That talent served Togo well on the serum run: at one point, the intrepid pup led the team across 40 miles of Bering Sea ice in the face of an oncoming storm. “He was the best dog had at navigating sea ice, and would often run well ahead of the team on a long lead in order to pick out the safest and easiest route across Norton Sound or other parts of the Bering Sea,” the Salisburys write. He was tapped to anchor the serum relay team. According to Gay and Laney Salisbury’s The Cruelest Mile, a 2003 history of the serum run, Togo was a living legend among Alaskan dogsledders, “a natural-born lead dog.” Although Togo was 12 years old in January 1925, he was still fast and strong. He’d been born a smaller-than-average puppy in 1913 but quickly distinguished himself as a sled dog, running 75 miles his first time in a harness. (Courtesy Disney)Įnter our story’s hero: Togo, who was already a champion racer by 1925 but whose running days were largely behind him. The people of Nome realized that sled dogs would have to carry the 20-pound package of medicine to their city through the storm.
But that week, record-setting cold weather and gale-force winds swept across Alaska, grounding the only rickety planes in the area. Trains could bring it to within around 700 miles of Nome, and the team hoped bush planes could take it from there. Nome’s medical team put out a call for help-and found that the nearest supply of serum was in a storehouse outside Anchorage. Several years earlier, a flu epidemic had killed off half of Nome’s indigenous population. They worried that the fatality rate for those infected would be 100 percent. In the winter of 1925, Nome had a supply of antitoxin, the serum then used to treat diphtheria, but it had all expired. (A vaccine was later developed that has virtually eliminated the disease.) The town’s single doctor and four nurses watched helplessly as a three-year-old boy died, soon followed by a seven-year-old girl. Young children were especially vulnerable to it. Diphtheria was called the “strangling angel of children,” because it releases a toxin that shuts down its victim’s windpipe.
The city, located approximately 150 miles south of the Arctic Circle, had a population of just under 1,000. The saga began when a doctor diagnosed the first case of diphtheria, a deadly illness, in a young boy in Nome in January 1925. For all the true dogsledding aficionados out there, we broke down the real history of Togo and Balto’s now legendary run to Nome. Togo, which stars Willem Dafoe, promises to chart the life of the historically overlooked pup who made the crucial delivery of medicine possible. But a different dog, Togo, ran more than double the distance of any other dog on the team and led it through some of the riskiest spots. Balto did lead the canine team over the final 55-mile stretch of the journey (he was still leading the pack when it arrived in the city itself). As it turns out, Balto was just one of more than 100 pups who made that lifesaving dogsled relay to Nome possible.
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Since 1925, Balto has earned universal acclaim, legions of fans, and a commemorative bronze statue in New York City’s Central Park.īut Togo, a new movie that hits the Disney+ platform on December 20, corrects the historical record in favor of an underdog. But you’ve heard this story. The 1995 movie Balto immortalized it for a generation: the eponymous dog rallied the team that brought the lifesaving serum through the Alaskan wilds, heroically saving the city’s children. The nearest stores of medicine were hundreds of miles away, across the state’s snowy interior. In the winter of 1925, a deadly illness struck the city of Nome, Alaska.
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