Icebound: The Greatest Dog Story Ever Told

January 1925.

In Northwest Alaska, a legend was born.

Gunnar Kaasen and his team of dogs, led by Balto,

had braved the frozen wilderness to save a small, isolated town

from a deadly outbreak of diphtheria.

Their mission became a media sensation.

All these elements of drama, of uncertainty, played into this.

What are people imagining Alaska to be?

And what are people imagining this journey to be like?

There's a lot of unanswered questions.

And stories tend to get better, I've learned, as the years go by.

The story begins in Nome.

Once a gold mining Mecca with a population of 20,000,

it was now fading frontier town of fewer than 1,000.

Located 160 miles east of Siberia, on the edge of the Bering Sea.

With no roads in or out, it was, for much of the year,

completely cut off from the rest of the world.

The winters are seven months long.

All transportation on the water ceases.

The Bering Sea and the river start to freeze up.

The last boat would leave in October.

Along Nome's Front Street stood the Miners and Merchants Bank.

The top floor was the home of the town's only doctor, Curtis Welch.

For months, Dr Welch and his wife, Lula,

had been troubled by the recent deaths of children.

There were two in the autumn.

And then seven-year-old Margaret Ida fell ill on Christmas Day.

She died three days later.

Then word came that a fourth child was dead - Billy Barnett,

the infant son of a local mine official.

Welch had diagnosed all four cases as tonsillitis.

But now he feared it was something worse.

For three days,

Dr Welch and his wife told no-one of their suspicions.

But then came news from his nurse, a fifth child - an Eskimo girl -

was seriously ill.

Welch immediately bundled up and headed out into the cold.

The Eskimos of Nome lived on the Sandspit - a sliver of land

jutting out into the Bering Sea, on the outskirts of town.

Nome in the 1920s - racially segregated.

There are separate restaurants, bars and schools.

Alaskan Natives weren't allowed to live in the boundaries of Nome.

It was considered to be a healthier option than living with Nome whites.

Once on the Sandspit, Welch entered a tiny one-room shack.

As he peered into the mouth of his six-year-old patient,

he realised he could no longer hide his fears.

Later that same day,

an emergency meeting of the city council was called.

Huddled in a small office on Front Street,

a handful of Nome's prominent citizens

listened intently as the doctor spoke.

The town, he declared, was facing an outbreak of diphtheria.

This was an extremely contagious respiratory kind of disease.

Symptoms for diphtheria - extremely high fever, a very, very sore throat

to the point where it's constricting your breathing

and you have trouble swallowing.

There was only one known cure -

serum, or anti-toxin, made from horses' blood.

Dr Welch went to see how much serum he had.

But he only had a small amount.

Certainly not enough for more than a few people.

But it was worse than that.

The batch had expired five years earlier.

Welch told the assembled men that he was too scared to use it.

By the morning of January 22nd,

the town of Nome had essentially shut down.

They closed everything down.

All the public libraries, schools...

You couldn't have any visitors.

And you couldn't go out of the house.

We were super cautious and apprehensive.

I remember my sister, Helen, and I would go by a house that had

been quarantined, and the quarantine was posted on the door.

Great big red card.

And we'd hold our breath and walk real fast, or run past that house.

Nome's mayor was George Maynard.

He was also the owner and publisher of the town's only newspaper -

the weekly Nome Nugget.

Deeply worried, Maynard put the outbreak on the front page.

Soon, fearful residents began streaming into the small hospital

with symptoms both real and imagined.

By day three, Welch had six patients in his care

who showed signs of diphtheria.

Fearing there were no other options available,

he began to privately administer experimental doses

of the expired serum to a Native patient.

Welch had sent an urgent telegram

to the nation's top health authority in Washington DC.

Now Nome could only wait while government officials scrambled

to locate shipments of serum that could be redirected to Alaska.

Then, on day five of the epidemic, came news that anti-toxin

was discovered at a hospital in Anchorage, 1,000 miles away.

It was only a small amount, barely enough to cure a handful of people.

But it could still, possibly, keep the epidemic at bay

until a larger shipment could be found.

