Dr. Curtis Welch had arrived in Alaska in 1907.  He was very familiar with the winters and rather enjoyed the isolation of the ice bound, blizzard swept town of Nome.  Nearly half  of Nome’s population shipped out  for the winter on the last vessels departing before the Bering Sea froze.  Being icebound November through June, Nome was a distant place indeed, closer to Siberia than any other major city in Alaska.  What didn’t arrive on the last supply ship in November would have to wait until breakup in mid-June.

Welch had served Alaska during the 1918-19 flu epidemic and knew firsthand the devastation  disease had brought to Alaska.  Long before Welch’s time in Nome, typhoid fever, measles, tuberculosis and small pox had claimed the lives of countless children and wiped out whole native villages.  The native population hadn’t built immunity to diseases brought into the area by sailors, miners and traders.

The last thing the 50 year old physician wanted to deal with was an epidemic.  So during the summer of 1924 when he realized that his supply of diphtheria anti-toxin was not only running short, it was expired, he placed an order for more units with the public health commission in Juneau.  Welch and the nurses who helped him serve the community of Nome and the surrounding area took careful inventory every summer and placed an order to resupply all of the medical consumables ranging from cotton balls to ether to tongue depressors and vaccines. It would all arrive by ship before the Bering Sea froze in November.

The Alameda, the final ship of the season, dropped anchor in a sheltered stretch of water a mile and a half from shore.    She was loaded from stem to stern with supplies to sustain residents of the Seward peninsula through the winter of 1924-25.  There was no dock or harbor along Nome’s shore.  Going closer to shore in a large ship would result in running aground.  Lighters (barges), launches and longshoremen were immediately ready to unload the ship and bring the cargo ashore in order to get the Alameda back to sea before ice closed her in.

Nome had evolved into the transportation hub of the area, serving the 1,400 residents of the town as well as the 10,000 people who lived in the area outside of Nome.  The same was true for medical care.  The Maynard Columbus Hospital in Nome was the shining star for area medical needs.  The twenty-five bed facility, staffed by Welch and four nurses, was the best equipped hospital in all of northwest Alaska.  Welch was the only doctor for hundreds of miles.

As Welch and his nurses unpacked and inventoried the newly arrived supplies, one item was never located.  The anti-toxin had been ordered but it didn’t arrive.  This didn’t worry  Dr. Welch.  In his 18 years of practice on the Seward Peninsula, he’d never seen or diagnosed a case of diphtheria.  Severe sore throats that he had seen had always turned out to be something less serious.

With the supplies unloaded and the last passengers boarded, the Alameda departed.  All of Nome settled in for the long winter ahead.  Somewhere in the Nome hospital were a few units of expired diphtheria anti-toxin.

Facts in this and the other stories in the Serum Run Series come from a number of sources  including The Cruelest Miles written by cousins Gay Salisbury and Laney Salisbury and published by W.W. Norton and Company.  The cousins have created an astounding in-depth account of the diphtheria outbreak and all the events that transpired to save the children in Nome from a deadly epidemic.