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

The next day, an autopsy showed that Balto had died of old age. This made everyone feel a little better, knowing that there was nothing that could have been done — that it had just been Balto’s time to die. All the dog’s organs appeared to be normal except for his bladder, which was greatly enlarged. Balto lived to a “ripe age for a dog,” said Captain Wilson. In human years, he was “like a man past 70,” he said. Balto had had a long and interesting life, especially for a dog, and his last years had been good ones. Now, it was time to say goodbye.

But Balto’s many friends at the zoo couldn’t. Neither could the people of Cleveland. So the husky’s still-impressive body was lovingly stuffed and mounted by a staff taxidermist at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

When he was done, Balto looked alive. His beautiful black fur was thick and glossy. The mount had poise, presence. Perhaps because the mount was created with so much feeling, it exuded something special: the old Balto magic, the unmistakable approximation of Balto’s charisma and spirit. The mount wasn’t disgusting or creepy. It was beautiful, like Balto.

“Instead of the vigorous pulsing body which took hope to Nome,” Balto’s fur now was “stretched life-like” over an artificial form, the Plain Dealer wrote in an editorial.

The mount was all that Cleveland had left of the great dog, and the museum planned to take good care of it. It was a way to keep the story of Balto alive for posterity, so that he would never be forgotten.

Almost seven decades later, he hasn’t been.

The year after Balto died, Sye, then 17, died of “bladder stones and complications,” the Plain Dealer reported, and the zoo’s dog pen was torn down. Of the zoo’s seven huskies, Sye was the only one to breed — he impregnated a German police dog. Hmm. How did that happen? No one any longer knows, if anyone ever did. Perhaps Sye broke out of the dog yard one day, saw a police dog that had strayed onto the zoo grounds, and made a beeline for her. Perhaps a zoo keeper or other member of the zoo staff arranged a secret tryst between Sye and the police dog to ensure that at least one of the seven dogs’ genes were passed on. (Such an anonymous match-maker could not have chosen Balto as Seppala had had him neutered.) Two weeks before Sye died, the German police dog gave birth to five pups, though only one survived. What happened to it? No one knows, but we like to think that a little part of Sye lives on somewhere.

In 1934, the same year Sye died, fire broke out in Nome, and the tiny Alaska town burned to the ground. It was rebuilt, and today 4,021 people live there. Every winter, the town’s residents turn out to watch the winner of the 1,150-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race cross the finish line downtown. The race honors the 1925 serum run by following part of the same trail that Balto and his fellow dogs took.

In 1929, the party decade ended with a loud pop when the stock market crashed. The value of individual stock shares plummeted, in many cases to way below what people had paid for them. Many Americans lost most or even all of their investments. Banks, factories and shops closed, leaving millions of people jobless and penniless. It was one of the scariest times in U.S. history. Then in 1932, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected. In a moving inaugural speech, he said: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” FDR — as the president was called — had many new ideas for how to help people and fix the economy. The reforms were pushed through Congress in just 100 days. The “New Deal” with the American people provided help to the poor and created thousands of jobs. A virtual army of Americans went to work for the government building highways, parks and zoos. Many writers and artists were given jobs, too. The country pulled together and the economy began to stabilize. But it took World War II to end the Great Depression, which affected most of the world. In the late 1930s, Germany and Japan attacked many countries in Europe and Asia. To fight the two enemies to world peace, the United States and its Allies had to greatly increase their production of weapons and other war materials. The war effort provided millions of people with jobs.

In 1930, the American Kennel Club recognized the Siberian Husky as a distinct breed.

Seppala’s legendary dog, Togo, spent the sunset of his life in Poland Spring, Maine, with Elizabeth Ricker, Seppala’s good friend and a champion sled-dog racer. In 1928, Ricker wrote Togo’s Fireside Reflections , a charming work of fiction based on fact. In it, Togo stretches out luxuriously before a crackling fire in a cozy New England home and tells his life’s story to two rapt children. “My mother was like the princess in your stories,” Togo begins. “She was beautiful and gentle and everyone who knew her loved her, but she was sometimes very sad and lonely, I think, for she was a long way from home. She had come from the Kolyma River in Siberia, and there were few other dogs in Alaska from there.” A few copies of the book still can be found in libraries, and occasionally one goes up for auction on the Internet. (In 1999, one copy sold for $128!)

Togo fathered many puppies at Ricker’s kennels. After he died in 1929 at 16, his body, too, was mounted and displayed — for 20 years at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. Seppala visited Togo there in 1960, when he was in his 80s. “I never had a better dog than Togo,” he said. “His stamina, loyalty and intelligence could not be improved upon. Togo was the best dog that ever traveled the Alaska trail.”

In 1964, the mount was acquired by the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont. But it was unprotected and over time was worn nearly threadbare from visitors’ petting. In 1979, the mount was placed in storage, where it languished for several years — until a newspaper story sparked a campaign by some Alaskans to get Togo back. Children, officials and dog clubs wrote letters to members of Congress, demanding that Togo be returned to the state of his birth. In 1983, a deal was worked out and the museum gave Togo to the Iditarod Trail Committee. Today, the mount can be seen in a glass case in a dimly lit room at Iditarod race headquarters in Wasilla. It has seen better days. The Peabody Museum still has Togo’s bones, which also were mounted. The skeleton is in storage.

Also in 1928, the fearless explorer, Roald Amundsen, disappeared on a flight to the North Pole to rescue his old adversary, Umberto Nobile, whose plane had crashed on the ice. The brash Italian aviator eventually was rescued, but not by Amundsen, whose own plane plunged into the sea.

And what became of the other characters in our story? Sol Lesser had a long and successful career as a major Hollywood producer. He produced 117 feature films, including 16 “Tarzan” movies. In 1951, he won an Oscar for Kon-Tiki , a documentary about the famous raft expedition made in 1947 from Peru to Polynesia by Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian zoologist and adventurer. In 1960, Lesser won a humanitarian award for his support of theatrical and movie industry causes. He died in 1980 at age 90.

In 1950, Gunnar Kaasen left Nome and moved to Seattle, where he died a decade later at age 78. The author was unable to locate any of his relatives. In his obituary, he was described as a former miner and civil engineer.

Leonhard Seppala died in Seattle in 1967 at age 90. His wife, Constance, scattered his ashes along the Iditarod Trail. He is still a legend in Alaska, though his name is not well known in the Lower 48.

Cleveland businessman George Kimble quietly moved to New York, but his thread in this story has been lost. The author could not learn when or where he died.