About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

CRUELEST MILES, THE: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic
by Gay and Laney Salisbury
Norton, June 2003
317 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0393019624


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Nome Alaska was founded about 1900 by prospectors from the Klondike who heard of placer gold deposits on a godforsaken windswept beach. The traces of gold gave out rather quickly, and most of the prospectors and hangers-on left on the last ship each autumn and returned on the first ship each spring, so Nome was never a really exciting place.

By 1907, the city fathers were desperate to save their city, so they established the Nome Kennel Club and organized a 408 mile round trip dog sled race. The first race was run in April 1908 and it lasted until WW I.

Dogs had always been important in the North. The native people had Malamutes, named after a local tribe. They were bred them with larger dogs, such as St. Bernards, to enable the animals to pull heavier loads. Over the years, mushers brought the smaller, swifter Siberian Huskies to Alaska for use in mail runs and races.

Dr. and Mrs Welch arrived in Alaska in 1907. They had lost everything in the SF earthquake the previous year, and were ready to start anew. They moved into the bush but by 1925 had moved to Nome where the conditions were a bit easier.

In the autumn of 1925, the last ship into the port of Nome, Alaska, neglects to bring the diphtheria serum Dr. Welch had requested. Since there hadn't been a case of diphtheria in Alaska in 18 years, Dr. Welch reckoned that he could wait until spring to replenish his supply. Boy, was he wrong.

First an Eskimo child was brought to him suffering from "tonsillitis" The child died the next day, Working under primitive conditions, even in Nome, Dr Welch finally diagnosed diphtheria and tried to get some fresh serum to try and keep the death toll down because he only had a limited amount of the outdated material.

It was decided to carry the serum by train to the end of the railroad line and then use dogs to haul it from the interior to the coast. The best mushers, both Athabaskan and white, were used under conditions that were absolutely unbearable, with temperatures mostly -40 to -60F. Leonhard Seppala and his lead dog Togo, had the longest and most dangerous part of the run, across Norton Sound. But it was Gunnar Kaason, with his lead dog Balto, who had the honor of carrying the serum into Nome and getting all the publicity.

In the summer of 2002, on the Antiques Roadshow tour, a woman came in with a large poster, measuring 41" x 81" of a tall handsome man with a little ball of black fur at his feet. The poster was the one which had hung in Kaason's home after he had been taken up and then dropped by Hollywood and the furry creature was Balto. The large poster had been used to promote Kasson's personal appearances during several speaking tours across the U.S. The woman was Kaason's grandniece. Unfortunately the item arrived at the Roadshow venue too late in the day for taping. It would have made a fascinating segment.

The authors worked very hard to get the full story of this event out of the realm of legend and into historical context, but perhaps they worked a little too hard. There was too much irrelevant history and sociology. Perhaps a tighter story would have served their purpose better. The section of the book dealing with the race to Nome with the serum through a raging blizzard loses much of its potential impact because of numerous digressions into anecdotes about other fascinating, but irrelevant heroics of sled dogs.

That said, the book is still well worth reading, especially for its wealth of information about a very particular and important period in Alaskan history.

Reviewed by Barbara and Rudy Franchi, July 2003

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]