The question was, how to get the serum to Nome?

I think, about that time, airplanes started to come over.

The original World War I planes.

I remember one time this biplane came in and circled over and over.

Everybody in town went out there, and the plane went around

and around, and looked over the field good before he came in to land.

Aviation fever was sweeping the country.

But in Alaska there were only a handful of aviators

willing to brave the treacherous conditions.

Most were based in the small town of Fairbanks.

The town had established a small aviation business -

The Fairbanks Airplane Corporation -

funded in part by the town's merchants and businessmen.

PIANO MUSIC

But the company's biggest booster, and one of its founders,

was the bigger-than-life editor of the Fairbanks' Daily News Miner -

William Fendtriss Thompson.

The most dynamic newspaper man there's ever been here

was WF Thompson.

Thompson was prone to exaggeration, prone to overconfidence

and a tireless promoter of Fairbanks and aviation.

So he saw a future for the community.

They were past the gold-rush era,

they were in the age of the Roaring '20s.

This was the time in which, you know, Alaska was going to be modernised.

Thompson envisioned flying the serum to Nome in just two days.

But no-one had ever flown across the interior in the dead of winter.

It was a risky business.

Instruments were minimal.

You had a compass.

And goggles.

These are aircraft that are built out of wood,

fabric and basically piano wire.

They really weren't much more than a dog-sled

with a big engine on the front. And wings.

Upon learning of Nome's plight, Thompson immediately ordered

one of his planes - an open-cockpit, standard biplane -

to be dragged out of storage.

But Thompson would need approval from what he called

"the federal bunch."

The federal government's

representative in the territory was the Governor, Scott C Bone.

Public health service - that's Bone's responsibility.

And so the challenge was - can we get the serum over to Nome in time?

Transportation by dog team is reliable.

But how long is it going to take?

The mail run used to take 30 days.

Because the teams in those days would run about 30 miles,

and they had roadhouses.

You'd pull in, they'd put the dogs in the barn,

and the next day you'd take off again.

Speed is of the essence.

That's the advantage of the airplane. But Bone didn't trust the airplane.

He sees Thompson as nothing more than an irresponsible irritant out there.

The Governor decided to go with the dogs.

Bone proposed to transport the serum as far north as possible by train.

And then, a nonstop dog sled relay would ferry the serum,

night and day, across 700 miles of postal trail.

Down in Anchorage, the serum was bundled securely

and handed to a conductor waiting aboard an express train.

They've got this serum packed in these little glass bottles,

wrapped in a quilt, very carefully insulated,

because these little glass bottles of serum could not freeze.

The starting point would be the tiny village of Nenana -

the last stop on the Alaskan railway.

From Nenana, the trail followed the westward-flowing Tanana

and Yukon rivers.

The last stretch wound its way up the coast,

around the frozen Norton Sound, and into Nome.

At 9pm on the evening of January 27th, the train chuffed into Nenana.

Temperatures in the interior were reaching record lows.

Waiting at the station was William Shannon,

the first musher in the run.

He was a part-time mail driver with a reputation for hard drinking,

earning him the nickname Wild Bill.

In Fairbanks, Thompson still fought for his plan.

In that evening's edition of the Daily News Miner, he lashed out.

"Governor Bone has evidently taken charge,

"and has ordered the anti-toxin sent to Nome by dog team.

"Fairbanks must sit by the fire envisioning Nome babies and

"their pioneering parents strangling and dying the most horrible deaths.

"Should conflicting authorities change their mind,

"Fairbanks is standing by, ready with airships and men,

"to cut Nome's waiting time in half."

Wild Bill strapped the precious 20lb bundle to his sled.

Then, with a shout to his nine dogs, he took off.

Will Bill disappeared into the darkness.

In Nome, early the next morning,

in a small kennel towards the outskirts of town,

one man was awake, readying his team of dogs.

Leonhard Seppala, an immigrant from Norway,

worked as a musher for the Hammond Consolidated Gold Mining Company.

But he was also a racing champion.

Once referred to as "the king of the trail."

Leonhard Seppala was always competitive. That's what drove him.

