Gunnar Kaase & Leonhard Seppala

LEONHARD SEPPALA, all-time great dog driver, was born in Skibotn, Norway of ethnic Kven (Finnish) parentage in 1877. He grew to manhood in the village of Skjervøy, where as a youth he was apprenticed as a blacksmith. He heard tales of the Nome Gold Rush in Alaska and decided to try his luck there, emigrating in 1900. He became famous first in Alaska through his superlative dog driving skills and his domination of the Nome Sweepstakes and later throughout the USA for his crucial role in the dogsled delivery of antiserum in the 1925 Nome diphtheria epidemic. Seppala worked with and popularised the Siberian sleddog in Alaska from 1914 until 1926. Following the Serum Run he toured the USA, ending in Poland Spring, Maine, where he established Seppala Kennels in partnership with Elizabeth Ricker. When that partnership ended with the remarriage and the loss of the Poland Spring kennel dogs, he returned to Alaska, where he remained until 1946 when he retired to Seattle, Washington, where he died in 1967.

Gunnar E. Kaasen was born the son of Hans and Anna Kaasen in Burfjord, in Troms county, Norway. He went to the United States to mine for gold in 1903, in the wake of the discovery of gold-bearing sands on Cape Nome in 1898, which triggered one of several gold rushes in the state between 1891 and 1898. Kaasen became an experienced musher and a resident of Nome. While the boom was spent by 1905, the port of Nome sits on Norton Sound, which is usually ice locked and inaccessible by ship between October and June. Dog sledding remained the primary transportation and communication link to the outside world during the winter months.

In 1925, an outbreak of diphtheria threatened Kaasen's adopted home, and the disease could easily spread across the northern Alaska villages of which Nome was the hub. The Inuit children in particular had no immunity to the "white man's disease". The port was frozen. No train routes or regular roads extended to the northern coast of Alaska. Bush piloting was in its infancy; the only two aircraft in the state had open-cockpits, and had never been flown in the winter. Given the choices, Governor Scott Bone authorized the transport of 300,000 units of serum in Anchorage to Nenana by train, where it was picked up by the first of twenty mushers and more than one hundred dogs who relayed the serum the remaining 674 miles (1,085 km) to Nome. Kaasen was scheduled to transport the cylinder of serum along the next-to-last leg of the relay, from Bluff to Point Safety. At Bluff, Charlie Olson passed the serum to Kaasen, who left with a team of 13 dogs, led by the husky Balto. Kaasen traveled through the night, in the middle of winds so severe that his sled flipped over and he almost lost the cylinder containing the serum. Visibility was so poor he could not always see the dogs harnessed closest to the sled.

Kaasen reached Port Safety ahead of schedule on February 2, at 2 AM Alaska Standard Time. The next musher in the relay didn't make the exchange, so Kaasen pressed on the remaining 25 miles (40 km) to Nome, reaching Front Street at 5:30 AM. Kaasen traveled a total of 54.3 miles (87 km).

Kaasen gave the serum to Dr. Curtis Welch, the only physician in Nome, who distributed the serum. No further deaths from the disease were reported. A second batch of serum, from Seattle, Washington arrived in Seward, Alaska five days later, and was transported to Nome in the same fashion. Prior to 1925, the disease killed 20,000 people a year in the U.S. The worldwide publicity the event received helped spur widespread diphtheria inoculations, which greatly reduced that number.