History versus Hollywood

NOTE TO ARIU: I realize that, in this topic, I may have broken the site rules by posting consecutively (I saw no rules pertaining to that effect, or anything else beyond the FAQ, actually). However, as you know from how this topic is posted over on my site (and also on Balto's Treasure), there was just NO WAY to post this material as one incredibly-long entry. It just would have been too ponderous and cumbersome, and no one would read it. I hope you'll let this stand as-is. Thanks.


For fans of one or more of the Balto animated movies...

Right, well, we know that the cartoon movie Balto (© 1995, Universal Studios/Amblimation) was based upon the true story of the 1925 Nome Serum Run. "Loosely based upon" would be a better choice of words. Though the words "based upon a true story" are very often used by Hollywood writers, directors and producers to tell their own versions of real history. Rather than turning this into a rant about that concept, which I'm sure would bore you ( ), I'm gonna just outline the parts of the history to which the cartoon was faithful, and the areas where it went wrong (or parted from history). I will also throw in the elements of Balto 2: Wolf Quest and Balto 3: Wings of Change. You might be surprised about what those two cartoon movies got right historically (meaning, in this case, general Alaskan and Nome history from that era).

I'll break this down into separate posts, to make it easier on the eyes and attention spans...

A. Balto - What it got right
1. There was indeed a dog named "Balto" who led a sled team during the Serum Run.

2. The Nome Serum Run (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1925_serum_run_to_Nome and http://www.serumrun.org/History.htm) occurred in the dead of winter...January 27th through February 2nd, 1925...the coldest and harshest time of the year for that area of Alaska.

3. There was a terrible blizzard which blew onto the Seward Peninsula (upon which Nome sits), from off the Bering Sea, during the last few days of the run. There were "white-out" conditions from the amount of snowfall, and the gale-force winds of the blizzard. The prevailing temperature, with the wind chill, was -85°F. Balto's team had to face some of the worst of it (so did Togo's...who didn't appear in the Balto cartoon).

4. Many citizens of Nome were struck down by a sudden epidemic of the respiratory disease known as "diphtheria" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphtheria). And it was a child who was first affected with it. Though, in truth, it was a 2-year old Inuit girl from a village named "Holy Cross". Dr. Curtis Welch, Nome's only doctor, went out to visit the girl when word came she was affected...late in December of 1924, but he misdiagnosed her condition as tonsilitis, and she died the very next day.

5. Wireless telegraph was used to transmit the announcement of the epidemic to the governor of the territory (Alaska did not become a U.S. state until 1959, incidentally), and to prepare a plan for getting the serum to Nome.

6. After tossing around many different ideas for how to get the serum to Nome, given the harsh weather conditions, it was decided that a train would carry an initial supply (which had only been discovered sitting in the Anchorage Railroad Hospital on January 26th) from Anchorage north to Nenana (a small village to the southwest of the then small town of Fairbanks). From there, a dog sled team would pick it up and carry it west towards Nome.

7. Balto's team carried anti-toxin (also called "serum") for the diphtheria epidemic, which was meant to replace the existing supply (from a 1918 shipment, which had expired during the summer of 1924) which was housed in Nome's 24-bed Maynard Columbus Hospital. Dr. Welch had ordered more serum during the summer of '24, but the port of Nome had closed up (due to pack ice) before the shipment could be sent...leaving the hospital without a supply, and totally unprepared for the sudden epidemic.

8. Balto's team did indeed arrive back in Nome before first light, at 5:30 A.M. local time and in the dark (though, in truth, very few people were up and about to welcome them).

9. The town of Nome lay on the shores of Norton Sound (where it empties into the Bering Sea). It was snowed in during the winter of 1925, and the offshore waters were blocked up with a solid sheet of pack ice. And, at that time of the year, it is darker more often than it is light. The ridge seen looming over the town is actually there too...it's called "Anvil Mountain", and it actually is about 4.5 miles north-northeast of Nome. It was at the foot of this ridge that gold was actually first discovered in the area, thus giving birth to the town of Nome.

B. Balto - Where it went WRONG
1. Unlike what you see in ALL the Balto movies, the actual terrain in and around Nome (for a GREAT distance in all land-based directions) is actually open, rolling tundra, creeks, rivers, hills and mountains. There are almost no trees on the Seward Peninsula (upon which Nome sits), and very few forests. And this is not because of human interference. It was that way long before humans arrived there. And was that way in 1925. The beautiful pine forests and waterfalls you see would be far more evident of southern and eastern Alaska (into the interior).

