The Cruelest Miles

The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic

By Gay Salisbury and Lainey Salisbury

When a deadly diphtheria epidemic swept through Nome, Alaska, in 1925, the local doctor knew that without a fresh batch of antitoxin, his patients would die. The lifesaving serum was a thousand miles away, the port was icebound, and planes couldn't fly in blizzard conditions—only the dogs could make it. The heroic dash of dog teams across the Alaskan wilderness to Nome inspired the annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and immortalized Balto, the lead dog of the last team whose bronze statue still stands in New York City's Central Park. This is the greatest dog story, never fully told until now.

I was actually set to read something else for this prompt (Overnight Float, if you must know) but as the Iditarod rolled around and I found myself reading the Wikipedia page about the original Serum Run and sobbing, I thought, well, why not just completely wallow in it?  What better than to really immerse yourself in the shared terror of small choking children slowly dying without life saving medicine which is only available through gale force winds, 60 degree below zero chills, and the luck of some dogs' noses?

Actually, the Iditarod truly is a phenomenal feat of athleticism, by both dog and man.  It is also one of those things which, avoiding excessive commercialism and set in some of the country's wildest territory, manages to still feel pure in the sense that watching the World Series definitely does not. The Cruelest Miles manages to take the story and bog it down with facts and history and reality, which all distracts from the feel-good sports win mentality of the thing.

That can be a difficult thing with books about specific historical events: you want to get more detail and background than you can with, for example, a deep dive through Wikipedia, but you also want to keep things zippy, or else you're going to lose readers.  Killers of the Flower Moon kind of runs into the same problems: it's an incredibly interesting situation and events, but in an effort to make it novel-length, the pacing can get dragged out and lose suspense.  Which I know is a ridiculous thing to say about a non fiction account of a historical event that you can definitely just look up and see how it ended.  But still!  One I read last year, Destiny of the Republic, manages to straddle this line well, I think partially because it really did take that long for Garfield to die (spoiler alert!), but it too got draggy there towards the end.

Anyway, if you want to know all about turn of the century and 1920s Nome, this is the place to start.  Honestly, nothing about how it is described sounds appealing.  Not only are you encased in snow for seven or eight months months and cut off from outside contact, contagious diseases also run rife through town.  

Once we skip past the introductory information and get to the dogsled race against death, it does pick up the pace, pun very much intended.  What's interesting is that, because the authors were working with whatever historical materials were available after the race, you can kind of see how some of racers get overlooked for the "celebrity" ones.  I have to assume that some of this was probably because of the native heritage of the non-celebrity dogsledders.  (I know that there is a better term for that but I already returned the book to the library, so we're sticking with "dogsledders").  There were twenty plus racers on the route, but only a few are highlighted.  Maybe the Salisburys had more they didn't want to include for fear of bogging it down, but I would read all twenty racers' recollections and not be satisfied.  From the accounts included, a lot of them also felt that it was simply a necessary task, and perhaps didn't know at the time just how much publicity it was getting in the lower 48, but stoicism is the bane of the historical record.  You gotta get out there and get those memories down, because everyone dies. 

The dogs get their proper dues in the book as well.  Due to the kerfuffle between Balto and Togo (and Seppala and Kaasen), the authors definitely have to explore that aspect of it, but since they don't really come down on one side or the other, I think in an effort not to tarnish anyone's efforts or memories, it doesn't really add much to the story.  The authors do discuss the second batch of serum, but don't really go into that relay at all.  There's definitely also a sense that they spent a lot of time on airplanes for nothing, since they were never used in the Serum Run, and I can see that they were trying to foreshadow the Serum Run as the last hurrah of the sleddog era, but it's an unnecessarily long detour away from the real action.

Anytime you have sleddogs and unforgiving nature, you want to spend as much time as you can on that story.  You have only to look at this year's race, where the front-running team decided to go on strike to realize that the dogs, loyal, clever, and brave, are the real heroes.  Which is what Seppala was arguing about all along - without them, would Nome still be on the map? Or would it be another ghost town, a cautionary tale about living beyond the edge of the world?


Cancer Ward and The Cruelest Miles have been, well, not depressing, exactly, but definitely not as light and frothy as some of my other selections (ahem, My Lady's Choosing) have been.  As a preemptive strike against gloominess, I'm now reading two very silly books: a YA crime mystery and a chick lit epistolary novel.

21: A Book By Two Female Authors