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

Sam Houston, the owner of the dime museum, toured the West with a live gorilla and managed a circus, not necessarily in that order. In the late 1930s, he bought three railroad baggage cars and filled them with a collection of odd objects: wax figures, a one-man Japanese submarine, a dead, mounted, two-headed calf; a saddle that allegedly once belonged to Pancho Villa, the famous Mexican bandit and revolutionary. (The saddle had a rear view mirror so that Villa could see any enemies riding up behind him.) Houston would hitch the cars to a train and the train would pull the strange exhibit from town to town. His last known venture was a dime museum with a “wishing well” inside. The author does not know when Houston died. He is said to have been a handsome man, and lived in a hotel in Los Angeles.

Frederick George Richard Roth died in 1944 after a long career during which he created many beautiful large and small animal sculptures which still grace many American buildings, parks and museums.

In 1998, Cody McGinn, a third-grader in Palmer, Alaska, with the help of his teacher, launched a campaign to get Balto back, and the Alaska Legislature officially asked the Cleveland Museum of Natural History to return the mount. The museum declined, but agreed to lend the mount to the Anchorage Museum of History and Art for a three-month exhibit. It did — for the 1999 Iditarod race — and the show was a huge success. When Cody heard Balto’s full story and all that he had suffered after the serum run, he told this author: “Cleveland helped save him, so he belongs to both sides. Maybe we could share him.” The author disagrees and feels Balto rightly belongs to Cleveland. But she hopes the museum will continue to let the mount travel to other U.S. cities so as many children as possible can see it.

Today, 67 years after Balto’s death, the mount still exudes something magical and powerful. Balto’s shiny black fur has faded to mahogany, the natural effect of air and light exposure, and his white “socks” are now light gray. But the fur is still thick and lustrous, and the body is strong and muscular. Balto’s eyes are now glass beads, but they shine through the glass case that contains the mount in a transfixing way. They look very real, and the gaze is alert and dignified. The mount is displayed each year for several weeks around the time of the Iditarod, along with an 8-minute video of old film clips, including one showing Kaasen, Balto and the rest of the team in Nome shortly after the serum run. Another shows Dr. Curtis Welch injecting a diphtheria-stricken child with serum at Nome’s small hospital in 1925. Still another shows Seppala and his dogs, including Togo, arriving by ship in Seattle. The museum’s annual Balto display is wonderful! It changes slightly from year to year as the museum acquires new Balto memorabilia and details of the story. The museum hopes to someday find a copy of Lesser’s 20-minute re-enactment of the serum run.

Nothing could be learned about the fates of the five huskies that are unnamed in this story. One or more dogs may have died in the dime museum, or on the vaudeville tour. Of those that were sold, at least one reportedly produced offspring. The author would like to think that some dogs in America today carry the genes of at least some of Balto’s teammates.

Balto’s statue still overlooks Central Park. So many children have climbed on the larger-than-life bronze dog and hugged it so fiercely for so many years that parts have been rubbed golden, while the rest has turned bluish green with verdigris, a natural chemical residue that forms on bronze. The statue is between 66th Street and 67th Street on the east side of the park. According to the official Guide to Manhattan’s Outdoor Sculpture , it is New York’s only statue commemorating a dog. (Unfortunately, the guide incorrectly states that Balto died as a result of the serum run!)

In Cleveland, nothing at all remains of the old Brookside Zoo — not one original exhibit — and the zoo’s name has been changed to Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. The oldest exhibit still standing — Monkey Island — was built in 1936 — three years after Balto’s death. The Fulton Road Bridge is crumbling — so dangerously that a safety net has been draped from the bridge to prevent any loose chunks from falling on the heads of zoo visitors. The team’s sled has mysteriously disappeared, along with all its collars, food dishes and water bowls and six of the seven harnesses. The one remaining harness is on display at the Wolf Wilderness gift shop. Was it Balto’s? No one knows.

Happily, Balto and Togo have been reunited, at least symbolically. Bronze statues of the two famous huskies have been placed outside the Wolf Wilderness exhibit center, which looks like an old trapper’s cabin.

Balto sits erect; Togo is lying down. They seem be looking up at a wooded ridge slightly behind and above them — at the very real gray wolves that live there and seem often to be looking back at them.

Information on Balto and the other characters in this book was drawn from a wide variety of sources, including old newspaper stories, letters, books, magazines, press releases, film clips and interviews with surviving relatives and acquaintances. Many of the sources, or references to them, were found in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s Balto archives, where the research for this book began. In cases where information from one source conflicted with another, the author used that which she thought more credible. Here are some of the sources:

The Race to Nome by Kenneth A. Ungermann; Harper & Row, Publishers, 1963

Seppala: Alaskan Dog Driver by Elizabeth M. Ricker; Little, Brown, and Company, 1930

Seppala’s Saga of the Sled Dog by Raymond Thompson, self-published sometime in the 1970s. Existing copies are very rare.

Togo’s Fireside Reflections by Elizabeth M. Ricker; Lewiston Journal Printshop, 1928

Togo, The Hero Dog by Barbara L. Narendra, Discovery, The Magazine of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History , Volume 24, Number 2, 1993

The Complete Siberian Husky by Lorna D. Demidoff and Michael Jennings; Howell Book House, Inc., New York 1978

Roald Amundsen: A Saga of the Polar Seas by J. Alvin Kugelmass; Julian Messner, Inc., 1955

Nansen: The Explorer as Hero by Roland Huntford; Barnes & Noble Books, 1998

The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen’s Race to the South Pole by Roland Huntford; Modern Library, New York, 1983

Fifty Years of Vaudeville, 1895–1945 by Ernest Short; Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1946

Once Upon a Stage, the Merry World of Vaudeville by Charles and Louise Samuels; Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1974

LEISURE and Entertainment in AMERICA by Donna R. Braden; Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village, Dearborn, Michigan, 1988

Freak Show by Robert Bogdan; The University of Chicago Press, 1988

American History in 100 Nutshells by Tad Tuleja; Fawcett Columbine, 1992

New York: A Documentary by Ric Burns

The Cleveland Plain Dealer, New York Times, Seattle Times, Los Angeles Times, Detroit Free Press, United Press International, Nome Nugget, Siberian Husky Club New s and Northern Dog News .

Mount Rainier National Park Official Web Site