The 1925 husky race that saved Nome (and how the wrong dog got the statue)

In January 1925, a diphtheria outbreak hit the small Alaskan town of Nome. The only antitoxin in Alaska was 674 miles away in Anchorage. Planes couldn't fly in the winter weather. Ships couldn't reach the iced-in port. The only way to deliver the serum was by dog sled, across an entire winter Alaska, in time to save the town's children.

What happened next is one of the great stories of American working dogs. Twenty mushers and roughly 150 huskies, in relay, covered the 674 miles in five and a half days through what was later confirmed to be the worst winter storm in twenty years. Temperatures hit -50°F. Wind chill at -85°F. Mushers went blind from the cold. Dogs died in the harness.

The serum arrived in Nome on February 2nd. The diphtheria outbreak was contained. The children survived.

Then the wrong dog got the credit. This is the story of how that happened, and why the husky who ran the hardest leg only got the recognition he deserved in 2019.

The geography of the run

A map helps. Anchorage is on the south coast of Alaska. Nome is on the west coast, on the Bering Sea. Between them is a thousand miles of frozen interior — the Alaska Range, the Yukon, the Norton Sound. The standard sled route is 938 miles, but the serum run used a shorter winter trail of 674 miles by relay.

The plan was to break the route into stages, each musher and team running their own leg. The serum (a glass vial of antitoxin worth, in modern dollars, about $200,000) would be handed off between teams like a baton.

Twenty mushers volunteered. Most were Athabaskan or Inupiat native runners with deep experience of the trail. The dogs were nearly all Siberian Huskies or Alaskan Malamutes, with a few mixed-breed leaders. Most teams had eight to twelve dogs.

The temperatures during the run made history. Reports from telegraph stations along the route recorded -40°F as routine and -50°F at the worst stages. Wind chill made human skin freeze in under a minute.

Togo

Leonhard Seppala was a Norwegian-born musher considered the best in Alaska. He had won the All Alaska Sweepstakes three times. He owned a kennel of Siberian Huskies that he had bred for the trail himself, and his lead dog was a 12-year-old named Togo.

Togo was not the obvious lead. He was small — under 50 pounds, smaller than most of the team — and Seppala had originally tried to give him away as a kid because he was too small and too willful to be a sled dog. The man Seppala gave him to brought him back twice. Togo kept finding his way home across miles of Alaska. Eventually Seppala accepted that the dog was staying, and put him in the team.

By 12 years old, Togo had run more sled miles than any dog Seppala had ever owned. He could read the ice. He could find the trail in whiteout conditions. He had survived multiple breakthroughs into open water and pulled his team out of sea-ice cracks more than once.

When the serum run was organized, Seppala was tasked with running the longest and most dangerous leg — across Norton Sound, the open ice of the Bering Sea, where storms could split the ice in hours and strand a team in open water.

Seppala and Togo ran 261 miles. They crossed Norton Sound during the worst part of the blizzard, in conditions where every other musher had stayed in shelter. Togo navigated by feel through total whiteout, kept the team on the ice, and led them to the relay handoff. It was the longest, hardest, and most dangerous single leg of the entire run.

Balto

Gunnar Kaasen, another Norwegian musher, was assigned a much shorter leg — about 53 miles — near the end of the route. His lead dog was Balto, a 3-year-old freight husky from Seppala's kennel that Seppala had not personally trained.

Seppala apparently didn't think much of Balto. He had used the dog for hauling supplies, not as a lead dog. But Kaasen put him at the front of his team for the serum-run leg, and when the previous musher was running ahead of schedule, Kaasen ended up running through the night.

Kaasen and Balto reached Nome at 5:30 AM on February 2nd, 1925, in a blizzard. The serum was handed to the doctor. The town was saved.

Kaasen was the last musher in the relay. By the time the press telegraphed the story out, he was the human face of the run. Balto, his lead dog, was photographed with the serum at the finish line. The press, on deadline, ran with the story as a man-and-dog narrative. The 19 other mushers and 150 other dogs who had run the longer, harder, more dangerous legs got mentioned in passing or not at all.

Within months, Balto was the most famous dog in America. He went on a vaudeville tour. He was photographed with celebrities. A statue of Balto was placed in Central Park, New York, in December 1925. The inscription read: "Dedicated to the indomitable spirit of the sled dogs that relayed antitoxin six hundred miles over rough ice, across treacherous waters, through Arctic blizzards from Nenana to the relief of stricken Nome in the Winter of 1925."

The statue's "indomitable spirit" was technically dedicated to all the sled dogs. The specific dog whose name and face were on the statue had run 53 miles of the 674.

Togo's recognition, 94 years late

Leonhard Seppala, the musher who had run the actual dangerous leg, spent the rest of his life trying to correct the record. He toured America with Togo. He wrote articles. He gave interviews. The man understood what his own dog had done.

It mostly didn't work. The Balto-in-Central-Park story had set, and the harder truth — that the dog and musher who had carried the most weight got the least credit — was less marketable than the simpler narrative.

Togo died in 1929 at 16 years old. His body was preserved and is now displayed at the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race headquarters in Wasilla, Alaska. Most visitors to the museum have heard of Balto and not of Togo.

In 2011, Time magazine named Togo the most heroic animal of all time. In 2019, Disney+ released a feature film called "Togo," with Willem Dafoe playing Seppala, telling the actual story of the actual lead leg. By then, both dogs had been dead for ninety years.

A second statue of Togo was finally erected in Seward Park, New York, in 2019. It sits a few miles from Balto's. Most visitors still don't know why there are two.

What husky people know

Modern Siberian Husky owners tend to know the Togo story. Modern Iditarod mushers all know it. The Iditarod itself, which runs every year along most of the serum-run route, was created partly as a tribute to the 1925 teams.

The Siberian Huskies you see today — the bushy tails, the blue eyes, the howling that pierces walls, the inability to stay in a yard — are descendants of the same Chukchi-bred dogs that ran the serum. The breed standard is essentially unchanged in a hundred years. The dog whining at your back door because she wants to run is genetically a few generations removed from the dog who saved Nome.

The howling that you can't stop is the pack-call instinct that hasn't been bred out. The selective hearing off-leash is the same independent decision-making that got a sled team across Norton Sound in a blizzard. The willingness to run for hours is exactly what she was made for.

She is, by design, a working dog. She is exactly what her great-great-grandparents were 100 years ago, doing exactly what they would do.

If you have a husky on your couch, the custom plush of her is going to need the bushy tail and the ice eyes if it's going to look right. The shape is distinctive. That's because the breed standard was set by the kind of dog who could pull a serum vial across 250 miles of frozen sea ice and arrive on time.

Ready to see your pet as a plush pillow?