And he loved the spotlight.

Seppala used Siberian Huskies.

People call them Siberian rats because they're so small

compared to these 150lb Malamutes that were out there

pulling these massive sleds.

Seppala was to take his best team and head east down the trail

for 300 miles, until he reached the village of Nulato.

There he would meet the relay of mushers heading west,

and turn around to deliver the life-saving serum to Nome.

The 600-mile round trip journey would be daunting to most mushers,

but Seppala relished the challenge.

That morning, Leonhard Seppala didn't hesitate

to select as his lead a 12-year-old dog named Togo.

In a lifetime of driving dogs, you'll have a great leader.

You'll have one dog that will excel.

Togo was Leonhard Seppala's greatest dog.

As Seppala and his team were leaving Nome,

Wild Bill was making his way west.

He'd had a long, tough night.

The Yukon interior is one of the two coldest points

in the northern hemisphere. Colder than the Arctic itself.

As Wild Bill followed the trail along the bank of the Tanana River,

the temperature dropped to -54.

Nobody moves in that kind of weather.

No animal, no creature, nobody goes anywhere.

There's an enemy without.

And if you let him in through your parka or through your mukluks

or whatever it might be,

I mean, you've let a real enemy in. And it could destroy you.

By morning, the bitter cold had taken its toll.

Will Bill's team of nine was reduced to six

by the time he handed off the serum to the next musher.

In Nome, the situation had grown more dire.

By now, Dr Welch had tried the expired serum on several patients,

and their conditions seemed to improve.

But there were five new suspected cases in just two days.

In the midst of all this, George Maynard, as both mayor

and editor of the local paper, wrote a simple but pointed dispatch

and sent it out to the Associated Press.

The story was immediately picked up by dozens of papers.

You had the mayor of Nome sending out a reasonably terse

and factual report.

There was a need for the serum.

And there was a sled run that was going to get the serum

from point A to point B. All of those things are true.

But now it reaches the media in the lower 48.

The race against time is one of the oldest and hoariest cliches,

but you layer on top of that this other element of Alaska itself,

well, it's no wonder that this grows.

There had been generations of epidemics.

A lot of Alaskan Natives died.

But I think white America looked at Native populations

within a historic framework -

Native peoples are supposed to be vanishing,

so another wave of epidemics is tragic but somehow natural.

But the reason why the story mattered

was it was happening to white children.

Across the Yukon Valley, word of the relay spread rapidly

from one signal core cabin to the next.

All of the next mushers in the interior

would be half or full-blooded Koyukuk or Yukon Indian.

They were mostly young men with an unparalleled stamina -

forged from the daily struggle to survive the long sub-zero winters.

After Wild Bill, 20-year-old Edgar Kallands,

a part-time mail driver for the Northern Commercial Company,

made the 31-mile journey to Manley Hot Springs.

Later that day, Johnny Folger carried it from Fish Lake.

Overnight, the serum was in the hands of Sam Joseph

who descended from the fiercest tribe in the region.

Harry Pitka, who had lost a dozen siblings to a previous epidemic

of tuberculosis, picked up the serum in Kokrines.

By January 29th, the serum had reached the town of Ruby.

It was the home of Bill McCarty, the ninth musher in the run.

Word came over to the telegraph station in Ruby that

they needed mushers to relay this serum to Nome.

My dad, at the time, was kind of like a handler.

You know, he took care of the dogs.

Somewhere along the stretch, he ran into the whiteout.

It's kind of scary.

It comes right into your face and you can't see where you're going.

He just relied on the leader. The leader's name was Prince.

The dogs, you had to totally understand them.

If a dog goes over one trail, you take him

over that same trail five years later and he won't lose the trail.

A dog never forgets.

30 miles down the river, another musher was waiting.

My dad, Edgar Nollner, was a young man when they asked him

to run that serum run.

He started from Whiskey Creek, which is about 25 miles behind me,

up on the river there.

He said that as he was going along, when he looked at his dogs,

there was steam coming from the dogs' breath.

As he neared the village of Galena,

Edgar saw his brother, George, waiting.

He told his leader...

