This Heroic Dog Raced Across the Frozen Alaskan Wilderness to Deliver Life-Saving Medicine—but His Contributions Were Long Overlooked

The temperature hovered around freezing in New York’s Central Park on December 15, 1925. Clad in a thick fur coat, Alaskan sled-dog musher Gunnar Kaasen stood next to the hero of the moment: Balto, a Siberian husky who’d helped deliver medicine across a frozen frontier to halt a deadly epidemic.

The pair were on hand for the unveiling of a bronze statue heralding Balto’s life-saving actions ten months earlier. In the winter of 1925, Balto was part of a team that braved subzero temperatures to bring a shipment of antitoxin to the isolated city of Nome, Alaska, where children were dying of diphtheria, a serious infection caused by a highly contagious bacterium.

In the aftermath of this mission of mercy, now known as the 1925 Serum Run to Nome, Balto dominated media coverage around the world. Myriad stories and photos of the “hero dog” ran in newspapers, in many cases mythologizing or incorrectly stating his role in the daring rescue.

Back in Alaska, Balto’s owner, Leonhard Seppala, read the media acclaim in disbelief. The public was recognizing the wrong dog, he argued. “I resented the statue to Balto, for if any dog deserved special mention, it was Togo,” he stated in his 1930 memoir.

Seppala added, “It was almost more than I could bear when the ‘newspaper’ dog Balto received a statue for his ‘glorious achievements.’”

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Nome’s diphtheria outbreak began on January 20, 1925, when Curtis Welch—the city’s lone physician—diagnosed a 3-year-old boy with the disease. (Though two Native Inupiaq children had died after experiencing similar symptoms the previous month, Welch initially suspected they were suffering from tonsilitis, not diphtheria.) With only a limited supply of outdated antitoxin serum on hand, Welch realized that Nome’s 1,400 residents, as well as those living in the surrounding region, were in trouble.

Children are particularly vulnerable to diphtheria, which starts out as a sore throat and fever but can quickly escalate to a full-blown respiratory infection. Later stages often include the development of gray or white patches in the throat and lungs, which can block the airway and cause suffocation. Experts only discovered an effective treatment for diphtheria around the turn of the 20th century, when public health agencies and pharmaceutical companies started producing an antitoxin serum derived from the blood of horses.

“Most probably every parent in this decade feared their children would contract this disease,” says Elaine Salisbury, co-author of the 2003 book The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic. “Diphtheria killed thousands of children each year, and with Nome cut off from the rest of the world by snow and ice, the town was in dire straits.”

Alerted by Welch, public health officials devised a plan to send additional antitoxin by rail from Seward to Nenana, located 674 miles away from Nome. Though authorities considered dispatching aid by plane, the dangers posed by flying in such cold temperatures over poorly mapped, inhospitable territory led them to opt for dog-sled teams instead. Trained to carry mail over the icy terrain, these teams would haul the serum from Nenana to Nome. Seppala, with Togo leading a pack of 19 other dogs, was chosen to cover the most dangerous part of the route, traveling from Nulato to Nome and back again—a distance of 630 miles.

Driven by 20 mushers and more than 150 dogs, the relay of sled teams navigated a blizzard, hidden crevasses in the snow and ice, and the continual darkness of the Arctic winter. At one point, a howling gale caused the wind chill to drop to 85 degrees below zero, which could freeze sled dogs’ lungs and the exposed skin of their mushers in seconds.

All of the mushers “faced the risk, and they were willing to do it,” says Salisbury. “Every single person was a hero of equal measure.” Still, while Native Alaskan drivers covered nearly two-thirds of the route, these men received little recognition until the 1970s.

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As far as Seppala was concerned, Togo was the perfect dog to meet the serum run challenge. Born in 1913, the Siberian husky was small, weighing less than 50 pounds, but he was strong and determined, with an uncanny ability to lead a sled-dog team in harsh conditions.

According to Seppala, Togo was “a spoiled pup and hard to handle,” though he soon showed signs of being a “natural-born leader.” At only 8 months old, on his first run as a sled dog, he reached the lead spot on the team, where he stayed throughout his career.

Togo and Seppala bonded from the start and became inseparable. They worked together on provision runs for the Pioneer Mining Company in Nome and competed in races around the territory, including the grueling 400-mile All Alaska Sweepstakes, which they won in 1915, 1916 and 1917. Seppala also earned a silver medal in dog sledding, which appeared as a demonstration sport at the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York.

Born in Norway in 1877, Seppala moved to Alaska in 1900, during the Great Nome Gold Rush. He was recognized as one of the best mushers in Alaska, while Togo was often considered the top dog in sledding. Seppala was also responsible for popularizing the Siberian husky as a sled dog. He became captivated with the species when he trained some of its members for a planned expedition to the North Pole, which was canceled due to the outbreak of World War I.

When officials first contacted Seppala to ask for his help delivering antitoxin, “so much was at stake, he thought, that at first he hesitated,” write Elaine Salisbury and co-author Gay Salisbury in The Cruelest Miles. “This was not in character for the usually confident Seppala.” (Adding to the pressure was the fact that Seppala’s 8-year-old daughter, Sigrid, was one of the many children at risk of contracting diphtheria.) But the musher and his dogs were the only ones believed to be capable of covering the western portion of the run in time. Their prowess over the ice and snow of the Alaska backwoods would soon be sorely tested.

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The first leg of the relay kicked off on the evening of January 27, with musher William “Wild Bill” Shannon and his nine-dog crew picking up the antitoxin from the train station in Nenana. On January 28, with multiple children dead and dozens more ill, Seppala and Togo left Nome and headed toward Nulato. Over the next three days, the serum changed hands multiple times, with teams of mushers and dogs navigating increasingly perilous conditions.

