10 Things You Need to Know About the 1925 Serum Run to Nome, Alaska

At the start of 1925, the small isolated city of Nome, Alaska, and the surrounding communities were hit by a diphtheria outbreak. Located on the western coast of Alaska, Nome was not only hundreds of miles from the nearest diphtheria antitoxin in Anchorage, but also largely inaccessible due to the harsh winter weather. With the highly contagious—and often lethal if untreated—infection spreading rapidly, the pressure was on to get the antitoxin to Nome and a dog sled relay was deemed the only option. To mark the 100th anniversary of the serum run—which started on January 27 and finished on February 2—here are 10 facts about the heroic and harrowing journey.

1. Officials quickly ruled out sending the serum by plane.
2. Twenty mushers and around 150 dogs took part in the relay—crossing 674 miles in blizzard conditions.
3. Leonhard Seppala and his 12-year-old lead dog, Togo, covered not only the most miles, but also the hardest section of the route.
4. Gunnar Kaasen and his lead dog, Balto, unexpectedly finished the relay.
5. A second relay took place shortly after the first.
6. It isn’t certain how many people died of diphtheria, but the serum run saved many lives.
7. The serum run was subject to a few controversies.
8. There have been four movies about the 1925 serum run.
9. Balto’s life had ups and downs after the serum run.
10. Togo had a good life after the serum run.

Officials quickly ruled out sending the serum by plane.

In mid-January, Nome’s only doctor, Curtis Welch, identified and reported the diphtheria outbreak. He initially thought that the sick children had tonsillitis, but changed his diagnosis once they started dying. The hospital’s supply of antitoxin was expired and although Welch had ordered more, for unknown reasons it hadn’t been present on the last supply boat of the season. From around November to June, the Bering Sea freezes over, leaving Nome inaccessible by boat. Delivering the serum by train also wasn’t an option—the nearest train station was hundreds of miles east in Nenana.

Although some people suggested flying the serum to Nome, officials declared that plan too risky. Flying in Alaska in any season was still considered too dangerous by the U.S. Postal Service and flying an open-cockpit biplane through a blizzard would likely lead to the death of the pilot and the loss of the serum. Left with no other option, authorities decided that the antitoxin would be transported by train from Anchorage to Nenana and then sent via dog sled to Nome

Twenty mushers and around 150 dogs took part in the relay—crossing 674 miles in blizzard conditions.

Although no roads ran to Nome, there were mushing trails originally blazed countless years earlier by Native Alaskans. When Alaska’s population started growing thanks to the gold rush at the end of the 19th century, a network of roadhouses was built to allow mushers and their dogs to rest at regular intervals. It was at these roadhouses, and at towns along the route, that the relay teams waited for their turn.

At around 9 p.m. on January 27, Bill Shannon collected the package of serum from the train in Nenana and immediately set off with his dogs. The temperature plummeted to -62°F (-52°C) that night and by the time Shannon had finished his 52-mile stretch, he had severe frostbite on his face and three of his dogs were dying. The 19 other teams along the trail faced the same freezing conditions and many suffered similar injuries. One newspaper reported that Edgar Kallands’s gloved hands froze to the bar of his sled and had to be freed by a roadhouse owner pouring boiling water over them. On average, each covered around 31 miles—with one exception: Leonhard Seppala.

Leonhard Seppala and his 12-year-old lead dog, Togo, covered not only the most miles, but also the hardest section of the route.

Renowned musher Leonhard Seppala—who had won the All Alaska Sweepstakes, a 408-mile sled dog race, three years in a row—covered 91 miles carrying the serum, but his total journey was a staggering 261 miles.

Originally, the plan was for just two teams to cover the entire route, with Seppala traveling east from Nome to meet the serum-carrying musher heading west from Nenana. Seppala would take the serum at the halfway point of Nulato and return to Nome. Seppala had already set off from Nome when it was decided to add more mushers to the relay to speed things up and there was no way to tell him about the change. The hope was that that whichever westward-bound driver had the serum would run into Seppala. Although it was a near miss, Henry Ivanoff thankfully managed to flag Seppala down near Shaktoolik and give him the antitoxin.

Not only did Seppala cover the longest distance, but he also tackled the most dangerous section of the trail: a 42-mile stretch across Norton Sound. This inlet of the Bering Sea was covered with ice that was liable to shift and break up. It was possible to go around the sound, but doing so would have added a day to the journey. With no time to spare, but also often limited visibility due to the storm, Seppala relied on Togo to lead the team safely across the cracking ice (they had also already crossed the sound on their outward eastbound journey). Just hours after they had crossed, the ice completely broke up

Although the riskiest section of the trail was now behind them, the dogs still had a literal uphill struggle ahead of them. After just a few hours of sleep, the team had to cross Little McKinley Mountain, which stands at 1200 feet (366 meters), but the constant rise and fall of the slopes meant that they essentially climbed 5000 feet (1524 meters). Seppala, who had trained many dogs in his time, later said, “I never had a better dog than Togo. His stamina, loyalty and intelligence could not be improved upon.”

Gunnar Kaasen and his lead dog, Balto, unexpectedly finished the relay.

On February 1, Gunnar Kaasen took the serum as the penultimate person in the relay. At one point, a particularly strong gust of wind tipped his sled over and knocked the serum into the snow. The white-out conditions meant that Kaasen couldn’t see where it had landed, so he searched through the snow with bare hands to find it, resulting in frostbite. Ed Rohn was supposed to do the final leg of the journey, but Kaasen arrived at the roadhouse earlier than expected (a message had been sent out to pause the relay until the weather improved, but Kaasen didn’t receive it) and decided to continue instead of wasting time waiting for Rohn to wake up and harness his dogs.

