A Husky History: by our side from igloos to living rooms

Olga Pavlovsky
Sep 5, 2018 · 13 min read

Endurance.

FIdelity .

Intelligence.

Those are the words inscribed on a bronze statue in New York City’s Central Park.

That statue commemorates Balto. Balto rose to fame in 1925 at the age of six by which time he was already an adult, because he was a husky.

Balto’s rise to fame was because of diphtheria. Diptheria is a particularly nasty infectious disease. It starts with a sore throat and fever but if you’ve got a really severe case it can lead to the lymph nodes in your neck swelling making difficult feet to breathe and to swallow and then if you don’t treat it the infection can start destroying healthy tissue in your respiratory system. Diphtheria is fatal in five to 10 percent of cases but in young children, the fatality rate is more like 20 percent.

It’s a disease that, nowadays, we’re not very likely to suffer. But, back in January 1925, an epidemic of diphtheria swept through the small town of Nome on the coast of Alaska. When the doctors of the town realised its young people were at high risk of dying, they looked at their options for getting medicine into the town that’s right in the middle of nowhere. Nome is cut off by the ocean on one side and mountain ranges on the other. And yep… that’s right. That’s the kind of place that becomes populous because of the promise of riches. More on that later.

The only aircraft available to them was out of action. The engine was frozen and it just simply wouldn’t start. Nome after all, is two degrees south of the Arctic Circle. Temperatures in January would usually hover around highs of minus 11 and lows of minus 17 Celsius.

So guess what the officials decided was the way to get the medicine into the town over six hundred and seventy four miles of frozen terrain? That’s right: a husky relay.

And what began came to be known as a Great Race of Mercy. What usually took twenty-five days to complete using sled dog teams was travelled in 127 and a half hours by 150 dogs and 20 mushers.

The road was not a comfortable one. The teams faced blizzards and temperatures that never went higher than minus 30 degrees Celsius. In fact they dropped to minus 65 at times with the windchill. There was a chain of relays across that distance and that they made it at all was pretty miraculous. Some of the drivers suffered from hypothermia and frostbite. Sadly, several of the dogs along the road perished.

The medicine arrived and lives were indeed saved. What followed was a media frenzy to celebrate the achievements of the sled dogs and their drivers.

Some of this was done in not the most gracious way to be fair. Athabascan another Alaskan native mushers were largely ignored even though they covered two thirds of the routes. Also, our friend, Balto is really the only dog that has made it into the history books into Central Park and into popular culture. You might remember that Disney film of the same name where he’s actually portrayed as a half-wolf half-dog. Of course there were many, many dogs who made that journey possible and some of them ran a much greater distance. Nevertheless I think no one can argue that celebrating the huskies’ contribution was more than deserved.

And that, for you, is the husky. I looked at the history of the husky for my new podcast the other5billion. And it was that story of the relay to Nome which convinced me that this magnificent dog breed deserves its own episode.

What is a husky?

First of all, then what is a husky? Well, there’s more or less consensus that the word husky is a shortening or a corruption of the word Eskimo. That word itself Eskimo was used by Europeans, Americans and Canadians to describe several distinct groups of people. So, at some point the name went from Huskemaw to Uskemaw to Husky and the first known use of the word Husky in Canadian English was an 1852.

Someone feeling right at home!

The husky is ancient dog breed that’s really special to many people and I’ve seen it with my own eyes. The sight of a husky can melt a grown up’s heart. So, let’s spend some time finding out why.

Just a couple of caveats for the history I’m about to cover:

  1. I’m going to cover just enough on the origin of dogs to appreciate all that a Husky is today. I’m not going to delve far too into the enormous and quite complicated subject of the domestication of dogs which warrants, frankly, an episode in its own right.
  2. I’m using husky as a general term for a sled dog. We don’t just mean the breed of dog which is very popular around the world at the moment and which in fact is a Siberian husky as labelled by kennel clubs. Yes, the Siberian Husky is indeed a very iconic breed and its excellence at covering vast distances fast. But do not imagine that a sled dog teams’ members all look like a show Siberian Husky. Good sled dogs come in all shapes and sizes because in a team of seven or nine there are jobs to be done and they get done by dogs of different characters and different sizes.

Putting all that good stuff aside the question I really want to answer is: when how and why did husky type dogs appear and become our domesticated companions?

The origin of dogs

You might be surprised to learn that around the world there are hundreds of researchers studying the origin of dogs and there’s a lively debate amongst these researchers about the precise dates that dog domestication started. Right now, the best guesses are that it was between 32,000 thousand to 14,000 years ago. The other best guess is that the earliest domestication of dogs happened in the northern regions of Asia.

Around 35,000 years ago in northern Siberia, there was still a prehistoric species walking around called the Taimyr wolf. The current thinking is that this is the most recent common ancestor of modern dogs and wolves. And what that means is this the wolves and dogs that are alive today don’t share a direct lineage, they share this common ancestor. Again, I’ll not spend too long there because it does all get a little bit unclear… Scientists studying the origins of dogs are still questioning whether there’s another prehistoric wolf that was actually involved in this puzzle.