HE SPEAKS A COMMAND

They did an about-face and George got on the sled

and kept on going down to Bishop Mountain.

TRADITIONAL NATIVE MUSIC

As George Nollner and the team raced down the river,

the Northern Lights began to dance overhead.

George had told his brother that he wanted to make the run

because he had a girlfriend in the next town.

The 12th musher in the relay, Charlie Evans,

was waiting at Bishop Mountain.

The grandson of one of the last great Athabascan chiefs,

Evans was just 22.

Evans' destination was just 30 miles down the Yukon.

But now the temperature had dropped even further,

reaching a devastating -64.

In such conditions, exposed skin blisters,

lungs become scorched.

As Evans made his way, he could hear the sound of trees cracking,

popping like pistol shots.

Most people don't drive dogs in this cold.

He didn't really push them or anything,

just let them go at their own pace.

Let them got at a trotting pace, at their own speed.

That way, you don't hurt them.

Ten miles into his run,

Evans came to the place where the Koyukuk River flows into the Yukon.

Deceptively beautiful, it was as dangerous as a minefield.

The fast-running suppressed waters of the converging rivers

had eroded away the surface ice.

You're going along,

and pretty soon you feel the whole works starting to sink,

just kind of collapsing under the weight of the team and yourself.

You get wet, you freeze up real fast.

You get to a point where you can't take care of yourself or your dogs.

If you fall into the river, it sweeps you right under the ice

and you're gone.

Evans had to wind his way around the open water,

carefully dodging the exposed ice.

But, a few miles later, his two lead dogs began to stiffen up.

Then both dogs collapsed.

With no other options, Charlie Evans hitched himself to the team

and helped pull the sled.

He had become his own lead dog.

By January 30th, three days into the run, the serum

was in the hands of the last Athebascan musher - Jack Nikolai.

Small, muscular and tough, he was legendary throughout the Yukon,

known simply by his nickname, Jackscrew.

It was growing dark as Jackscrew began to traverse the Kaltag Divide.

Finally, at 9pm, he saw a light piercing the darkness.

A lantern hanging outside the cabin called Old Woman Shelter.

Jackscrew waited inside.

Soon, he heard the sounds of an approaching sled.

It was Victor Anagick - a native Inupiat Eskimo who had been sent

from a village on the coast to meet the serum.

Together, Jackscrew and Anagick

warmed the serum in front of the fire.

The serum was still 240 miles away from Nome.

And now there were 16 suspected cases.

Dr Welch had rationed the expired anti-toxin,

but there was almost none left.

I was brought to the hospital. I had a very high fever.

I was given 6,000 units of anti-toxin.

My second brother, Goodman, was probably the next to get sick.

And then Johnnie.

Mother was very sick,

and the doctor wanted her to have what serum there was left.

And she refused to take it because she wanted Johnnie to have it.

So Johnnie got the last of what serum there was.

And Mother had to wait for the new serum to arrive.

There was no guarantee they were going to make it.

And that fuelled the story, coupled with the belief

that if the diphtheria outbreak wasn't stopped,

it could spread to every village along the coast of the Bering Sea.

This is a period of the introduction of the tabloid newspaper.

And this mushrooms as editors pick it up and add their own twists to it.

Unable to get photos from the frozen north,

some newspaper editors created their own.

The newspapers were put together rapidly.

They were put together hurriedly.

Whoever was writing the headlines or laying out the stories

in New York or Boston would be relying on the information

they obtained from someone in Alaska.

On the morning of January 30th,

Governor Bone received a private query

from the Universal News Syndicate in California.

"Please rush picturesque story," it said.

"Would like dope about famous mushers. Will pay good rate."

Essentially what the telegram invites him to do

is to create the story.

To imagine what was going to happen.

Bone had received periodic updates on the westward relay

by telegraph. But no-one had heard from Leonhard Seppala,

who was now two days into his journey east.

Bone wrote about the champion musher anyway.

"In a race for life, Leonhard Seppala,

"the most famous musher of the northland, has skirted Norton Sound.

"And crossed the tundra over land to Kaltag."

