On This Day in History: March 20

The Iditarod

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Alaska has a snow-to-road ratio that led to a rich history in puppy transport. Sled dogs were how you got around, until snowmobiles became a thing. By the 1960s mushing was almost extinct, like how cars replaced horse-drawn carriages. So a race was formed to honor that history. Two women played major roles in its inception and popularization.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: March 20, 1985--

Dorothy Page was from New Mexico and felt the call of the north, moving to Alaska in 1960. In 1966 she became president of the Centennial Committee to celebrate Alaska’s 100th anniversary as a U.S. territory. She’d witnessed the rapid decline in dog sledding and thought a race was the perfect way to celebrate. Yet no mushers were interested, except for Joe Redington, who owned a large kennel. With his support Dorothy became “The Mother of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race,” and Joe, the father. The race was only 25 miles long, but it was popular because the purse was $25,000.

First held in 1973, 34 mushers entered, and 22 finished. I feel like I’m not giving enough credit to the dogs here. They are such good dogs! Yay for puppies! The next year there wasn’t enough snow and the year after that the purse was only $1,000 and only a dozen mushers participated. So that was that. Until Redington decided it was too good an idea to die and began a fundraising campaign, making the race a major event that was about a thousand miles long with a $51,000 purse. Continues below …

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The race begins in Anchorage and ends in Nome, which is the same route a life-saving antitoxin travelled mostly via sled dog in 1925 to save children dying from a diphtheria outbreak. Soon the race garnered corporate sponsorship and became a big deal in the state. The conditions often involve horrific blizzards and temperatures that qualify as hideous below zero. Like, with the wind chill, it feels like minus a fucking hundred Fahrenheit. That’s -73C for those not in the U.S., Liberia, or the Cayman Islands.

The 1985 race brought the Iditarod to international attention. Libby Riddles was born in Wisconsin in 1956 and moved to Alaska when she was 17. She quickly fell in love with dog sledding because, well, dogs! She competed in the 1980 and 1981 Iditarod and came in 18th and 20th, respectively. Then she decided to breed her own dogs to improve their performance. In 1985, she was still considered a longshot.

Beginning on March 2, the race didn’t start well for her. An hour in, the dogs took a wrong turn and her sled slammed into a discarded washing machine and she went flying and got dragged. After that it was one catastrophe after another, but she refused to give up, and neither did her dogs. On March 20, 1985, she and her team were the first of 64 competitors to cross the finish.

“They performed their duties just to please me,” Libby said of her dogs. “They were the real heroes of the race.” 

Image: Libby Riddles and her sled team in Alaska.

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