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