In fact, the relay of other mushers had long since passed Kaltag,

and would soon reach the coast.

Though they were each told to expect Seppala's approach at any point,

he was nowhere to be seen.

On the morning of January 31st, the Eskimo musher, Victor Anagick,

carried the serum through the Kaltag Portage,

across open tundra, climbing as the trail followed the twists

and turns of hill-borne streams.

Then, just before sunrise,

he finally descended until he reached the Bering Sea.

The serum had now travelled more than half the distance to Nome

in just over three days.

But the trail would undergo dramatic changes.

The mushers would now have to battle the legendary howling winds

along the exposed, tree-less shoreline of the frozen ocean.

By late morning, 28-year-old Eskimo Myles Gonangnan

had the serum safely in his sled.

In Shaktoolik, Henry Ivanoff - a half-Russian, half-Eskimo musher -

was waiting.

My dad had his team ready. They just handed it from one sled to the other.

He took off before he even had time to drink a cup of hot coffee.

That's what he said.

Just as Ivanoff set out, Leonhard Seppala,

who had already mushed 43 miles since morning,

was approaching Shaktoolik from the north.

When Leonhard Seppala left Nome, he thought that he was doing

this whole halfway distance and back on his own.

And so he was making his way, thinking he was going to be

going up the Yukon River towards Nulato,

and he hears this...shouting.

And he sees a man, you know, waving his arms.

Surprise, surprise. The serum's there.

He really didn't expect the serum to be there.

With the serum in hand, Seppala and the team turned around

and began to retrace their route back to Nome.

After just a few miles, they came to the shoreline of Norton Sound.

The shortest route to Nome lay in a northwest course

straight across the sound.

But a storm was brewing

and Seppala would be mushing through 20 miles of open, windswept ice.

Seppala had received a warning from Mark Summers, his boss at the mine.

With the lives of the entire population of Nome at stake,

speed was secondary to safety.

Under no circumstance was Seppala ever to put the serum at risk.

Now he faced a hard decision.

The sun is setting.

It's getting darker.

It's getting colder.

The wind is building.

WIND WHISTLES

Seppala's looking out, he tells Togo, "Let's go."

Togo puts that first foot out on Norton Sound and they begin to cross.

They were given orders, go on land. Do not cross Norton Sound

because it's high-risk.

He disobeyed my father's orders.

Seppala tried to listen for the tell-tale crack of ice breaking.

But he could only hear the constant roar of the wind.

Seppala now would have to trust the more basic instincts of Togo.

Togo was a 12-year-old dog.

This is ancient for a race dog.

But he had been through all kinds of things with Seppala.

There was a real bond between them.

The wind is blowing into their face, sweeping the snow right off the ice.

Seppala's desperate to get off this water.

He got to Isaac's Point

and put the dogs up in an Eskimo kennel for the night.

When they woke up in the morning, all that ice they'd crossed was gone.

It had all floated out to sea.

Though the storm was growing, Seppala set out again.

For 13 hours, he mushed on. He had covered more than 200 miles in all.

He would now hand the serum over to another musher.

It's not a mystery that when he finally did make it back to Golovin

that he was bushed, and his dogs were bushed.

The next musher, Charlie Olson, had a short run.

And by evening had reached the roadhouse in Bluff.

Waiting inside was Gunnar Kaasen.

Gunnar Kaasen, like Seppala, was a Norwegian immigrant.

And also worked for the Hammond Mining Company in Nome.

Though at 43 he was only a few years younger than the famous musher,

Kaasen worked as his assistant.

And was often overshadowed.

Gunnar was modest. Kind of quiet. He stayed in his own area.

Once that they decided they needed more relay people

from Golovin into Nome, they asked Kaasen if he could do it.

But he did not have a team. So he went and asked Mrs Seppala

if he could take some dogs from Seppala's kennel.

For some reason, he selected Balto.

Balto was just a freight dog.

He belonged to Seppala, but Seppala felt he lacked sufficient speed,

and Balto was never selected for his racing teams.

Balto was not as intelligent as Togo.

Not that much of a leader. He was a follower.

A dependable dog.