2. Balto was most definitely NOT a wolf-dog hybrid. He was a purebred Siberian husky. Further, he was not a stray, living on the fringes of Nome as an outcast. He was owned by Leonhard Seppala (an employee of the Pioneer Gold Mining Company - part of the monopoly known at the time as the Hammon Consolidated Gold Fields, a musher and racer, and the first breeder of Siberian huskies, imported from Siberia, in Alaska). And he lived in Seppala's kennels.

3. Balto was not a brown-gray color either. He was a mostly-black, and partially white, husky. (See here for some details on how such things are possible in Siberian Huskies today, and existed then as well: http://www.huskycolors.com/mblack.html and http://www.huskycolors.com/sealmak.html. Here's a picture of the real Balto for comparison: https://2img.net/h/i15.photobucket.com/albums/a389/JerseyCaptain/Balto.jpg). Visits to his taxidermic mount, in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, can be misleading in this respect, because the dead fur on the mount has faded to a deep brownish-mahogany. But this is due to exposure of the DEAD fur to excessive light in early days of its mounting. Also, it is said that some black-furred dogs sometimes experience some fading of their black coloration over time, with excessive exposure to sunlight (and, in a northern climate, where the sun beats off of white snow and ice a good portion of the year, this problem can be compounded).

4. Balto was a bit on the large size for his breed, with a boxy body and a barrel chest. As a result of this, it was felt by his owner (Leonhard Seppala) that he would never be a good racing dog (which was THE measure by which dogs were assigned to teams...whether or not they had the body lines and dimensions to make a good racing dog). Racing, of course, being one of THE recreational activities in Alaska at the time. Therefore, Balto was neutered when he was still very young, and never mated with any dog or produced any offspring. (Neutering or spaying was the fate which awaited all huskies which didn't measure up to the racing standard at the time.) Until his one big opportunity in 1925, the only work on a team which Balto ever experienced was doing freighting work for the Pioneer Gold Mining Company...and never as a lead dog.

5. The following characters are completely and utterly fictional: Steele, Star, Nikki, Kaltag, Jenna, Dixie, Sylvie, Doc, Morse, Boris, Muk, Luk, Rosy (and her parents), and the musher of Steele's/Balto's team (who was actually a 21-year old Norwegian named Gunnar Kaasen...another employee of one of the gold mining companies situated in Nome).

6. Steele was NOT based off of Togo!

7. Steele's/Balto's team was not the only team which made the serum run (which covers a round trip of nearly 1,350 miles...it's about 674 miles from Nome to Nenana). There were, in fact, twenty teams, consisting of 150 dogs, which carried the serum in relay from Nenana westward to Nome. (Incidentally, while the modern-day Iditarod Trail Race does commemorate the 1925 Serum Run, it does not follow the same route, nor was it founded for that purpose. The routes of the race do eventually mirror the latter half of the Serum Run route as they turn westward towards Nome...after a northwesterly run out of Wasilla, a northern suburb of Anchorage.)

8. Balto did not set out looking for the team after news came that it got lost. He was assigned to his team from the very beginning...and NOT as lead dog. It was his musher, young Gunnar Kaasen, who put Balto in the lead position (over Fox, the experienced leader) because he liked Balto, and saw potential in him that his owner (Leonhard Seppala) did not.

9. There never was an old, abandoned fishing boat beached on the shore outside of Nome, which Balto lived in. Balto lived in the kennels of Leonhard Seppala, his owner.

10. There was no race in Nome to determine the fastest dogs for Balto's team.

11. The accident suffered by Steele's team during the cartoon, where they slid down an icy embankment and became bogged down (and their musher was injured) did not happen with the real Balto's team. However, there WAS an accident suffered by Balto's team during the run. Balto's own quick thinking did avert total disaster, but the packet of serum was tossed off the sled and buried in a deep snow bank. But Balto was not the one who found and rescued the serum. Gunnar Kaasen, the team's musher, did this by digging around frantically (during the blizzard). He did finally find it, and set the team in motion after a short break.

12. The serum was not enclosed in a wooden case, but rather in a "packet", containing many small "ampules" (little vials) rather than the large glass containers seen in the cartoon. Further, the serum froze solid during the trip, and had to be thawed out (slowly, using room temperature rather than placing it too near a fire or on a stove) for use when it arrived in Nome.

13. When the team arrived in Nome (at 5:30 A.M. local time, in the dark), there was not a sudden rush of citizens out of buildings to greet them. There were some people up and about who witnessed their arrival, but it was not like it is shown in the cartoon, with roped-off wooden sidewalks and crowds of people.