Kaasen arrived in Nome at around 5:30 a.m. on February 2—a record-breaking five and a half days after Shannon had set off (the previous record was nine days). Allegedly, the first thing Kaasen did was to go over to Balto and praise him as a “damn fine dog.” Not one vial of the serum had smashed and soon afterward life-saving doses were being administered. While Kaasen was hailed as a hero, he gave the credit to Balto: “Many times I couldn’t even see my dogs, so blinding was the gale. I gave Balto, my lead dog, his head and trusted him. He never once faltered. It was Balto who led the way.”

A second relay took place shortly after the first.

The first batch of antitoxin was merely a holdover and a second batch needed to be sent before Nome ran out. Once again, sending the medicine by air was suggested, but Alaskan Governor Scott Bone was reluctant to green light the proposal, describing it as a “most hazardous undertaking with inadequate equipment and unskilled flyers.” He eventually bowed to pressure, but mechanical issues caused by the subzero temperatures meant that the plane scheduled to leave on February 7 couldn’t fly.

Bone’s original faith in the dog sleds was vindicated when on February 15 the second serum delivery arrived in Nome. Many of the same mushers participated in the second relay—during which weather conditions proved to be just as menacing—but this time Rohn completed the run as had been the plan during the first relay.

It isn’t certain how many people died of diphtheria, but the serum run saved many lives.

The death toll is usually listed as five or six—with around 70 recoded cases of infection overall—but Dr. Welch believed that the number of people who died was actually much higher. “I imagine there were at least a hundred cases among the Natives and no telling how many deaths in {their} camps outside of the city,” he told the New Haven Evening Register.

The serum run was subject to a few controversies.

The most well-known controversy surrounding the serum run concerns Balto receiving a disproportionate amount of acclaim—he became one of the most famous dogs in the world—simply due to being the dog to cross the finish line. Seppala thought the focus on Balto obscured the fact that the run was a team effort and said that “if any dog deserved special mention, it was Togo.” Seppala had trained both Togo and Balto, and while he declared that Togo was “the best dog that ever traveled the Alaska trail,” he described Balto as a “scrub dog” who was unfairly lauded with Togo’s past achievements.

There was also speculation that Balto wasn’t Kaasen’s lead dog—or was at least co-lead—with a husky called Fox actually heading the team. (Seppala, for his part, regarded Fox as the “best all-round dog” left in his kennel after he had taken the pick of the litter for his own team.) It has been suggested that Balto gained the credit because of his name—it was said that Fox was deemed by the press to be either too common or too confusing. Although there are photographs that show Balto in the lead position, these are actually re-creations from later that day because it was too dark to capture the team’s actual arrival in Nome.

The contributions of Athabaskan mushers were also largely ignored by the press, despite the fact that they covered two-thirds of the distance. By the time there was a spark of interest in their participation, many of them had already sadly died and didn’t get the chance to share their experiences. Those who did comment didn’t seem bitter about their erasure from the public eye though. Kallands, for instance, described the run as “an every day occurrence as far as we were concerned.”

Kaasen was also the subject of controversy. While he claimed to have not stopped to wake Rohn in order to save time, some have suggested that he wanted the glory of crossing the finish line for himself.

There have been four movies about the 1925 serum run.

The short film Balto’s Race to Nome came out just a few months after the run and starred Balto as himself. Although the movie has now been lost, one reviewer said that Balto “plays with zeal and fervor” but that the film “doesn’t carry the ‘kick’ the real race did.” The story was then given the animated treatment in 1995 with Balto, which depicts the titular canine (voiced by Kevin Bacon) as a wolfdog and omits the main relay aspect of the story. In 2019 came Togo, starring Willem Dafoe as Seppala and Diesel as Togo (from whom he is descended), stuck a lot more closely to the true story. That year also saw the release—although to less noise and fewer positive reviews—of The Great Alaskan Race.

Balto’s life had ups and downs after the serum run.

In addition to appearing in his own film, Balto was also honored with a bronze statue of his likeness in New York’s Central Park and was awarded the “bone of the city” in Los Angeles. Kaasen and the huskies toured the states on the vaudeville circuit for nine months, but then the dogs were sold to a dime museum in LA (Kaasen didn’t have enough money to pay their passage back to Alaska). Balto and his teammates spent their days chained to a sled as a sideshow attraction. When businessman George Kimble from Cleveland saw the appalling conditions the dogs were being kept in—they weren’t fed properly and were given little exercise—he endeavored to raise $2000 to rescue them. A little more than a week after launching the campaign, the money had been raised and the dogs were soon moved to the better conditions of Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. When Balto died in 1933, his body was preserved via taxidermy and displayed at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, where he remains to this day.

Togo had a good life after the serum run.

Togo didn’t make as many headlines as Balto, but he and Seppala embarked on their own tour of the states in 1926 and appeared in a cigarette ad campaign. Togo was also awarded a medal by renowned polar explorer Roald Amundsen. Seppala and musher Elizabeth Ricker then opened a Siberian dog kennel in Maine, where Togo spent the rest of his days in comfort and sired litters of puppies (many Siberian huskies today can trace their genes back to Togo). When he died at the age of 16, in 1929, he was taxidermied and is now on display at the Iditarod Headquarters in Alaska. (His skeleton, meanwhile, is at Yale.) Although Togo didn’t receive the acclaim he deserved during his lifetime, in recent years far more attention has been brought to his instrumental contribution to the serum run. In 2001, he got his own statue in New York’s Seward Park, and in 2011, he was named by TIME Magazine as history’s most heroic animal.

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