Saved by the Sled Dogs

Balto the Siberian Husky earned a place in the dog hall of fame for his part in bringing much needed medicine across the Alaska wilderness to Nome during a diphtheria epidemic 100 years ago. “Balto” the movie came out in 1995 and is available for streaming, and at least four books on this famous dog’s adventure   have been published.

But I hadn’t realized that another sled dog named Togo deserved as much or more credit. This information is from an obituary in the New York Times for Jirdes Winther Baxter, who died recently at the age of 101. She was the last survivor of that deadly epidemic. According to her son Fred Baxter, this long-lived daughter of Norwegian immigrants was only 11 months old when she was hospitalized in Nome with diphtheria, along with her mother and brother.

When the epidemic arrived, “at the time, there was only one doctor, Curtis Welch, in Nome, a gold-rush town of 1,400 inhabitants. After two young children died of diphtheria by mid-January, officials there instituted a quarantine advised by Dr. Welch, who realized that a pandemic seemed almost inevitable.”

Dr. Welch sent out alert by radio telegram for emergency help, but the nearest supply of antitoxin was at a hospital in Anchorage 1,000 miles away. The only available planes had open cockpits, which were unsuitable for sub-zero flying. Nome’s port on the Arctic circle was frozen over and there was no local train service.

“A plan was devised to carry 300,000 units of antitoxin by train from Anchorage to the railhead of Nenana in interior Alaska, about 300 miles north. From there, sled dogs would ferry the serum 674 miles west to Nome, a relay that would involve 20 mushers and about 150 dogs. It would come to be known as the 1925 Serum Run and the Great Race of Mercy. For days, millions were enthralled by radio and newspaper accounts of the rush to keep a threatened town alive.”

Bill Shannon, the first musher on the relay, retrieved the serum (the glass vials were wrapped in bearskin), and set off on a 52-mile stretch as midnight approached on Jan. 27. “Mushers handed off the antitoxin and rested at roadhouses along the relay, enduring aching cold and wind and blizzards that sometimes made the trail disappear. On Feb. 2, the serum arrived in Nome after five days and seven hours, frozen but quickly thawed by Dr. Welch and administered to the sick. The sled dog relay covered nearly 700 miles of the Alaska wilderness.”

Without the serum, “she probably wouldn’t have lived,” her son Fred Baxter said. Dr. Welch’s records seem to indicate that she received more doses of the newly arrived antitoxin than any other resident of Nome. Jirdis was released from the hospital on her first birthday.

At the time of her death this January, Mrs. Winther Baxter had six children, ten grandchildren, sixteen great-grandchildren, and six great-great-grandchildren!  That’s a lot of people who are alive today thanks to Jirdis’ surviving diphtheria 100 years ago, with special thanks to these heroic sled dogs and their mushers.

 In 2005, when Ms. Winther Baxter was 80, she served as an honorary musher at the ceremonial start of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, the annual long-distance event held in Alaska. Although some accounts say that the race was inspired by the Serum Run, the Iditarod’s website says that while it has honored the Serum Run, the race was not begun to commemorate it.

According to The Times obituary, the 1925 epidemic, the sled dog relay and Mrs. Winther Baxter’s resilience have come to be viewed as an illustration of the public’s awareness of disease outbreaks and the validity of vaccines, and as an example of the long history of dogs offering medical support to people.

Jirdis always believed that Togo, the dog that led his team on the final 55-mile stretch into Nome, was the real canine hero. Togo was the lead sled dog for a celebrated Norwegian-born driver named Leonhard Seppala. Togo led his team for 261 miles, including 170 miles to meet up with the relay and 91 miles on the longest, most hazardous stretch, involving a treacherous crossing of a frozen bay. Balto has a famous statue in Central Park.  Decades later, Togo received his own statue in New York, but in a less prominent location, Seward Park, on the Lower East Side.