Mike Dillingham - Alaska Dogs and Iditarod Mushers - The Adventures of Balto, Back of the Pack, Honor Bound, Rivers

The boom town of Iditarod was the largest in Alaska in 1910, with more than 10,000 people. It has been deserted for half a century except for the occasional trapper and, more recently, the biennial influx of mushers and race support people. Today only a few old buildings remain standing.

Dogs can easily keep up with horses over the long haul; even the old freight teams could average several miles an hour, and lighter teams could go considerably faster. Dogs require virtually no shelter and can easily withstand conditions which would kill horses or oxen. Even better, dogs can be fed from the land with moose, fish, or caribou in winter, while horses require expensive hay or grain. Perhaps most important, heavy draft animals simply cannot use the snow packed winter trails which lace much of the north country.

Early mushers used a mixture of breeds. Over the centuries, different Native peoples had bred dogs for their particular needs. For instance, the Malemiut Inupiat people of the Seward Peninsula developed a particularly hardy sled dog which today bears their name: the Malamute. The teams on the Iditarod Trail included everything from Native working dogs such as Malamutes and Siberian huskies to various domestic breeds imported from the Lower 48. Some mushers even used wolves — some full-blooded but mostly mixes — although these eventually fell into disfavor as more suitable dogs became available.

By 1900, dog teams were as common in Alaska as cars, ATVs, and snowmachines are today. Almost every winter photograph of early Alaska includes a dog team of some kind. These ranged from small family work teams to massive freight teams used for long-distance movement of supplies, mail, and even passengers. The Iditarod Trail and many other winter trails around Alaska (such as the famous Yukon Mail Trail which ran the length of its namesake river) were built and maintained primarily for the freight and mail mushers, who occupy a special place in Alaska history. They manned Alaska’s winter lifelines in the days before airplanes and modern communications.

Freight drivers would start out from Knik with 20 or more dogs pulling up to three sleds laden with food and gear for the isolated mines and villages as soon as the river crossings were frozen. Traffic was heavy. In November of 1911, for example, 120 teams headed west across the Alaska Range on the Iditarod, and over an average winter many hundreds of teams would travel part or all of the trail.

Each evening the drivers would stop at roadhouses located about a day’s travel apart. Some roadhouses were in villages and towns, but some, such as Mountain Climber Roadhouse, Rohn Roadhouse, and Pioneer Roadhouse, all located on the lonely trail across the forbidding Alaska Range, were isolated way stations not much different from Old West stage stops of half a century before. Mushers could get a meal (two dollars) and a warm bed (two dollars more), along with food for their dogs and a place to wait out the storms which periodically swept the trail.

The elite of the Iditarod, and throughout Alaska, were the mail drivers. With their large, well-trained teams, they operated on rigid schedules in all kinds of weather and were often trailbreakers for other travelers. They limited their loads to 50 pounds per dog and tried to make at least 25 miles per day regardless of conditions. They were accorded great respect and always got the best food and accommodations wherever they stopped.

A trip to Nome could take three weeks or more. Mostly the teams hauled cargo, but passengers were sometimes carried in the long sleds. (Most people who did not plan to winter over probably had taken the last steamboat out in the fall when “termination dust” coated the mountaintops.) Dog teams sometimes hauled out the season’s gold on the return trip to Knik. According to Ron Wendt in Hatcher Pass Gold , 2,600 pounds of gold arrived at Knik on December 10, 1911, hauled by four teams. In December of 1916, no less than 3,400 pounds of the precious metal came out behind 46 dogs.

The Iditarod Trail was used every winter through the World War I era and well into the 1930s, with parts of it being used as late as World War II. By the mid-1930s, Alaska had more than 7,000 miles of maintained winter trails, mainly for dog teams, stretching from the Canadian border to the Bering Sea and from the Gulf of Alaska to the Arctic Ocean. Even as the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the autobahns were being built elsewhere in the world, Alaska’s extensive winter trail system was still in daily use.

The inevitable end for the Iditarod and other long-distance winter sled trails in Alaska, though, was the airplane. In the late 1920s and 1930s, air freight became economically feasible with the advent of reliable engines and sturdy, easily maintained airplanes capable of using short bush airstrips and sandbars. At the same time, the gold mining which had provided much of the freight for the dog teams dwindled as strikes played out; Iditarod itself was a ghost town by end of the 1930s.

Even as the freight traffic waned, mail continued to use sled trails. However, the airplane soon began to usurp this hallowed domain of the dog team as well. The first airmail in Alaska was flown from Fairbanks to McGrath in early 1924 by legendary aviator Carl Ben Eielson. The first regular air mail contract was given to Harold Gillam in 1931. By 1938, airplanes had won most of the long-haul mail contracts in the territory.

Once the mail teams vanished, the roadhouses began to disappear and thousands of miles of trails that had so admirably served the territory for half a century were abandoned. Alaska went directly from the steamboat and the dog sled to the airplane, without the road-and railroad-building era which led to the dense road and rail networks of the Lower 48.

But the dog teams had one last taste of glory in early 1925 when a diphtheria outbreak threatened isolated, icebound Nome. The nearest serum was in Anchorage, and the first thought was to fly it to Nome. However, the only pilot in the Territory considered capable of braving the unpredictable weather was Eielson, who was on a trip in the Lower 48 and was not available.

Instead, a Pony Express-type relay of dog teams was quickly organized. The serum was loaded on the newly completed Alaska Railroad and rushed to Nenana, where the first musher took it westward down the frozen Tanana River to the Yukon. Every village along the route offered its best team and driver for its leg to speed the serum toward Nome. The critical leg across the treacherous Norton Sound ice from Shaktoolik to Golovin was taken by Leonhard Seppala, the territory’s premier musher, and his lead dog Togo. Gunnar Kaasen drove the final two legs into Nome behind his leader Balto through a blizzard hurling 80 mile-per-hour winds.

The serum arrived in time to prevent an epidemic and save hundreds of lives. The 20 mushers and their teams had covered almost 700 miles in little more than 127 hours (about six days) in temperatures which rarely rose above 40 below zero and winds which were sometimes strong enough to blow over dogs and sleds. The serum run gained worldwide press coverage and the mushers received special gold medals from Congress. A statue of Balto, Kaasen’s heroic lead dog (who actually belonged to Seppala) was erected a year later in New York’s Central Park, where it still stands.

But the day of the dog team as an integral part of Alaska’s long-range transportation system was almost over. The bush pilots were in the ascendant, learning how to fly the air routes now taken for granted by Alaskan aviators. Within a decade of the serum run, pioneer flyers like Noel Wien, Mudhole Smith, and Bob Reeve had fashioned the foundation of a far-flung network which today serves nearly as many scheduled destinations as all Lower-48 airlines together.