EDGAR NOLLNER, 94, DIES;
HERO IN EPIDEMIC
Now, almost three-quarters of a century later, an event that dominated radio broadcasts and newspaper headlines is a fading memory.
The tale has often been told, but when Edgar Nollner died on Monday at his home in Galena, Alaska, it seemed time to tell it once more: Mr. Nollner, who was 94, was the last of the 20 intrepid mushers and more than 150 dogs who became national heroes when they made their way in relays through raging storms over 674 forbidding miles to save a town and carve a legend in the snow.
The race against death, as it was called, inspired statues and speeches and eventually the annual Iditarod dog sled race, but to Mr. Nollner it was simply a day’s work.
The son of a Missouri man who came over the Chilkoot Pass for the 1890’s gold rush, Mr. Nollner, whose mother was an Athabascan Indian, was born 10 miles upriver in Old Village, but from the age of 15 he made his home and his living in the Yukon River town of Galena.
He was 20 when the call went out for the territory’s best dog sledders to form a relay from the railhead at Nenana to Nome. Like the others, he was an experienced musher who carried the mail and other supplies by dog sled, raced and used his sled to haul wood and carry home the area’s abundant game.
It was on Jan.21that the first ominous Morse code message from Dr. Curtis Welch, Nome’s only physician and the head of the Public Health Service’s most remote outpost, clacked out over radiotelegraph to “Outside,” as Alaskans called the rest of the world.
Reporting several cases of diphtheria, a highly contagious and often fatal respiratory ailment, and two deaths, Dr. Welch, who was rapidly using up Nome’s 7,500 units of six-year-old antitoxin, issued an urgent appeal for more of the serum, the only hope, he warned, of averting a full-scale epidemic in a community whose large Eskimo population had proved vulnerable to alien diseases.
A supply of 300,000 units, enough to cure about 100 patients or treat perhaps 300 exposed to the disease, was swiftly traced to the Anchorage Railroad Hospital, but the question was how to get it the 1,000 miles to Nome.
Delivery by air seemed the obvious answer, but with Alaska’s only two planes, both open-cockpit models, crated for the winter, the territorial Governor, Scott C. Bone, knew such an effort would be futile—and in the frigid, windy weather almost certainly fatal. He was willing enough to let pilots risk their lives, but he would not risk the serum.
So, turning to a more reliable,19th-century technology, he ordered the serum sent by rail from Anchorage to Nenana,298 miles to the north. From there, it would be a matter of men and their dogs.
The train arrived at Nenana at 10:30 p.m.on the 27th, and the fur-wrapped 20-pound cylinder was handed over to Wild Bill Shannon, who lashed it to his sled, called out to his malamutes and set off down the frozen Tanana River into history.
At a time when Nome received almost all of its winter supplies by dog sled, it normally took a musher 15 to 20 days to make the trip over the old Iditarod Trail, and never less than 9. But with 20 mushers and dog teams dividing the trek into short sprints, the serum flew across the territory, arriving in Nome on Feb.2 in a record 5 days and 7 hours.
Mr. Nollner, who had the 10th leg, had been scheduled to take a 42-mile run, but when his married younger brother, George, asked for a role, he let him drive the last 18 miles.
Like others, Mr. Nollner, who ran his leg at night, covering the 24 miles from Whiskey Point to Galena in three hours, reported so much blowing snow that he could not see his dogs but really did not need to. The dogs, led by his trusty Dixie, knew the trail and never faltered.
Mr. Nollner’s friend Charlie Evans did not fare as well. On his 30-mile run from Bishop Mountain to Nulato, Mr. Evans’s two lead dogs froze to death in harness, so he did the obvious thing—he took their place and pulled along with his other dogs on the final miles of the run.
Within days after the serum arrived in Nome (frozen but quickly thawed), the epidemic, which claimed five lives, had been broken.
The 20 men and scores of dogs on the famed serum run were all hailed as heroes, but to most students of the event, the Norwegian-born Leonhard Seppala and his lead dog, a 48-pound Siberian husky named Togo, were the most heroic, because they traveled the first and longest leg of the run,260 miles, before handing off the serum. But much of the credit ended up going to a second-string lead dog on the final 55-mile leg, Balto, whose background was garbled with Togo’s in glowing news reports of the day. A statue of balto,the subject of a children’s book and a 1995 animated movie, stands in Central Park, and his stuffed body has been exhibited at museums in Cleveland and Anchorage.
For all the acclaim it received, the serum run marked the end of an era. Before the year was over, Alaska’s scheduled air service and the proliferation of snow machines brought an end to mushing as an essential north country occupation. The Iditarod, a network of interconnecting trails extending for more than 2,000 miles, was soon abandoned until parts of it were revived in 1973 for the annual race. And if the threat of diphtheria now seems quaint, it is only because the serum run brought an end to the disease as a health menace in the United States.
To Mr. Nollner, a treasured fixture at the modern Iditarod race, greeting the mushers as they came through Galena, the serum run was just part of a lifetime in the wild.
A man who recalled when caribou, beavers, foxes and wolverines abounded, and the springtime skies would be so black with migrating geese that a single shot could feed a family for a month, he continued to live the outdoor life. A gregarious sort who was widely admired, he was always the life of the party at the great north country potlatch celebrations, and he liked dancing almost as much as he did hunting.
Along the way, he married twice and fathered two dozen children,20 of whom survive, along with what some of them insist are more than 200 grandchildren and no telling how many greatgrandchildren.
Despite the end of the dog sled era, Mr. Nollner did not abandon his dogs and sleds right away. Nor did he abandon saving lives.
In February 1953, while gathering wood with his dog team, he heard an Air Force plane crash. Finding two wounded officers on the verge of freezing to death in temperatures 54 degrees below zero, he built a fire and called his friend Charlie Evans to help him get them to town. A quarter-century later when one of the officers, Lionel Levin, tracked him down, Mr. Nollner told him it had simply been a day’s work.
January 24, 1999
CORRECTION: Because of an editing error, an obituary on Sunday about Edgar Noller, the last of the20mushers who carried life-saving serum674miles to Nome, Alaska, in a diphtheria epidemic in1925, misstated the distance covered by another, Leonhard Seppala. He and his lead dog, Togo, ran the18th leg, not the first. They covered91miles (260miles was the total distance they traveled, including a169-mile run from Nome to the start of their relay leg).