Starting in Siberia
We do not know for how long dogsled transport existed in Siberia among aboriginal tribes before Europeans arrived on the scene. Possibly for centuries, equally possibly for thousands of years. We can be certain that the raw material from which Siberian sleddogs were fashioned was the wolf. We can be equally certain that the sleddogs that arrived in Alaska from Siberia in 1908 were considerably evolved from the wild state, and superbly adapted for harness work. That is proven by the fact that Siberian dogs were considered the finest sleddogs in Alaska within a few years of their arrival, and that they ultimately dominated the All-Alaska Sweepstakes race in its final three years.
The Siberian sleddog population was diverse. Photos of imported dogs show a wide variety of body type and physique, as well as great variations in length of coat, colour and markings. The insistence of Siberian Husky breed clubs that these dogs were a "purebred" strain maintained by the Coastal Chukchi is utter nonsense. No tribe could have maintained purebred status in its canine stock, least of all the Chukchi, whose dogs were regularly wiped out by terrible famines. The nomadic trading practices of Siberian natives are well-documented by anthropological and exploratory expeditions of the late nineteenth century, including a thriving trade in dogs. Market villages such as Markovo on the Anadyr river were the site of "dog fairs" specifically for purposes of trade.
All evidence points to extensive evolution and extreme selection to produce the Siberian sleddog as it arrived in Alaska in 1908. The natural environment was extremely harsh. Subsistence for many of the native tribes was marginal and famine a constant danger. Anthropologists and explorers document a high level of dog sacrifices and other cultural-selection factors operating on the sleddog population. Relatively few dog breeds have experienced the high levels of sustained brutal selection that produced the Siberian sleddog.
We can be reasonably sure that Koryak, Chukchi, Kamchadal, Yukaghir and Yakut sources contributed to the exports to Alaska during the Nome Gold Rush era. Uelen, Petropavlovsk, Markovo, the Anadyr River region, the Kolyma River region, and even the Indighirka River are mentioned as geographical sources of imported sleddog stock.
Nome 1908 - 1926
Siberian dogs enter the Nome gold fields
WILLIAM GOOSAK, a Russian fur trader, brought to Nome, Alaska, the first imported Siberia stock of the American period (during the earlier Russian dominion it is known that Siberian dogs were regularly taken across the Bering Strait and used in Alaska for transport). A ten-dog team was trained that fall and winter for entry in the second All-Alaska Sweepstakes. The small (40-50 pound) dogs were given 100 to 1 long-shot odds in Nome betting; the team, driven by Louis Thurstrup, actually placed third and for awhile appeared the clear front-runner. (Interference by gambling interests is rumoured to have occurred, as a win at those odds would have broken the Bank of Nome.) The team was sold afterward to Nome fur trader Charlie Madsen.
CHARLES "FOX" MAULE RAMSAY, the second son of a Scottish Earl adventuring in Alaska, was deeply impressed by the Goosak team. An Oxford graduate, young Ramsay was accompanied by his two uncles Colonel Charles Ramsay and Colonel Weatherly Stuart; the family had investments in the Nome gold fields. The young laird had driven a mongrel team in the 1909 A.A.S. without placing. The following summer at the instigation of Ivor Olsen, who knew Siberia well, he chartered a schooner for the sum of $2500 (equivalent value today would be at least $50,000) to motor up the Anadyr River to the dog fair at Markovo village. There he acquired sixty or seventy dogs (accounts vary as to the actual number).
Ramsay's imported Siberian sleddogs were set to work hauling mine timbers into the hills that year, and the following winter were divided into three teams for purposes of the Nome Sweepstakes. Driven by John Johnson "the Iron Finn", by young Ramsay himself, and by Charles Johnson, those three teams placed first, second and fourth respectively in the 1910 All Alaska Sweepstakes. The winning team set a trail record of 74 hours, 14 minutes, 37 seconds, which was never surpassed, even when a 75th Anniversary re-running took place in 1983 with modern Alaskan huskies (won by Rick Swenson with a time ten hours off the Johnson recordat 84 hours, 42 minutes, 4 seconds). As it happens, except for the famous leader "Kolyma" the winning team was actually third string dogs, left over after Fox Ramsay and Charles Johnson had made their selections.
JOHN AND CHARLES JOHNSON entered Siberian teams in the A.A.S. in 1911, 1912, 1913, and 1914; the Johnson team won in 1914, but mongrel teams of Scotty Allen (1911, 1912) or Fay Delzene (1913) won in the intervening years between the two John Johnson victories. Little is known today about the Johnson kennels or the breeding that took place there. The famous leader Kolyma with his striking white cape and blue eyes was a neutered male, so no lineage can be traced to him. A well-known photo shows the Johnson dogs pulling the "pupmobile" railroad handcar on the Kougarok railway with Kolyma at right point. The Northern Light stock of Judge Julien Hurley 15 years later may have had Johnson ancestors in its pedigree. But another breeder with his own bloodline was fated to take center stage after 1914.
