It’s the 95th Anniversary Of This

It is the winter of 1925, in a small gold mining town located on the Norton Sound Area of Alaska.

Nome had a serious gold rush barely twenty years earlier and was now a real town but something was happening to threaten it.

People were getting sick with what they first thought was tonsillitis or simple sore throats but later turned out to be something more serious — diphtheria. At this time, Diphtheria was extremely contagious and could have wiped out the entire population in the region.

Although the local hospital had some medicines, they couldn’t use it because it was so old, it had expired. So the doctor who’d diagnosed the disease, sent telegrams to both notify the Public Health Services and the State about the outbreak and request medicine.

The government rounded up enough antitoxin but it would have to be shipped to Seattle before being transported to Alaska, so local officials found enough in Anchorage that if they could get it to Nome, would keep the epidemic from wiping everyone out.

They sent it by rail up to Nenana but they had to get it across the state in winter. So the Governor gave orders to the Postal Service to set up a relay of dog mushers to run known trails so the serum could make it. In the middle of one of the worst winters with temperatures dropping to -62 degrees, the run began.

The trip took five and a half days to cross half the state but it arrived with half a day to spare before this batch became ineffective. The men who ran the relay suffered frostbite but they persevered and Nome was saved.

Fast forward to 2020 when a bunch of people got together to retrace the path these mushers followed as a way of celebrating this event’s 95th anniversary. These people crossed the same route via dog sled but this time, it is taking longer and the participants are taking time to provide vaccinations for village dogs and showing a video on dog sledding.

They stopped by the local school last week on Friday. They arrived in the middle of a huge basketball tournament and they spent the night in the teachers think tank at the local school because every other room was filled with basketball players.

The picture you see at the top is of some of the dog teams. This group has snow machines to help carry supplies from one place to another and they are taking time to sleep rather than trying to redo it in the same time period. One of the women who began the trip, didn’t finish it because she was hit on the trail by a snow machine. She ended up with a broken leg, so she couldn’t finish.

The interesting thing about this commemorative serum run is that it will form the basis of the leader’s masters thesis in school. Yes, Alaska still has a bit of the frontier in it even though we are in the year 2020. Later this week or early next week, we are expecting to see participants in the Iditarod come through on their way to Nome. I hope to get pictures of that to share with everyone. Have a good day. Let me know what you think.