In late January 1925, the only doctor in town, Curtis Welch, identified the symptoms in his young patients with cold horror. Diphtheria. A bacterial infection so deadly that it could choke a child to death within days. The town’s small supply of antitoxin had expired. Children were already getting sick.
And Nome — frozen in by sea ice, cut off by storms, hundreds of miles from the nearest railroad — had no way out.
The closest fresh batch of antitoxin was 674 miles away, in a hospital in Anchorage. Officials raced it by train as far as the rails went — to a tiny town called Nenana. From there, the serum had to cross 674 miles of brutal Alaskan wilderness in the coldest winter in twenty years.
There were no working planes. The two open-cockpit biplanes available were unreliable in the cold. Ships were locked in the ice. The only living things on Earth that could possibly make the journey through what was coming were dogs.
A relay was assembled. Twenty mushers. About 150 dogs. They would hand the package of serum from team to team like a pharmaceutical baton across some of the most punishing terrain on the planet.