Leonhard Seppala acquires Siberian dogs
LEONHARD SEPPALA had arrived in Alaska as a young immigrant in 1900 and worked there for many years for his boyhood friend Jafet Lindeberg; it was at Lindeberg's urging that he came over initially. Lindeberg was owner of the Pioneer Mining Company. He learned to drive dogs at first with mongrels. His first two sleddogs, "Nigger" and "Jack," were big mongrels, brothers who weighed 120 and 110 pounds respectively. Sepp says they "pulled loads that would have staggered ordinary dogs." It was not until 1913 that he became involved with the Siberian dogs. Let Seppala tell it himself:
"It was in 1913 that a man came to me and said that he had bought a group of Siberian females and puppies and wanted me to take charge of the raising and training of the young dogs. He said he was going to make Captain [Roald] Amundsen a present of a team of Siberians next year, at which time it was planned that Amundsen was to come to Nome with an expedition on his way to the North Pole. Hence about fifteen dogs, mostly puppies and females, arrived at my camp, and as soon as the snow began to fly I started to break in the oldest ones."
Amundsen abandoned his plans for a polar expedition once the Peary expedition got there first, and Seppala remained with the dogs, which the Nome Kennel Club officials then encouraged him to enter in the All-Alaska Sweepstakes, albeit they were only "half-trained" according to Seppala. He had a hair-raising experience in a blizzard near Topkok, nearly going over a precipice into the Bering Sea, sliding down an icy slope, unable to hold his team, and stopping finally by means of his "emergency steel bar" jammed into the snow through a hole in the sled.
Seppala was hooked, no matter how dangerous his race had been. Crossing the mountains between Bluff and Timber, his team became exhausted, with torn pads, lost nails and frozen flanks incurred in the difficult mountain crossing. He abandoned his first Sweepstakes attempt, but says:
"I was determined to complete a Sweepstakes race, and with this in mind I trained all the next fall, getting my dogs in condition for the race in April. I had set out the first tie with dogs a year old or under, and I had planned that the next year I would start with a well-seasoned string."
So where exactly did Sepp's dogs come from? He answers this question in an interview article circa 1947:
"My first team of Siberians came from the Fox Maule Ramsay, English nobleman, which he imported for the All Alaska Sweepstake races in 1910. Since then, I imported more dogs by having traders in Siberian bring them over the Bering Straits to Nome. I got them from many parts of Siberia. From Indigirka River farthest West . . . from Kolyma and Anadyr Rivers . . . from the coast East of Kolyma and from Petropavlowsk. They varied somewhat in size. The coast dogs were the smallest . . . about 50 pounds . . . Anadyr and Kolyma, 60-65 pounds. My last shipment of eight dogs arrived direct from Siberia to Poland Springs, Maine, where I had kennels at that time. I may be the only one alive today who has imported Siberians."
Seppala dominates the Nome Sweepstakes
THE ALL-ALASKA SWEEPSTAKES was the premier event of the winter in Nome, Alaska, during the ten years of its existence. Prior to the organisation of the Nome Kennel Club in 1908 by Albert Fink and the inauguration of the race, skiing had been the principal outdoor sport. Seppala states that the introduction of new and faster dogs brought about sleddog racing. It is perhaps important to understand that the major function of the race was as a vehicle for gambling. Seppala narrates:
On April 1 the All-Alaska Sweepstakes race, over a course of 408 miles, was inaugurated. The excitement was intense. Every man and woman in the community who could get there was present at the start in Barracks Square on Front Street. There was a telephone line along the Sweepstakes trail to Candle, the turning point, and the position of each team was reported from stations established along the line to Nome and posted on blackboards in saloons and other public places. The Board of Trade saloon was the main headquarters of the race, and here the people crowded to read the news on the blackboard and place their bets. Hundreds of thousands of dollars changed hands during those days.The Sweepstakes race would not have enjoyed the universal interest it did, nor had such large amounts of effort and resources poured into it, had it not been for the backing of gambling interests. Big money was involved, and when the result finally became predictable, the race was terminated.
