In Loving Memory of Balto

Balto, the Siberian Husky who led the final leg of the 1925 serum run to Nome, Alaska, died on March 14, 1933, at the Brookside Zoo in Cleveland, Ohio. He was fourteen years old. Born in 1919 in Nome, Balto was initially dismissed by his musher, Gunnar Kaasen, as an unremarkable sled dog. That assessment would prove spectacularly wrong. In January 1925, a diphtheria epidemic threatened the isolated town of Nome, and the only available antitoxin serum was in Anchorage, nearly a thousand miles away. Territorial officials organized a relay of twenty mushers and more than one hundred sled dogs to transport the serum across the frozen interior — the Great Race of Mercy. Balto led Kaasen's team on the final fifty-three-mile leg of the relay, running through a ground blizzard so severe that Kaasen later said he could not see his own hands on the sled. Visibility was zero. Kaasen placed his trust entirely in Balto, who navigated by instinct and memory. At one point, Balto stopped abruptly and refused to move — Kaasen discovered they were on the edge of the frozen Topkok River, and the ice was breaking. They arrived in Nome at 5:30 a.m. on February 2, 1925, with the serum intact. The children of Nome were saved. A statue was erected in his likeness in New York's Central Park later that year, bearing the inscription: "Endurance · Fidelity · Intelligence." Within two years, Balto and his teammates were found in a degrading sideshow in Los Angeles. A Cleveland businessman organized a fundraising campaign, and the dogs were brought to the Brookside Zoo. After his death, Balto was taxidermied and displayed at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, where he remains today — forever mid-stride, forever running through the dark toward a town full of sick children who needed him.