C. Balto 2: Wolf Quest and Balto 3: Wings of Change
1. The totem pole seen in Balto 2: Wolf Quest (© 2000, Universal Cartoon Studios) has historical precedence. The native peoples of Alaska did use them for a variety of purposes (heraldic poles to show clan genealogy and history; mortuary poles to honor the dead; memorial poles, which served a similar purpose; house posts for use in clan housing structures; and shame poles, erected to shame and ridicule someone who failed to clear a debt, behaved dishonorably, or broke their word...they would be cut down when amends were made by the shamed individual or group). The pole seen in Balto 2 was most likely a heraldic pole.

2. Biplanes, as seen not only in Balto, but also in Balto 3: Wings of Change (© 2004, Universal Cartoon Studios), were starting to be used as an alternate means of carrying important mail and communications in the 1920s. By the 1930s, they had all but replaced dog sled teams as THE means for carrying supplies and mail. And they were indeed called "bush planes". In 1925, there were only three in service in Alaska. They were World War I-era surplus...Standard J-1 biplanes from the Fairbanks Airplane Corporation. During the winter, these planes were dismantled. They had open cockpits and water-cooled engines, which were totally unreliable in the winter and wintry weather. So, the storyline of Balto 3: Wings of Change, while fictional, is entirely historically-plausible, and based in historical foundations. Though there is no way a dog sled team could have actually beaten a bush plane in a race. Duke, the bush pilot character in Balto 3, faced some very unusual weather conditions in the timeline of the cartoon (early spring). Such things could also pop up from time to time...which is usually why most bush pilots didn't attempt to fly until the weather became much more agreeable.

3. The terms "bush plane" and "bush pilot" echo the use of those terms by Australians for their own small planes and those who pilot them. Northern remote Alaska became known as "bush Alaska" (or just "the bush") when visitors from Australia, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, found that the tundra and remote villages of the region reminded them of the outback, which they frequently called (and still call) "the bush". Indeed, northern Alaska is STILL called "bush Alaska" or "the bush" as well. And pilots of small prop planes are still called "bush pilots" (and their planes are still called "bush planes"). These terms have been totally integrated into Alaskan slang.

4. As demonstrated by the racial appearance of Mr. Simpson, the musher of Kirby's team in Balto 3, most mail carriers and mushers were actually of native blood...even if they often had European names.

5. The following characters, from the two sequels, are entirely fictional: Aleu, Saba, Dingo, Kodi, (and the two unnamed pups), Nava, Aniu, Niju, Nuk, Sumac, Yak, Stella, Dipsy, Mel, Ralph, Kirby, Dusty, Mr. Simpson, Mr. Connor, Mr. Gundersen, and Duke.

6. After the Nome Serum Run of 1925 (during the summer of that year, in fact), all but five members of Balto's twelve-dog team were taken out of Nome by Gunnar Kaasen when they were invited to participate in some short movies made about them by Hollywood Producer Sol Lesser. They would never see Nome or Alaska again.

All things considered, there ARE some things the production teams of the various Balto cartoons did try to nail down with surprising accuracy!

For instance:

1. Dr. Curtis Welch
Though he is not apparently named in the credits of Balto, the artists went through a great deal of trouble to make the doctor in the cartoon look a heck of a lot like Dr. Curtis Welch, the real doctor of Nome during the Serum Run time period (though the cartoon character seems to have some balding problems which Dr. Welch managed to somehow avoid. lol). Have a look:



2. St. Joseph's Catholic Church
One of the few remaining historic structures in modern-day Nome (which has been removed from its original location, incidentally), it is said that the spire of the church was a mark for mushers working their way towards Nome, and looking for some identifying mark on otherwise featureless tundra. Note the startling similarities in the structure of the cartoon church, and that of this historical picture taken of the church in the early 1900s (most people don't even realize that, at the time of the serum run, the cross on top of the spire was actually lighted electrically...and often served as a visual focal point for mushers returning to Nome, even from a few miles away. It was often the very first evidence that a musher had correctly navigated to Nome on the otherwise nearly featureless tundra of the Seward Peninsula...especially in the winter when it was covered in snow and ice):



3. The Nome Post Office
While there are a few minor differences (mainly the structure of the windows and the sign over them and the door), there are also some startling similarities between the cartoon version of Nome's post office (seen here from Balto 3), and the real Nome post office, from this historic image of Balto's team parked in front of it on February 2nd, 1925...the day they arrived back in Nome:



4. The arrival of Balto's team in Nome on February 2nd
At left, we see the arrival of Balto's team as it was portrayed in the Balto cartoon. The darkness is right. The team racing down the street is right. Almost everything else is wrong. The streets were not separated from the wood plank sidewalks by rope barriers. There were not crowds of people to greet them (they arrived EARLY in the morning...5:30 A.M. local time. Most people were still asleep!). In the historical image on the right, Gunnar Kaasen can be seen driving Balto's team (with Balto in the front) hard down Front Street, the same street they arrived on. This was a re-enactment done for the press corps...photographers, videographers, and columnists, after it became light out later that day. The team was also later posed in front of the town post office as well (in the image above). But their first stop was the Miners & Merchants Bank of Nome (where it is likely that Gunnar Kaasen expected to run into contacts from his employers, the Pioneer Gold Mining Company. That, though, is unknown. Upon the team's arrival, Kaasen was so exhausted, it is said by witnesses that he collapsed...taking the time to mutter "d**n fine dog" (referring to Balto):



5. Gold Dredges
Many of us have seen these strange-looking structures, with big machinery coming out of them at a steep angle, in the Balto cartoons, but probably have no idea what they are. Fans have come to refer to one of them as "the boiler room". Partially correct...to an extent. And we see the dogs in Balto and Balto 3 go in and out of it a lot...which probably wouldn't happen in the real structures these are supposed to represent.

These are actually gold dredges...(usually) floating structures used to dig up the sea bed by the bucket full (on a rotating tread) and dump it into sifting machinery inside the dredge, which would sort gold bits out of the sand and other material, which would then be dumped back out into the surf. These were lined up along part of Nome's beach, and were owned and operated by the gold mining companies which monopolized the latter end of the Alaskan gold rush. The "boiler" is actually part furnace, to keep the structure (and its operators) warm in cold weather, and part boiler to operate the machinery through steam power. Gold dredges are rarely used today, but they were used extensively in the surf along the Nome coastline, and up river inland. Here is an example of the structures seen in the Balto cartoons, and then a historical photo of a gold dredge, and a modern photo of one:

Here's another item of interest!

In Balto, we can see the telegraph operator lighting and also extinguishing (and then RElighting) a lantern which throws off a red light:



This is historically accurate as well. Here is the explanation for that as taken from http://www.nomealaska.org/vc/iditarod.htm:

History of the Red Lantern

During the days of Alaska sled dog freighting and mail carrying, dog drivers relied on a series of roadhouses between their village destinations. Since these mushers ventured out in all types of weather they decided to use a "flight plan." Word was relayed ahead that a musher and team were on the trail, and a kerosene lamp was lit and hung outside the roadhouse. It not only helped the dog driver find his destination at night, but more importantly, it signified that a team or teams were somewhere out on the trail. The lamp was not extinguished until the musher reached his destination.

Beginning in 1986, Chevron USA continued the tradition by hanging a "Red Lantern," as it is known today, on the burl arch in Nome. Each year the lantern is lit at the beginning of the race and hung on the finish line, not to be extinguished until the very last musher crosses the finish line. Once the musher crosses the line, (s)he then extinguishes the lantern, signifying the official end of the race. Thus, the last musher in the race is called the "Red Lantern" musher.

Kinda makes you think a bit more about what the telegraph operator was doing, and why, when he either lit or extinguished the lantern hanging by his door, huh? Note, too, that when (early in the movie) Balto goes out onto the prow of the boat, to look over at Nome, you can see the red light still glowing...awaiting Steele's team:

Here's another interesting INaccuracy about the Balto movies. In this case, Balto 3: Wings of Change.

In the scenes involving the race between Duke and Balto's/Kirby's sled team, a quick map of Alaska is shown, and we see a red line extend from Nome to White Mountain, the town which is the half-way point (and turn-around point) of the race. To wit:



This position, of White Mountain, is inaccurate. White Mountain does not lie in the interior of Alaska as shown above. it actually lay on the Seward Peninsula, and still is there...it's a very small place, and a survivor of the gold rush era (like Nome is). The blue dot, on the map below, indicates its actual location (which you can check on any good map of the real Alaska):



So, why was White Mountain shown to be so much farther east of Nome than it really is? Poor research by the pre-production team of the movie? Maybe. Total cluelessness, by the Hollywood types who made the movie, about just how freakin' BIG Alaska really is? Quite possible. (The Seward Peninsula alone, upon which Nome and White Mountain sit, is as big in size as the state of South Carolina!) Or a subtle attempt to make the race seem more grueling and longer than it really could have been, by assuming that the viewer knows just how big Alaska is? Er...unlikely. Especially since it is to be assumed that most viewers of this movie would be kids.

Anyhow, you want a perspective on just how big Alaska really IS? Check out this map, upon which I have indicated important towns and cities from the serum run (and/or the Balto cartoons). Please disregard the "Tongass" and "Chugach" references...this map was used to not only demonstrate the size of Alaska in relation to the rest of the United States, but also to show two of the largest protected tracts of forest in the state):