead sled dogs, a sort of taking charge when
they're they're human riding in the sled. Uh would have
made a treacherous or deadly decision because I also didn't stop.
At the next rendezvous point. When he got there, the
(23:30):
musher who was supposed to take over was asleep, and
because I thought that it would take longer to wake
him up and get his dogs into their harnesses than
it would take for him to just continue on with
his own tiring team. Later on, when Balso became a
famous household name, there were people who accused him of
just having been a glory hound and having bypassed the
(23:51):
last hand off on purpose. I don't even know how
to respond to that, like, could you have to be
a really serious glory hound to put yourself at that
level of risk? I think the whole thing was nearly
for not. And on that final leg, the winds were
so incredibly fierce that at one point they blew the
sled completely over and the serum was actually knocked out,
(24:12):
so Cassan's fingers were frost bitten by the time he
found it and actually was able to get it maneuvered
back into the sled. Finally, the anti toxin reached Gnome
on February second, at five o'clock in the morning. Had
taken more than twenty mushers, including both Alaska natives and
non natives, and more than a hundred and fifty dogs,
(24:33):
and they had been running for more than five days
and seven hours. The normal time for the mail to
be taken over this route was between fifteen and twenty days.
The serum was actually frozen when it arrived, but after
being thought out, it fortunately worked. Dr Welch and his
nurses started giving the serum to the sickest patients. First.
(24:57):
Ten percent of those three thousand units were used up
that first afternoon. A second and slightly less desperate relay
delivered those other million units of anti toxin later on
after following the same basic route from Anchorage to nome H.
In spite of all of that effort to have some
(25:18):
delivered by air that never worked out, the quarantine in
nome was lifted on February one. At least six children
died in the epidemic. The numbers are not exact because
Dr Welch actually suspected some of the Alaska Native families
did not report their children's deaths to him. There were
at least twenty seven confirmed cases and at least eighty
(25:39):
other people known to have been exposed. Even though Leonard
Soapala's dog Togo led a team for the longest part
of the journey and some of really legitimately the most
treacherous miles of the journey, Balto's heroic run into Nome
became famous. Both dogs eventually did die of old age,
and Togo was aly already twelve years old when he
(26:02):
ran the Serum Run. Sometimes people call the Serum Run
the inspiration for the Editorad Dog Sled Race, which is
kind of an oversimplification of the situation. And although the
Serum Run did go from Anchorage to Nome, which is
also where the Iditarod starts and ends, and both the
Serum Run and the Iditarod are tied to the Editorad Trail,
(26:22):
which has existed for more than a hundred years, it's
not entirely accurate. Yeah, dog sled racing was really well
established in Alaska even before the Cerum Run took place.
Uh As we said, Leonard Sappala had actually won several
long distance dog sled races. This was a pastime that
already existed and not something that came about because the
(26:43):
ceremon had happened. Later on, in nine five, the Kelly
Act was signed, and this allowed private aviation companies to
bid on mail delivery contracts in Alaska. And before the
Kelly Act, dogs and dog sleds were one credit called
to the Alaskan way of life and to moving people, mail,
and basically anything else in the winter. By the time
(27:06):
the Iditarod started in ninety three, snowmobiles were overtaking dog
sled as a as a way to move around in
the wintertime. So while there are some ties to the ceremonon,
the Iditarod was also founded in part to preserve that
way of life, the way of life of running with
dog sleds, and to preserve the Iditarod trail itself. Um,
(27:27):
not even just dog sleds. If if you look at
the history of northern Alaska, dogs go all the way
back to the first arrival of humans. They're like, there's
all kinds of study about how humans could not have
survived in that part of Alaska for thousands of years
without dogs to help them, Like, there are so many
(27:48):
incredible dog stories. One of the books that I read
to research this episode is called The Cruelest Miles, The
Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race against
an Epidemic, and I highly recommended in part because of
all these amazing dog stories. Like I was reading it
on the airplane on the way back from Thanksgiving, and
there were times when my jaw would literally drop at
(28:09):
a story of like, then, what happened with a sled dog?
Most of these stories were ancillary to this specific story.
They were sort of stories of things these particular dogs
had done at other points in their lives, but super incredible.
So I know there's a lot of debate about the
iditar Rod uh as an event, but sled dogs themselves
(28:30):
are amazing creatures. Um. And there's an I Did It
by two immunization campaign that is now tied to the
iditar Rod. It's a program that stresses the need for
children to get their childhood immunizations for diseases active theory
by the time they're two years old. So there are
connections there. But that's a little a little bit oversimplified
(28:51):
to say we have the iditar Rod because of the
gnome serum run and much more of a cat person
than a dog person. But all the dog sled stories,
like all these amazing stories about the heroic acts of
sled dogs made me really happy to read about. I
felt very sad for the dogs who did not make it.
(29:12):
They're incredible animals, they really are. I am a dog
incap person, So this is um. You know, as we said,
at the top Tracy warn't me. They're all said, thanks
so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this
episode is out of the archive, if you heard an
(29:32):
email address or a Facebook U r L or something
similar over the course of the show, that could be
obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at
i heart radio dot com. Our old hell stuff works
email address no longer works, and you can find us
all over social media at missed in History. And you
can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast,
(29:56):
the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. M Stuff You Missed in History Class is
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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Tracy Wilson
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