Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1994
Nobody ever saved the town where I grew up. But I’d heard about Balto even when I went to school in California in the 1950s. The big, black husky (with a right front leg that looked like he’d stepped into a can of white paint) who saved Nome from an impending diphtheria epidemic is part of American mythology. And now I live in the town that he saved. But where is Balto? Nome doesn’t have a statue of Balto. We should. New York’s Central Park has a statue of Balto. Enter the park from the 67th Street and Fifth Avenue entrance and you can see children sitting on his back and rubbing his ears. The bronze shines brilliantly from all that attention. Sculptor Frederick G. Ross modeled Balto still in harness, panting, as if he’d just arrived at Dr. Welch’s house on that fateful February morning.
Nome does have a statue of Roald Amundsen. Amundsen reached the South Pole on December 14, 1911, with his dogs, ahead of Robert Scott with his ponies. But it’s the first transpolar dirigible trip that Amundsen took that the Sons of Norway commemorated. 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 arch sign (sporting a new coat of varnish) that the mushers slide under when finishing the Iditarod. I had my picture taken under the sign and then beside the statue of Amundsen to send to my mother. But Amundsen didn’t save Nome.
The deaths of two Eskimo children in January of 1925 started the Nomeites to worry, as the well-known story goes. Dr. Curtis Welch diagnosed diphtheria and ordered by telegraph the only available serum from Anchorage. The 300,000 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 very cold temperatures. This is January, remember. The Nome City Council and Governor Bone decided to go with 20 men and 100 dogs relaying the serum on sleds along the coast of the Bering Sea. On January 27, “Wild Bill” Shannon’s dog team took off from Nenana just before midnight.
Our hero Balto was rejected by some of the mushers as too big and slow, too much of a “freighter.” Leonhard Seppala, who did the longest leg of the run (91 miles), passed over Balto in the dog lot in Nome. He relied instead upon a dog named Togo. Gunnar Kaasen did choose Balto to lead his 13-dog team that took off from Bluff for the 53-mile anchor leg, the leg of the run most Americans associate with the actual “saving” of Nome. But Nomeites knew that the doctors, the telegraph operators, the pharmaceutical company, the trainmen, all 20 mushers and all 100 of those wonderful dogs really saved the townspeople.
Balto went on tour in the lower 48 states after the great mercy run. He was loved and honored by all Americans, he posed for a statue, and was adopted by adoring schoolchildren in the city of no other than Cleveland, Ohio. He lived out his days at the Cleveland Zoo. When he died, his body was stuffed and you can go see it today in The Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Nome doesn’t have the statue. Frederick Ross didn’t even cast a copy for us. We don’t have the stuffed dog, either. The tour group from The Cleveland Museum of Natural History visiting Nome in July may be surprised to learn that we don’t have an image of him in town somewhere. But I guess that’s not really where Balto is. He’s really in the hearts of all children and people around the world who love dogs, sledding, heroes, and desperate causes. In that way Balto will always be here.
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