Racing people today tend to forget that the dogs of the Nome Gold Rush were, first and foremost, the main vehicle of winter transport for passengers and freight. That is why the dogs were there, that was the purpose of their presence and existence in Nome. It is true that the Ramsay dogs were imported mainly for the Sweepstakes, but that importation was made possible because the dogs were useful and profitable for the rest of the year. The race purses were important enough, being "from sixteen hundred to ten thousand dollars, depending upon the prosperity of the moment" (bearing in mind that in today's money that would be from $32,000 to $200,000): but the purses were dwarfed by the gambling money. The Sweepstakes was not about an athletic contest -- it was about money. And Seppala's dogs, like everyone else's, were not primarily racing dogs -- they were indispensable basic transport. Seppala states:
"That year [i.e., 1917, the year of his final Nome Sweepstakes win] my team covered a greater distance than any in Alaska has ever done so far as is known -- for, in addition to traveling from the first snowfall until the last fall in June, I used the dogs as motor power on the Kougarok railway all summer, covering in all approximately seven thousand miles."
Seppala won the 1915 Sweepstakes handily over famous driver of mongrels Scotty Allen, who was favoured to win the race. He went on to win the 1916 race, and the last running of the Sweepstakes in 1917 (which Sepp finished four and a half hours ahead of his nearest rival). Of those wins, Sepp said:
"My chief pride in winning the All-Alaska Sweepstakes race three years in succession was not in the purse or in defeating my rivals, but in the fact that in each successive race all the dogs arrived in harness and in as good condition as they did in 1915."
Sepp's Post-Sweepstakes years in Alaska
Dogsled racing in Alaska seemed to lose its fascination after Seppala's domination of the Nome Sweepstakes, or perhaps the advent of World War One brought on a more subdued atmosphere. At any rate, Seppala's races thereafter were affairs like the Borden Marathon (so-called!) of 26 miles, the Loop-the-Loop races in Nome (1923-25) of 8 miles, or the Forty Mile Race from Nome to Port Safety and back. He won all of these, but perhaps they were not that much to crow about. Throughout this period his employment in the gold fields continued and doubtless as his position there advanced and brought growing responsibilities, he found his time and energies fully occupied without the exhausting Sweepstakes.
Seppala's "race with Death" -- The same year of the last running of the Sweepstakes, Seppala pulled into Dime Creek after a forty-mile drive from Isaac's Point with Stevenson, the Pioneer Mining Company mines superintendent. A man ran down to the team, covered in blood and terribly disturbed. He informed Sepp and Stevenson that Bobby Brown, a friend and fellow Sweepstakes competitor, "had been cut and broken up in his sawmill and now lay in a terribly mangled condition." Although it was already afternoon and Candle, where there was a hospital, lay 62 miles away, Seppala agreed to take Brown to Candle. There were fresher teams available, but all were agreed that Sepp was the only man for the trip. Brown lay in a pitiable condition, with "one leg sawed off and just hanging by a piece of muscle, and the other leg and an arm broken and several ribs crushed." Seppala's sixteen dog team took off on the Sweepstakes trail late in the afternoon with driver and two passengers, the mangled Brown and Stevenson. Temperatures were "about thirty below, with the wind westerly and blowing hard in our faces." The wind increased, storm clouds came up and soon a blizzard was under way. Soon it was too dark to see and they were totally dependent on the lead dog's knowledge of the trail. Nonetheless by eleven that night they made Candle. Bobby Brown died in hospital three days later, but Seppala and his dogs had at least beaten death on the Sweepstakes trail. Sepp related:
"I was certainly proud of my dogs. They had made one hundred and two miles that day with sometimes two and sometimes three men on the sled. I have not heard of any dog team making as long a drive as that with such a load in one day and in one drive."Seppala's "race with Death" inspired a well-known poem by Mrs. Esther Birdsall Darling, herself a sleddog owner, entitled "Seppala Drives to Win!"
The Nome Serum Drive
By 1925 Seppala had the dog he describes as his finest leader at the head of his team: "Togo" was a small (48-pound) dog, a son of his earlier half-breed Siberian/Malamute leader "Suggen." In January of that year a diphtheria epidemic began to ravage the children of the small city of Nome. Such antiserum as they had was several years old and of doubtful value. Nome City officials asked Seppala to hold his team in readiness to go out over the trail to Nulato (a distance of 300 miles) after a delivery of fresh antiserum. They hoped to use airplanes for at least part of the delivery route, but it was feared that something might go wrong, that the airplane would not be able to reach Nome. At first the plan was for Seppala to go to Nulato in several "short mail-trip drives, hardening the dogs up gradually." Sepp went back to his home in Little Creek to await developmnents. The plans changed, and one morning early Sepp was asked to set out without further delay. He chose twenty dogs for the trip, planning to drop twelve of them off in stages along the way, arriving in Nulato with eight, and being then able to drive the return trip day and night using fresh re-enforcements. The best dogs were chosen, and a supply leader named "Fox" left as "leader for the cull team, which was to continue hauling supplies during our absence and was composed of dogs too slow to be of much use in a fast run."