“The weather was getting bad,” says Bob Thomas, co-author with his wife, Pam Thomas, of the 2015 book Leonhard Seppala: The Siberian Dog and the Golden Age of Sled Dog Racing, 1908-1941. “Up there, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to die quick.”

As one of the worst blizzards in decades buried Alaska in snow, officials ordered additional relay teams to ensure safe delivery of the antitoxin. Unfortunately, they had no way of conveying the updated plan to Seppala, who was already en route. All they could do was send a sled-dog team led by musher Henry Ivanoff to intercept him before he reached Nulato. Traveling in whiteout conditions on January 31, Ivanoff and Seppala almost missed each other. Intent on reaching Nulato as soon as possible, Seppala only stopped when Ivanoff, who’d picked up the antitoxin in Shaktoolik earlier that day, yelled, “The serum! The serum! I have it here!” After another handoff, Seppala turned around with the serum and raced back toward Nome.

Togo tirelessly led his pack most of the way, pushing the other dogs to ignore powerful headwinds, deep snow, uphill climbs and gelid temperatures. When the team reached Norton Sound, an ice-choked inlet along the Alaska coastline, Seppala faced a difficult decision. If he crossed the bay, he could trim 42 miles from the trip. But the wind had shifted and was blowing the icepack out toward the Bering Sea, opening gaping holes that were nearly impossible to see in the near-perpetual darkness.

A good lead dog can sense these crevasses and turn the team to avoid them. Seppala decided to cross Norton Sound with Togo on the lookout for bad ice. “When Seppala got to the bay, he unhooked Togo and let him pick his way across,” Thomas says. “There were a couple of spots that were marginal, so Togo took them around, and the rest of the team just followed him. That saved a lot of time.”

At one point, Seppala found himself trapped on the ice, unable to jump to safety on the nearest ice floe. As the Salisburys write in The Cruelest Miles, the musher “tied a long towline to Togo’s harness, picked him up and hurled him across the open channel. … Once on the other side, Togo dug his nails into the floe and lurched toward shore.” When the line snapped, the dog dove into freezing water to retrieve it, successfully bridging the gap between the two ice floes and pulling the rest of his team to safety.

Originally, Seppala was supposed to carry the serum all the way to Nome. Under the new plan, however, he was able to pass it along to a new driver early on the morning of February 1. Thanks to Togo, Seppala had safely traveled 261 miles, including 135 miles with the medicine—more than two and a half times the distance covered by any of the other drivers.

Leonhard Seppala with his dog team

The serum eventually made it into a sled driven by Kaasen, who worked for Seppala. The Norwegian-born musher was recruited for the relay at the last minute and used backup dogs not initially selected by Seppala for the run, including Balto. Kaasen was supposed to turn the medicine over to another team to take into Nome on the final leg of the relay, but that driver had fallen asleep, so he continued on.

Seppala did not consider Balto a lead dog and had never used him as such. Kaasen, however, alternated dogs at the head of his team, with Balto taking the top position on a few occasions. Around 5:30 a.m. on February 2, Kaasen pulled into the dark, largely empty streets of Nome. With the serum delivered, Welch was able to bring burgeoning epidemic under control. Scores had fallen ill, and at least five people died. Numerous Native Alaskans likely died of diphtheria during the outbreak, too, but those numbers went unrecorded.

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Controversy over exactly who did what and when erupted almost immediately. It’s unclear whether Balto was leading the team when Kaasen arrived in Nome, but when the last leg of the run was restaged for a press photo later that morning, Balto was in the front.

News of Balto’s heroics made headlines in newspapers around the world, with some articles attributing many of Togo’s accomplishments to him.

Seppala was not happy. “By giving [Balto] Togo’s records, he was established as ‘the greatest racing leader in Alaska,’ when he was never in a winning team,” the musher wrote in his memoir.

Balto became an instant celebrity. With Kaasen, the dog toured sold-out venues across the United States. He even starred in a 1925 silent film titled Balto’s Race to Nome. After this brief brush with fame, Balto and his teammates ended up with a traveling circus, where they endured horrific conditions before being rescued and sent to live out their days at the Brookside Zoo in Cleveland. After Balto’s death in 1933, his stuffed body was displayed at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, where it remains on view today.

The Serum Run proved to be Togo’s last hurrah. He never made another long trek, though he did appear at shows and events around the country, including a ten-day stint at Madison Square Garden. Still, Togo never achieved the level of fame enjoyed by Balto.

Plagued by arthritis and blindness, Togo, the once hard-running “natural-born leader,” retired to Maine, where he was euthanized by Seppala in 1929, at age 16. His mounted skin is displayed at the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race Headquarters museum in Wasilla, Alaska, while his skeleton is housed in the collections of the Yale Peabody Museum.

After decades of obscurity, Togo has finally started receiving credit for his role in the relay. Articles, books and movies detail his achievements, and his likeness is immortalized by statues in Cleveland, New York City and Maine. In 2019, Togo, a Disney film starring Willem Dafoe as Seppala, shared the dog’s story with a much wider public.

Togo – Official Trailer | Disney+ | Streaming Dec. 20

In 2011, Time magazine named Togo the most heroic animal of all time, writing:

The dog that often gets credit for eventually saving the town is Balto, but he just happened to run the last, 55-mile leg in the race. The sled dog who did the lion’s share of the work was Togo. … Togo, we salute you.

Seppala, who died in 1967, never forgot Togo and the bond they shared. For 12 years, the pair acted as one as they traversed the Alaskan wilderness, whether in races, for work or to save lives.

“I never had a better dog than Togo,” Seppala later said. “His stamina, loyalty and intelligence could not be improved upon. Togo was the best dog that ever traveled the Alaska trail.”