The most dangerous stretch — through the heart of the storm, including a deadly shortcut across the frozen surface of Norton Sound — was given to the best musher in Alaska. Seppala. With Togo in the lead.
Seppala set out from Nome on January 28, 1925. He did not yet have the serum. He had been ordered to ride east for hundreds of miles to meet the incoming team in the middle. Then he would turn around and bring the serum home.
The conditions were beyond imagination.
Wind speeds reached 80 to 110 miles per hour. At one point during the run, the windchill on Norton Sound was measured at −85°F. In some accounts, even worse — calculations have placed it as low as −116°F. The kind of cold where exposed skin freezes in under a minute. Where every breath is a small razor.
Seppala couldn’t see the trail. He couldn’t hear anything but the wind. He was completely dependent on the senses of one small graying dog ahead of him in the dark.
After racing nearly 170 miles east from Nome, Seppala found another musher named Henry Ivanoff fighting his lead dog through a snowdrift. Ivanoff was waving his arms, screaming through the wind:
“The serum! I have the serum!”
Seppala took the package, turned his team around, and now had to run another 91 miles west — back across Norton Sound — through worsening storms, in failing daylight, with the sea ice cracking beneath him.
The shortcut across the Sound could save a full day. Going around it would mean children dying. Seppala chose the shortcut.
He let Togo lead.
It was on this return crossing that something happened that almost no one outside Alaska has ever heard of — and it is, by any measure, one of the most extraordinary acts ever performed by an animal in the history of the human race.
The team became stranded on an ice floe — a chunk of ice broken off from the rest, drifting on freezing seawater. There was no way for the dogs to pull the sled across to safety. The team was about to die.
Seppala did the only thing he could think of. He tied a long rope to Togo’s harness and hurled the small dog across five feet of open black water.
Togo landed on the safe ice. He pulled. He braced his small frame against the line and tried to drag the sled and the rest of his teammates back.
The line snapped.
Most dogs, at this point, would have run. Most dogs would have stayed safe.
Togo did not.
He saw the loose end of the broken rope drifting in the icy water. He jumped back into the freezing sea, swam to the line, took it in his teeth, and pulled it back to the floe. Seppala tied it to his harness again. Togo dug in. Slowly, agonizingly, the small graying dog dragged the entire ice floe — with Seppala, the sled, the team, and the precious wooden box of antitoxin — close enough that they could leap to safety.
Three hours later, the entire shelf of ice they had just been standing on broke up and floated out to sea.
Seppala and Togo finished their leg of the relay at Golovin. Then handed the serum to the next team. They had run, in total, over 261 miles — almost five times the distance of any other team in the relay. They had crossed Norton Sound twice. They had somehow stayed alive.
Five days later, the final 53 miles was carried into Nome by a backup team led by another of Seppala’s dogs — a dog named Balto.
The serum arrived in Nome in time. Not a single child who received the antitoxin died. The town was saved.
But here is the part that breaks your heart.
When the newspapers caught wind of the rescue, they couldn’t tell the public about a 20-team relay. They needed one hero. They picked the dog who had crossed the finish line.
Balto got the headlines. Balto got the statue in Central Park (still there, today). Balto got the parades, the radio specials, the cigarette ads, the fame.
Togo got nothing.
The dog who had run almost five times farther — who had crossed the deadliest part of the route, who had jumped into freezing seawater to save his entire team — was barely mentioned.
Seppala spent the rest of his life quietly telling anyone who would listen that the wrong dog had been honored. “I never had a better dog than Togo,” he said many years later. “His stamina, loyalty, and intelligence could not be improved upon. Togo was the best dog that ever traveled the Alaska trail.”
Togo lived out his retirement at a kennel in Poland Spring, Maine, fathering generations of Siberian Huskies. He was awarded a gold medal personally by Roald Amundsen, the legendary explorer who had been first to reach the South Pole. He even appeared at Madison Square Garden.
But he never got the statue. Not in his lifetime. Not for almost a century.
On December 5, 1929, at 16 years old, his joints failing and his eyesight nearly gone, Togo was put to sleep. Seppala held him in his arms. The next morning, the New York Sun Times ran a small headline:
“Dog Hero Rides to His Death.”
In 2001, more than 70 years later, a statue of Togo was finally erected in Seward Park in New York City. In 2011, Time Magazine named him the most heroic animal of all time. In 2019, Disney finally told his real story in a film starring Willem Dafoe — and one of Togo’s own descendants, a Siberian Husky named Diesel, played the title role.
It was, perhaps, what Seppala himself had said best, in the years after the run, when reporters tried to give him credit:
“Afterward, I thought of the ice and the darkness and the terrible wind, and the irony that men could build planes and ships. But when Nome needed life in little packages of serum — it took dog teams to bring it through.”
A puppy once thrown out for being too weak.
The dog who carried the lives of an entire town in his teeth.
Sometimes the greatest heroes are the smallest ones — and history just takes a hundred years to notice.
