If you stroll through Central Park, you’re sure to come across a number of interesting statues, but one, in particular, may give you reason to pause.  At 67th Street, on the southeast side of the park, just off Central Park East Drive/Park Drive North, there’s a bronze statue of Balto, The Wonder Dog.  You might consider that few enough people in the world have statues created for them  (I’m pretty sure, for instance, that I won’t have one), much less dogs, but this one animal is particularly special for its service to its Alaskan owners in the first half of the Twentieth Century.  The plaque says the statue is dedicated to the spirit of Sled Dogs, but its two dogs that deserve the credit: Balto and Togo, who is the other Wonder Dog.

The town of Nome, Alaska, in 1925, was the epicenter of a diphtheria epidemic.  Isolated, remote, and in the middle of winter, where the world is dark most of the day and bitterly cold.  Dr. Curtis Welch, Nome’s lone physician, put out a radio call for help.  He needed antitoxin serum to save the townspeople.  At this point, several children had died, and more would die, if they couldn’t get the serum.  The closest hospital, though, was seven hundred miles away.  The only way to reach them was to send the medicine by a dog sled relay.  Gunnar Kaasen took up the last leg of the journey with his Siberian huskies, whose lead dog was new.  This was Balto.  The dogs and Kaasen braved temperatures of sixty to seventy degrees below zero for the last fifty-three miles.

As you look at this statue, whether its winter, spring, or summer, consider those fifty-three miles with Balto.  It certainly makes me grateful for living in a city and the chance to go back to a warm, comfortable room.  The actual Balto was stuffed and may be seen at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.  Most of the fame goes to Balto, as he was the lead dog in the last relay; however, another lead dog, Togo, who led musher Leonhard Seppala, brought the medicine across another arduous part of the trip, over Norton Sound.  Togo’s team actually traveled hundreds of miles there and back.  If the governor of Alaska had not added another relay to the team, the statue in Central Park would belong to Togo.  He’d be at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History too, instead of in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race Museum in Wasilla, Alaska.  Fortune and fame sometimes lends itself to odd quirks of fate; all food for thought while wandering Central Park.

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