Graduation Year

2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

History

Major Professor

Brian Connolly, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Philip Levy, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Richard Byington, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Ross Coen, Ph.D.

Keywords

Alaska, animal history, animal-human relations, dogs, dogsledding

Abstract

This dissertation charts the career of the Alaskan sled dog: how it was used as an engine of development, how it became a symbol for early American Alaska, and how it fell victim to obsolescence as newer and faster means of conveyance became available. The figure of the sled dog in the Arctic is complex. Because it was closer to the wolf in phenotype both it, and Alaska, were buffeted by the same White settler expectations and Darwinian chauvinism which afflicted its Indigenous peoples. This would intensify during the baptisms by fire of the gold rushes. Dog abuse – overwork, starvation, deprivation, injury, and too often death – haunt the annals of this upending period of Alaska and Yukon history. Yet, using dog labor as fulcrum, this event set Alaska – heretofore a far-flung outpost – unto a viable economic path. It was clear that the dog would serve as the supreme tool to blaze this very path. Eventually, all of these same paths led to Nome – a city founded by dogsleds. It was in Nome that the popular perceptions of mushing begin to coalesce. These were fueled originally by practical needs, but the desire to improve the dog-musher bond pushed enterprising Nomeities to creating dogsled races, the crown jewel of which was the All Alaska Sweepstakes. For twenty years, Nome was the center of the new canine universe which allowed the fledgling District, and then Territory, to claim for itself an unique identity in the world. The Nome Serum Run of 1925 cemented the figure of the sled dog in Alaska. However, very soon after, with the advent of new technologies, this symbol would be threatened and then overthrown. A way of life would be rapidly undone and then forgotten. But because the sled had such deep roots in Alaska, its eventual rebirth in the Iditarod starting in the 1970s was enthusiastically welcomed by a public that, while complicit in its disappearance, had missed it all the same. Thereafter, the sled dog became symbolic in increasingly unique, and sometimes bizarre ways – but always, at its heart, a quintessentially Alaskan creature.

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