Kathleen, Queen of the Desert

Originally published in The South Bay Daily Reporter, California, Summer 1994

I don’t know if anybody ever saved Manhattan Beach. I kind of wish somebody could have saved it from the polio that swept through my family in 1954. But, if anybody did save the Beach Cities from a more severe epidemic, there hasn’t been a statue, plaque, race, or a book in commemoration. Not like in Nome.

I’d heard about Balto even when I lived in the South Bay. The big, black husky who saved Nome, Alaska, from a diphtheria epidemic is part of American mythology. Now that I live in Nome, I wanted to know the real story of that serum run.

The deaths of two Eskimo children in January of 1925 started the Nomeites to worry. Dr. Curtis Welch diagnosed diphtheria and ordered by telegraph the only available serum from Anchorage. The 3000,000 units were put on a train on January 25 and shuttled to the end of the line in Nenana. There were airplanes that could have delivered the serum but they had open cockpits and were untested in temperatures of 40 below. The Nome City Council decided that twenty guys and one hundred dogs relaying the serum on cleds along the coast of the Bering Sea in January was better. On January 27, “Will Bill” Shannon’s dog team took off from Nenana just before midnight.

There had been other dog sled races before the historic serum run. An “All Alaska Sweepstakes” sled dog race in 1908 started in Nome, looped 408 miles, and returned to Nome. And mail and freight had been run along the “Iditarod” trail (named after a river and a Native Alaskan village) for many years. The Iditarod Sled Dog Race doesn’t exactly commemorate the serum run, either. The serum run was a relay; the Iditarod is a marathon. It does combine the Alaskan sled dog race tradition and the historic trail.

Our hero Balto was rejected by some of the mushers as too big and slow. Leonard Seppala, a Norwegian immigrant who did the longest leg of the run (91 miles), passed over Balton in the dog lot. He relied instead on a dog named Togo. Gunnar Kaasen did choose Balto. He also chose to let Ed Rohn sleep instead of waking him up for the last leg of the relay to Nome.

There’s Ed in the cabin, the anchor man of the 20-musher relay team, preparing to be alert and healthy for the relay’s last leg and Gunnar slides on by. Imagine Ed’s face when he checked for Gunnar that morning and saw the tracks. Ed Rohn’s people were dismayed that Kaasen also got a bonus of $1,000 from the serum’s pharmaceutical manufacturer for making the final delivery to Dr. Welch’s house. And then some Hollywood motion picture studio offered Gunnar an acting contract. Old Ed was really upset. And then there was the status.

Why New York wanted a statue of a dog who lived thousands of miles away, I’m not sure. Leonard Seppala was upset that status was made of Balto and no Togo. But Nome doesn’t have a statue of Balto, or Togo or Gunnar Kaasen or Dr. Welch or any of the other serum heroes either for that matter. We should. Nome doesn’t have a status of anybody except Roald Amundesen. Now Roald did cross the North Pole in a an airplane and the Sons of Norway thought that was pretty noteworthy. The bust is down on Front Street in front of the City Hall if you want to go down and have your picture taken. It’s next to the famous burled spruce sign that the mushers slide under when finishing the Iditarod. You might even want to have your picture taken under the sign and then beside the status of Roald. But Roald didn’t save Nome.

Joe Redington, Sr., the man you jump-started the Iditarod race back in the 1970s, is now proposing a new race. “The Commemorative Serum Relay Race” would start January 27 at 11 p.m. (just like “Wild Bill” Shannon did) and follow the original serum run path from Nenana to Nome. And, although old Joe’s heart is in the right place, I think what we really need is to bring back Balto. New January, we could fly in some miners with blow torches, cut that metal dog off its base, and mush it west across the great frozen American north: Central Park to Nome. Let’s put that cast-bronze canine on Front Street where he belongs. And maybe we’ll cast a statue of Togo, too, while we’re at it. Hey, our major works for the Alaska Gold Mining Company; let’s make it solid gold. Ed, Leonard, and Gunnar could finally rest in peace.