Right now that doesn’t massively matter to us. What we need to do is imagine that something like 20,000 to 30,000 years ago, there are some wolves roaming around in Siberia. And there are some humans wandering around too. They both need to hunt for food to survive. And somehow they begin to reach the conclusion that teaming up is going to help them to hunt better than alone. They do just that because the idea of agriculture doesn’t yet exist… and neither does dog food come in tins, but of course we all need to eat.

What that process of “teaming up” means is domestication.

We presume today that the prehistoric wolves who are most open to human contact began living alongside us. That partnership continued and we can assume that hunting together worked better than hunting alone. So, the process of domestication continued because the wolves that partnered with us then bred with other wolves that had done the same. Presumably also the humans that worked with these wolves were more likely to survive.

As a side note we do have to question whether we domesticated the wolf or whether they domesticated us. But that probably is just too complicated for today!

Anyway, let’s put philosophy aside and say that we were now good friends with our wolfie dogs or our doggie wolves. We shared a significant part of our lives with them.

When did this idea that a dog could be strapped to a sled and pull it come about?

Where did the sled dogs come from?

Well, until recently, the standard answer was about three thousand years ago. But since 1989 archaeologists have been excavating a small site found on an island called Zhokhov in the Siberian Sea. That island is extremely remote now but it was connected to the mainland before warmer temperatures brought rising sea levels.

What researchers have found on Zhokhov Island are the remains of dogs genetically indistinguishable from domestic dogs today. What’s more, they discovered elaborate wooden sled pieces that showed them that the inhabitants of Zhokov Island were already quite developed in terms of sled dog culture.

The researchers then examined the dogs’ skeletons and they concluded their size, or some of them, would have been almost what’s considered the ideal modern fast sled dog. The size of the others they found were more like Alaskan malamutes and they reckoned that those were used for hunting polar bears. The researchers concluded that the dogs were clearly being bred for something special.

So, these days in a number of studies it is estimated that sled dogs were certainly being used eight to ten thousand years ago and there are more sites across Siberia but the evidence lies, in Kamchatka, which is much further East in Russia.

In the case of these findings on Zhokhov Island, because of the position of the tools that they found, the similarity of the dogs to the modern breeds and the knowledge of the rising sea levels that came later, the researchers who analysed the evidence believe that our reliance on sled dogs could go back to up to 15,000 years ago.

Frankly, I could spend many hours here telling you all the thing as I found out in the research. The important takeaway here is that sled dogs have been a part of human lives as long as the concept of agriculture, which supposedly appeared around 12,000 years ago, and that suggest that we needed them and they needed us to survive.

So, let’s talk more about that idea.

Successful partnerships in Siberia

Biologists say that species are successful when they first of all survive and when they thrive. For instance: when their populations grow and they increase the size of the area they live in. Humans, by that measure, are very successful and so are dogs. And the partnership between the two species is thought to be a big factor in that success. With the help of their huskies the people of Zhokhov Island were able to travel longer distances, explore new lands and find new places to live.

And when you think about the fact that way back all those thousands of years ago we had very little in terms of modern conveniences. You start to see why it is that the husky became such a big part of life at this point.

Let’s introduce someone new here: the Chukchi people.

The Chukchis lived in Northeast Siberia and they tend to get credited with selectively breeding sled dogs with great precision into what we know as the Siberian Husky breed today. They were, and some still are, hunter gatherers. Reindeer, seals and even polar bears are among the prey they went after. Of course the overland journeys to go hunting were only really possible with dog teams and so their lives depended on the Huskies completely.

So, let’s just think about the functions a husky performed for the average family:

  • Huskies could pull a sled for maybe 50 kilometres a day every day. It was their car to get anywhere.
  • Huskies could withstand temperatures of between minus 50 to plus 35 degree Celsius. They were better performers than many modern machines.
  • Huskies could hunt to catch their own food. So we can say that they were incredibly cheap family cars to run. In the summer months they would live free in the steppes of Siberia, catch their own food and then they come back to the Chukchi villages when the snow and the ice sets in and they needed to partner up with the humans again for their survival.
  • Husky dogs are also extremely friendly with humans. The dogs would sleep alongside the parents or the children of their human families to keep them warm. A “three dog night” was a saying for a really cold one when you had to bring three dogs onto your bed. And so Huskies were their central heating system too.

And so you can start to see how important these dogs were to the people.

They were their lifeline. They were economically and socially important. The Huskies were hunters, trackers, companions and guardians of children alongside just been sled dogs. They were one of the family and they ate together with their human families. They were considered in equal standing or even higher than humans. There’s a legend that the Chukchi is believed to Husky’s guard the gates of heaven and they can turn away people who have been cruel to their dogs.

The Chukchis pretty much kept themselves to themselves and they continued their wonderful traditional way of life that, for one, I would love to experience. They fiercely resisted invasion as the forces of Tsarist Russia moved in and attempted to take over.