It was 10pm on the evening of February 1st

when Kaasen, Balto and the team started out.

The blizzard had grown in intensity.

Kaasen had never felt winds this heavy before.

The storm had gotten so bad that he couldn't even see his wheel dogs

on the back of the team, which were right in front of the sled.

He couldn't call directions to Balto, as to where to go,

where to turn, to gee or haw...

The storm attacked.

Kaasen had no choice but to follow blindly and trust his leader.

Then, 22 miles into the run at Bonanza Flats...

disaster struck.

He hits some rough terrain.

And the combination of terrain, wind, bad visibility...

it flips his sled over. And he goes to upright the sled...

..and the serum is gone.

It's blizzard conditions. Very little light.

And he's groping on the ground, takes his mittens off, tries to feel.

It's dark.

Amazingly, he found this bump on the ground.

It was the package.

He strapped it back on.

Some time after two o'clock, Sunday morning,

Kaasen neared his destination - Point Safety.

There, he would hand over the serum to the last musher in the run,

Ed Rohn.

Rohn was also a known resident and, like Seppala, a champion racer.

He owned the fastest dog team for short runs in the entire country,

and was an obvious choice for the final sprint.

Just before dawn on February 2nd,

a lone musher made his way up the beach toward Nome.

At 5.30, he swung up onto Nome's deserted Front Street.

Dr Welch was startled awake by a pounding on his front door.

He was stunned to see that the serum had made it through the blizzard.

But moreover, he was shocked to see who the musher was.

The entire town had expected to welcome Ed Rohn.

Instead, before him stood Gunnar Kaasen.

CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS

And so what did Gunnar Kaasen do instead of stopping at Safety

to let Ed Rohn have the last run in?

He didn't stop. He just kept coming.

The story I've heard was the lights were out at the cabin.

He thought, "Why should I take that precious time to wait for this musher

"to get up, to get dressed, get the dogs harnessed

"when I'm already going? We're almost there."

But I can see Gunnar Kaasen. I can see his mind.

You know, the only guy they're gonna really appreciate

is the guy that puts the serum in the doctor's hands.

At the signal core office, the wires buzzed with queries

from the press about the unexpected musher and, in particular, his dogs.

Kaasen's team had arrived with a double lead.

Balto had been paired with another dog, Fox,

for the final push into Nome.

One newspaper reporter didn't want to use the name Fox,

because he thought the readers would be confused

that a fox was leading the dog team into Nome.

So he said to Gunnar, "What's the name of your other lead dog?"

"That's Balto."

He says, "I'll use Balto. That'll be the name I'll use in my story."

Local cameramen rushed out to Front Street to take photographs

and even film footage of Kaasen and Balto.

But as the media celebrated the new heroes of the serum run,

the town of Nome was still in crisis.

The first amount of serum that arrives is only about a quarter

of what the doctor had said was needed.

So now Bone has to do the serious work of getting more serum

out of Seattle, getting it up to Anchorage,

getting it on the train, and getting it up to Nenana.

And more dog sleds.

This is when Thompson thought that he had a great opportunity

to get in on it.

"The optimism we registered yesterday

"is a mess of pessimism for Nome tonight.

"The airship way is the only way."

Thompson's trying to build up his story.

He rallies folks to contribute money in Fairbanks to pay for the fuel.

And he's in touch with Washington, trying to generate pressure.

Thompson's persistence was rewarded.

The US Public Health Service overrode the governor.

Of the new batch of one million units of anti-toxin,

half would go by dog team and half by air.

On February 8th, the second relay took off on schedule from Nenana

with half of the serum.

Some of the same drivers participated.

In Fairbanks, the other half of the serum was packaged and ready to go.

Thompson and his mechanics scrambled to get their plane in the air.

They were really trying hard to get an airplane ready,

but they were having one problem after another with it.

The dogs were a full two days ahead

by the time the plane was finally ready to take off.

They turned on the magnetos and the guy gets out to prop the airplane.

Big prop and he gets halfway down and there's a backfire.

And it threw the guy ten feet into the air.

It's a complete disaster.

