Miles and Miles of Ice and Snow

Miles and Miles of Ice and Snow by Kit Miller first appeared in issue Issue 103 in 2023.

Summary

Henry is a dog musher, driving from Fairbanks to Nome.

Author's Notes

Every now and then, I get obsessive over certain topics. Like, cannot-think-of-anything-else obsessive. One of those obsessions is the 1925 serum run to Nome (also known as the Great Race of Mercy) in specific, and dog mushing and Alaska in general. Combine this with the prompt for this issue et voilà.

I did my absolute best to research as thoroughly as possible. However, in addition to taking some deliberate artistic licence (see below), I am almost certain that I have also made errors and inaccuracies without meaning to. For these, I apologise.

Dogs and dog mushing

A glossary of the most important dog mushing terms can be found here.

Most of this work is inspired by the serum run and the people who participated in it. A great book on the serum run and its historical and cultural context is The Cruellest Miles by Gay Salisbury and Laney Salisbury. The internet archive has a digitised version that can be found here (it includes a map). A more concise report on the serum run can be found here.

Leonhard Seppala, a musher Henry idolises, was one of the most famous, successful, and daring mushers of Alaska. With his lead dog Togo, he was the first choice and initially one of only two participants in the serum run (the other being "Wild" Bill Shannon), and completed the longest and most dangerous leg of the relay, crossing the treacherous Norton Sound twice. Henry as a luckless prospector turned thriving musher is based on Seppala’s biography.

Additionally, Henry travels the same route as the Serum Run (it was the established mail route between Nome and Fairbanks), and his tribulations on the trail were similarly inspired by events that happened in 1925. The only fictional stop is the Irish House. I also fudged around with the timeline quite a bit. According to one source, a trip to Fairbanks and back could take up to four months — I had Henry make the trip in two. Furthermore, for a journey such as this, Henry's team is far too small. Realistically, he'd take twice as many dogs, at least. I chose to have a more concise team because I wanted to give each dog a name and at least one 'moment to shine' and this proved difficult enough with seven.

The Siberian Husky as a breed was not recognised by the American Kennel Club until 1930. Before that — and in some regions and contexts, until today — the term ‘husky’ was used as a generic term for a sled dog, even for dogs more similar to the Alaskan Malamute (recognised as a breed by the AKC in 1935). During the time the story is set, nearly every sled dog would be a mutt of some kind as cross-breeding was extremely common (and nobody gave a fig about breeds and breed standards anyway; if a dog was large and strong enough to pull a sled, it was deemed an acceptable sled dog). The Siberian Husky as it is today is derived from imported dogs from Siberia to Alaska between 1908 and 1930. Leonhard Seppala’s legendary lead dog Togo, whom I mentioned above, was of Siberian lineage and is one of the most famous ancestors of the modern Siberian Husky.

The Iñupiat people and the Iñupiaq language

An online dictionary of Iñupiaq can be found here (though note that this dictionary is for the North Slope dialect, not the one from the Seward Peninsula, where Nome is located). A (very) brief introduction to the Iñupiaq language, where I also found the Iñupiaq names of three of Henry's dogs can be found here.

The majority of the mushers of the serum run, and the majority of all mushers at the time, were Alaska Natives, and the most successful White mushers had adopted, to a large degree, Alaska Native technologies and skills. In fact, many European settlers of Alaska were quick and eager to adopt certain indigenous technologies, products, and customs, such as clothing, despite the government's insistence on introducing "better, more advanced" (i.e. White/European) customs. One particularly doomed effort was the attempt to use reindeer instead of dogs for transportation, simply because dog mushing was an indigenous practice. Salisbury and Salisbury make a compelling and convincing case that the serum run being done via dog sled rather than aeroplane “would be a testament to the hard-learned survival skills and spirit of the Athabaskans and Eskimos [sic]” at a time when the government deemed the cultures, languages, and customs of Alaska Natives ‘decadent’ and ‘primitive’.

Still, Henry's choice to integrate himself into an Iñupiat community ("going Native") would still be regarded as odd if not wrong, as many of those who adopted Alaska Native clothes and technologies had little regard for the peoples who’d come up with them (for instance, Roald Amundsen credited his success as a Polar explorer to the survival skills he learned from the Netsilik, a Canadian Inuit people, but still considered them “savages”), and even those most sympathetic towards Alaska Natives mostly swung largely in favour of assimilating them into White society (a policy that lasted until the 1970's). More devastating even than that was the forced relocation of Alaska Natives, the abduction and imprisonment in boarding schools of Alaska Native children, and the ban on Alaska Native languages to the point that most if not all of these languages are critically endangered today, as well as other colonial atrocities. Furthermore, Europeans brought diseases to Alaska that would prove devastating to the indigenous population; the 1918/1919 influenza epi/pandemic and the 1925 diphtheria outbreak in Nome are only two examples.

Miscellaneous and historical trivia

Henry and Conor share a bottle of whiskey, but this was the height of prohibition in the USA. However, at the point the story is set, Alaska was not yet a state and merely a territory, which many Alaskans riled against as they were governed from afar from people who knew next to nothing of the circumstances in Alaska itself. Alaskans thus sometimes cared very little for governmental policies and restrictions.

The teddy bear, first invented in the early 20th century and named after Theodore Roosevelt, quickly became one of, if not the most popular toy of all time. "Growlers", aka the noise boxes inside the bear, were first introduced (by Steiff, at least) in 1908. A timeline of the teddy bear by the Steiff corporation, who claim to be the inventors of the teddy bear (though this claim is not uncontested), can be found here (yes, really).

If you want a complete list of Henry’s team, here it is:

• Lead: Gerda, female, fawn and white, with blue eyes. Bit of a feisty little missus, but loyal, obedient, and hardworking. Won’t win any races, but then, Henry isn’t interested in that.
• Swing/Point: Rose, female, grey; Maguyuk, male, tan, almost ten years old.
• Team: Orca, female, black and white; Delta, male, greyish brown.
• Wheel: Siku, male, white; Suka, male, reddish-brown. Brothers.

External Links

This story is also available on Archive of Our Own (AO3).