For centuries not too much that’s relevant to our story happened and we can go pretty much all the way to the 19th century when communications, industrialisation and colonisation brought the Chukchis in direct contact with outside cultures. It turns out that they had engineered a way of life that made them the most challenging tribes of people to conquer. Knowing how to survive in the Arctic terrain and, moreover, being able to travel fast with their teams of dogs was what earned the Chukchis independence from the Tsarist regime. They were the first tribe to ever get that.

But the Chukchis did starts to build links to the outside world through trade as Europeans and North Americans began to take great interest in these northern territories.

The Siberians come to Alaska

In 1867, Alaska was acquired from Russia by the USA and then the gold rush started in 1880. At this point we do a full circle to where we began this episode: in Nome, Alaska.

People arrived to make their riches and the town was incorporated in 1901. Apparently, it was the most populous town in the whole of Alaska at one stage because of the rich gold deposits in the nearby river. It was in Nome that Siberian Huskies as we know them now first entered Alaska.

Now a brief tangent here. There were already sled dogs in the Americas and they had arrived something like 120,00 years ago and they’s settled with the Pale- Eskimo people and they’d also come over from Siberia. Then the Thule people brought dogs with them from the Bering Strait. But these dogs were much bigger than the Siberian Huskies. Like, up to twice the size.

Back from our tangent! In 1908 a Russia fur trader called William Goosak brought some Siberian Huskies to run in a sled dog race in the next year, called the All Alaskan Sweepstake. The length of the course was 408 miles and there was a $10,000 first prize. And that was obviously a lot of money back in 1909.

Now, when the people of Nome first saw Goosak’s little dogs they mocked him and they called his team the Siberian rats!

Despite being the laughing stock of the race the Siberian Huskies, or the rats, won third place.

Very quickly, the attitude towards Siberian huskies turned from amusement to intrigue and to admiration. They became a contender for the favourite dog of Alaskan sled dog drivers. Many more were exported from Siberia. There were also bred in North America and some of the breeders at that time closely study the practices that the Chukchis used to pair, to rear and keep the dogs. Of course,after the historic sled dog relay that brought the diphtheria medication to Nome in 1925, the humble husky had earned a permanent place in peoples’ hearts and they spent the rest of the 20th century helping us to achieve even more together.

The husky in the 20th century

From the 1930s the Huskies in all their shapes and sizes continued their rise to prominence. They were used for the transportation of goods in World War One in France. They served in the U.S. Army’s Arctic Search and Rescue units. They even worked as parachutists!

By this point I am asking myself is there anything a Husky can’t do. Well I’ll tell you what they can do.

They can help us to explore Antarctica.

Humanity has theorised that something like Antarctica existed as far back as 150 AD when a super bright Greco-Roman chap called Ptolemy floated the idea of Terra Australis Incognita. It took us until 1911 to reach southpole itself when an expedition led by the Norwegian explorer Rauld Amundsen arrived there on December 14th. As did Captain Scott’s expedition which arrived on the 17th of January 1912. By now you probably won’t be surprised to learn that both these expeditions involved the participation of sled dogs from Greenland.

To square the circle here, Greenland dogs were again connected to the dogs from Siberia. They had traveled with the Paleo-Eskimo people and then the Thule people from Siberia to North America. And then they came across to Greenland before even the Vikings had arrived there. Queue a plethora of genetic studies and theories of who came from where and when.

Anyway, the latest conclusion we have is that they did all in fact come from the same place… because Siberian Huskies and Greenland sled dogs both share what is an “unusually large number” of genes with — guess who — our good friend the Taimyr wolf!

Righty, back to Antarctica. Those journeys were some of the many that took place during the so-called “Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration” where teams of explorers from Britain, Germany, Sweden, France, Japan, Norway and Australia all set foot on Antarctica, many with the aim of reaching the South Pole. On the earliest expeditions, the teams were all learning how to navigate the challenges that Antarctica presented. Some used dogs, some used Manchurian ponies and others even tried the earliest versions of motorised transport.

The so called Heroic Age ended in 1922 and it became the so called Mechanic Age, which sounds a lot less romantic. And after World War 2 there was a flurry of activity by several countries to establish a presence in Antarctica. Thankfully, what could have ended up as a big land grab operation ended up being the setup of several research operations across the Antarctic continent and an agreement, underpinned by the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, that designated the continent as a base for peaceful international cooperation and scientific investigation.

By 1959 there were already 50 research stations in Antarctica. And guess what. Huskies were the transportation method of choice and they helped us make some of the most important climate science discoveries of the last century.

If you’re interested in learning more about the huskies’ time in Antarctica and what then happened to huskies in the 21st century, then listen to my podcast episode called A Husky History on Podbean, iTunes, Stitcher, Overcast or wherever you get your food for thought. I interview John Killingbeck who was one of the very last two people to drive a sled dog team in Antarctica before they were all removed from the continent. I also speak with Andy Cullen who rescues, rehabilitated and rehomes huskies in Ireland — and you might be surprised how many live there!

other5billion

What have the animals done for us?

Olga Pavlovsky

Written by

Host of the other5billion podcast. Building a reserve & sanctuary for endangered species in the Pyrenees mountains. Born: USSR. Raised: UK. Living: Andorra.

other5billion

What have the animals done for us?

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