And they can't pull it off. They can't do anything.

But the relay of dog teams was averaging a steady 10mph.

The new batch of serum was due to arrive in just a few days.

WF Thompson wrote a rueful editorial.

"All the world likes to put in with the winner and laugh at the loser.

"The only satisfaction is that we have never worried

"whether you laughed WITH us or AT us, so long as you laugh.

"The airship will go on when it can. We take our hat off to the dog."

Ed Rohn, the driver Gunnar Kaasen had bypassed the first time,

ran the final leg of the relay.

He arrived in Nome on the evening of February 15th.

The serum was quickly put to use.

Six days later, Dr Welch lifted the quarantine.

It was almost exactly a month since the first diagnosis.

On June 4th, 1925, under sunny skies,

hundreds of Nome's residents

crowded the shores of the Bering Sea.

The town welcomed the SS Victoria,

the first ship of the season.

That spring, the eagerly-awaited first photographs of the serum run

finally appeared in newspapers around the country.

Screenings of the film footage followed shortly thereafter.

A few weeks later, on a snowy mountain just outside of Seattle,

Gunnar Kaasen and his team once again re-enacted their run.

This time for Hollywood cameras.

Balto's Race To Nome toured the Lower 48.

At the end of each screening, Gunnar Kaasen would step out on stage,

then, to great applause,

out would trot Balto.

Balto, the hero of the serum run, was a piker.

The reason he didn't go with Seppala was that he wasn't good enough.

It does explain Leonhard Seppala's bitterness

right to the very end of his days

Togo wasn't statuised.

Togo didn't have movies made of him.

This was the last really significant run that that dog would make

and to come to the end of his career

and then to be outshone by some second-rater,

I think there was some real, real, authentic...remorse over that.

The serum run heralded the end of the dog sled era.

On the very day the anti-toxin was delivered,

the US Congress passed the Kelly Act, which encouraged

the awarding of mail contracts to commercial airplane companies.

The publicity from the Nome epidemic also focused attention

on the importance of inoculation and soon diphtheria was relegated

to a minor position on the nation's roster of dread diseases.

But Alaska still struggled in its fight against illness.

Though Doctor Welch's official report

indicated only five fatalities from the epidemic that winter,

native deaths were never scrupulously recorded.

I remember the death of a woman

who lived across the way on the Sandspit from diphtheria.

She was Eskimo and this was, of course, in February.

Only a few years after the serum run, the Eskimo village of Sinik,

just 50 miles up the coast from Nome, was wiped out by illness.

The town disappeared...

without mention in the newspapers.

By 1926, Balto and six other dogs had been sold

and soon found themselves virtual prisoners far from the snowy tundra

in Sam Houston's dime-a-look Museum of Oddities.

They're put in this hot little room in hot Los Angeles

and they're hooked up to their gang harness most of the time

on display with not a lot of people going in and out of there.

They start to lose weight, their fur gets matted.

They are basically neglected almost to death.

But the dogs' fame would prove to be their saviour.

-ARCHIVE VOICEOVER:

-Here's dog team pulling Alaskan sleigh through

streets of Cleveland, Ohio.

In lead is Balto, hero of fantastic drive

to snowbound ice-imprisoned city of Nome

when that Arctic metropolis was struck by epidemic.

In 1927, a travelling salesman from Cleveland

happened upon the sideshow and was moved to take action.

With the help of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the citizens

and children of the city raised 2,200 to rescue the dogs.

So they brought the dogs to the Cleveland Zoo

and they lived out their natural lives.

And, when Balto died, he was stuffed.

And, to this day, is in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Every so many years, they bring him out, dust him off

and they have a big deal.

There are still no roads that link Nome

and the interior native villages to the rest of Alaska.

The town and much of the surrounding region remains largely unchanged.

The legend of the serum run lingers,

but as a faded memory.

We would like to think that history is a thing that exists

and we access it.

No, no, no, no.

History is a thing we construct

out of an incredibly imperfect,

fallible, piecemeal record

which is incredibly dependent

on whatever piece of information got documented

and whatever piece of information somebody THINKS they remember.