Quotes from Gay Salisbury

There are a few lonely places in this world, and the wastes of the great Alaskan Interior are the loneliest of them all.

Tex Rickard started his career staging boxing matches for Nome's miners, then moved on to New York and built Madison Square Garden, becoming one

I am proud of my racing trophies," Seppala once said, "but I would trade them all for the satisfaction of knowing that my dogs and I tried honestly to give our very best in humanitarian service to our fellowman, regardless of race, creed, color, in Alaska's pioneer days. Often the going was rough—sometimes my courage was greater than my team's—several times I was ready to quit but was ashamed because of the great fighting heart of the Siberian Husky.

An attorney named Albert Fink, who years later would defend Al Capone, would tip his hat whenever he passed a husky he particularly respected, and

The first rule of survival was to hang on to the team, because without the dogs you were dead.

By 1925, most Native Alaskans had made their pact with the modern age. They still hunted, fished, and traded on occasion, but their bread and butter was in hauling supplies and carting the U.S. mail along the trails. These were skills handed down to them by their parents and their grandparents. If the serum could rescue Nome from the ravages of an ancient plague, then its safe arrival by dogsled would be a testament to the hard-learned survival skills and spirit of the Athabaskans and Eskimos.

A man is only as good as his dogs when he is on the trails of Alaska…and a dog is only as good as his feet," a well-traveled dog driver once said.

THERE WERE few worse places on earth to build a town, but Nome had gone up almost overnight after two Swedes and a Norwegian found a nugget the size of a small rock in a creek near the beach.

The man-dog contract goes back to before the invention of writing, before the invention of the wheel, even before the invention of agriculture. In that sense, living with dogs may be one of the oldest surviving cultural landmarks of our heritage, a surviving fragment of the Stone Age.