Seppala's team set out after a great send-off from the people of Nome. The first day they made thirty-three miles, and thereafter averaged fifty miles or more each day. The weather was favourable, the trail good, and Sepp dropped some of the dogs as planned. They reached Shaktoolik on the south side of Norton Bay. The wind was blowing hard. They crossed the bay and were all thinking of a good rest at the end of the day, when they spotted another team. Seppala was about to pass by, as "the driver was busy refereeing a dog fight," when over the wind he caught the words, "serum -- turn back." It was another mile before he could turn the team; when he got back, he discovered the other driver indeed had the serum. The epidemic had increased alarmingly in the interim since they had set forth from Nome, and a system of short relays had been arranged to speed the delivery. Sepp writes:
"We had had a hard day, covering forty-three miles with the wind at our backs. But the return was even harder. The gale was in our faces, the temperature was thirty below, and we had the forty-three miles to do over again in the dark. There was nothing for it but to face the music."They made Isaac's Point uneventfully where the dogs were rested and fed, and the serum warmed according to instructions. The coastal ice of Norton Sound was dangerous, and Sepp observes:
"An old Eskimo stood by as we hitched up, and observing the increase in the wind he cautioned me: 'Maybe ice not much good. Maybe breaking off and go out. Old train plenty no good. Maybe you go more closer shore.' I thanked him and followed his suggestion, taking a trail further in. At that, we came withini a few feet of open water, as the trail over which we had traveled only the day before had broken off and drifted far out into Bering Sea."They pulled into Cheenik Village in the afternoon, where another relay driver was waiting. Seppala and his team had traveled three hundred and forty miles in the interest of the serum -- no other relay team made more than fifty-three miles. Charlie Olson drove the serum to Bluff, while Seppala and his dogs collapsed in exhaustion for a well-deserved night's rest.
The final relay was completed by Gunnar Kaasen, who had taken the culls left behind by Seppala to Bluff. Kaasen was meant to have taken the parcel only to Port Safety, where Ed Rohn, who would execute the final relay, was waiting. In the event, Kaasen simply decided to carry on, as the team was running well. He completed the final 21 mile leg from Safety to Nome, traveling 53 miles from Golovin to Nome with the serum. Some say he deliberately bypassed Port Safety, some say he found Rohn asleep in his cabin and decided to continue on. It is said Kaasen claimed he failed to spot the roadhouse due to poor weather, but one man present in the roadhouse that night later testified that the visibility was good and that he spotted Kaasen's runner tracks 35 feet from the roadhouse the following morning.
The press had got word of the dramatic serum drive during the telegraph traffic that had accompanied the arrangements for the rail delivery to Nulato. The event became an early version of the "media circus"! Seppala describes the situation when he arrived back in Nome after a good night's rest:
"When we arrived there the whole town seemed to be out to meet us. It was like the winner's reception after a Sweepstakes race. News of the diphtheria had found its way to the outside papers, and in the States the teams were being followed from day to day by the press. They had become heroes while they were peacefully going on their way, totally unconscious that they were headliers in the press. The last relay team landed the serum in Nome at six o'clock on the morning of the second of February, 1925."The 674-mile route had been covered in 127.5 hours by the twenty relay drivers, nearly all of it in temperatures varying from -30°F to -58°F. When Seppala arrived, he found Kaasen feted as a hero, and the scrub leader Balto a canine celebrity. Sepp writes:
"There was plenty of scandal connected with the drive, and there were many rumors as to various individuals commercializing it. The chief thing which disturbed me was that Togo's records were given to Balto, a scrub dog, who was pushed into the limelight and made immortal. It was almost more than I could bear when the 'newspaper' dog Balto received a statue for his 'glorious achievements,' decked out in Togo's colors, and with the claim that he had taken Amundsen to Point Barrow and part way to the Pole -- when he had never been two hundred miles north of Nome! By giving him Togo's records he was established as 'the greatest racing leader in Alaska,' when he was never in a winning team! I know, because I owned and raised Balto, as well as Togo."It is a little-known fact that Seppala's old Sweepstakes leader Scotty was also on the Serum Drive team (speaking of unsung heroes)!
Kaasen was quickly engaged by promoter Sol Lesser for a tour of the United States and a movie contract with "his team" -- actually Seppala's dogs. $200 leased the driver and team to the promoter for ten weeks. In May 1925, some four weeks later, difficulties arose, and Seppala finally sold the dogs outright to Lesser. A year later Seppala got an offer to come to the lower forty-eight on tour himself, so that fall Sepp, Theodore Kingeak (a young Eskimo handler), and 44 dogs took ship for Seattle. A cross-country tour ensued, ending in January 1927 at Madison Square Garden in New York. The tour had crucial consequences for the subsequent history of Seppala's Siberian sleddogs.
