Siberian Huskies are of ancient lineage, dating back to more than 4000 years. Many experts believe that the breed evolved
with the Chukchis, a semi-nomadic, reindeer hunting people of extreme north-eastern Siberia. The
climate was once warmer in Siberia, but turned very cold about 3000 years ago. This meant that the Chukchis had to travel farther and
farther to find food, so the hunters moved all of their possessions and families along with them.
 The dogs became more and more important with the passing of time and became invaluable to the Chukchis
for their survival. They bred their dogs for multipurpose work: hunting, herding, and hauling. Sleds were mostly used for
hauling goods; the people walked. The animals were so highly prized that only babies, the very old and sick were allowed to
ride.
The Chukchis developed an elaborate religion worshiping one god. They believed that the gates of
heaven were guarded by two Chukchis dogs and that anyone who mistreated a dog would not go to "Chukchis Heaven".
The Chukchis eventually domesticated reindeer
and used them for hauling heavy loads; therefore, a premium was placed on the speed, endurance, and agility of the dogs. Even
today, no other purebred dog can haul a light load as fast and as far, on so little food, as the Siberian Husky. Please note,
this is not an excuse to not feed your Siberian every day!
"The Little Man with His Little Dogs"
Born
in Skjervoy,
Norway inside the Arctic Circle, Leonhard Seppala came to Alaska
as a young man around 1900 seeking fortune and adventure. A short man at only about 5 feet tall, Seppala had been an
Arctic fisherman since he was 11years old, an apprentice blacksmith to his father, and was an accomplished wrestler and skier.
Seppala worked at various jobs in the mining camps. In 1914, Jafet Lindeberg, his employer, acquired what was left of the
first Siberian imports and their offspring, around fifteen animals in all. They were to be a gift to the explorer Captain
Roald Amundsen, who was planning an expedition to the North Pole. Seppala
was given the job of the care and training of the dogs and he loved it.
When
World War I broke out it changed Amundsen’s plans and Seppala ended
up in possession of the dogs. He entered the 1914 All Alaska Sweepstakes, but with disastrous results he had to drop out early
when he lost the trail, and his dogs’ feet got badly cut. He trained hard in secret, far from town, Blitzing the field
in the 1915 Sweepstakes by over and hour. He repeated this victory in 1916 and 1917, at which time the increased war
effort and the lack of any real competition for him caused the race to be discontinued.
“The
little man with his little dogs” as he came to be known, became a legend in Alaska, remaining devoted to his Siberians
hauling freight and supplies, setting many new records in mid-distance races, and on several occasions being involved in truly
heroic exploits he once, unarmed, chasing down an armed kidnapper, and on another occasion transporting a man mangled
in a sawmill accident over a long distance at a speed no one thought possible.
In
1925, Seppala and his Siberians came to national prominence, with the famous "Serum Run" that saved the city of Nome from a diphtheria epidemic. Seppala and his Siberians, with his
famous lead dog Togo, covered 340 miles in that race against death, with no other team traveling more than 53 miles.
Togo became permanently lame from that marathon run. Seppala credited Togo with over 5,000 miles in his running career. The teams
had covered a distance of 650 miles that normally took the mail teams twenty-five days, and they did it in just five and a
half days. Senator Dill of Washington state had the story written into the Congressional Record, one sentence of which reads,
"Men had thought the limit of speed and endurance had been reached in the grueling races of Alaska, but a race for sport and
money proved to have far less stimulus than this contest in which humanity was the urge and life was the prize.
A Challenge in New England
After
the Serum Run Seppala was a national hero and he marched in parades and posed for glamorous photographs
in his equally glamorous furs, sometimes in 900F weather. All this fame and notoriety brought a challenge from Arthur Walden the
polar explorer, adventurer, and full-time blowhard, he challenged Seppala to come to New England
to race against his locally famous Chinook dogs, a strain of large, Mastiff-types he had developed from a single dog. This
dog, named Chinook, gained fame on Admiral Richard E. Byrd's first Antarctic expedition. Walden would become Byrd's chief
dog handler on that voyage, was the president of the New England Sled Dog Club, and was generally considered unbeatable.
Seppala
accepted the challenge. As they drove their teams for three days to get to the site of the race, Seppala was careful to keep
his dogs in check and letting Walden gain a false sense of confidence. Seppala figured his dogs may be out of condition
from all their parade appearances and wasn't sure how they would perform on the New England
trails. As the two teams lined up the Chinooks weighing in at 90 to 100 pounds, the Siberians at around half that weight
the contrast was striking. many New Englanders objected to the race on humanitarian grounds, considering the Siberians too
small to compete (There were even nutters like that in them days) Dick Moulton,
who would later become Byrd's chief dog handler and a two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner (once for saving the Admiral's
wife and once for his search-and-rescue missions during the Battle of the Bulge), was a teenager at the time. Moulton remembered
vividly the stark contrast between the dogs as the two teams were boarded at opposite ends of a barn the night before the
race. "At one end," he says, were Walden's great big Chinooks, while at the other were these sweet, little, kind of foxy Siberian
dogs who stood up on their hind legs to greet you, and their heads were hardly higher than your waist."
What
was not Known in 1925, was that if you double a dog's size, you only increase heart and lung capacity by about a 30 percent
therefore big dogs tire much sooner than medium-sized dogs. The next day Seppala simply left Walden's team in his dust,
changing the history of New England sled dog racing for all time. Admiral Byrd, himself,
would learn the same lesson when he reprimanded Moulton, upon first arriving on his second Antarctic expedition, asking why
in the world he had brought such little dogs. Moulton simply demurred, and Byrd then took of in at this point in the story,
a twinkle in his eyes. "You see," he says, "I knew that not only do big dogs get tired quickly, they also need a long time
to rest. But I wasn't going tell HIM that!”
Early New England Breeders
The Last of the Imports, and
AKC Recognition
Seppala
stayed on in New England for a time, winning pretty much all the races and planting the seeds of the future Siberian Husky
that would come to be officially recognized by the American Kennel Club in 1930.A partnership with Seppala and a woman named
Elizabeth Ricker,
Elizabeth had imported the last Siberians to come directly from Siberia and was an avid sled dog enthusiast, Nine of
these were selected by the renowned expert on Siberian dogs, Olaf Swenson, but
the ship that brought them to the United States became stranded in ice for the winter, and only four survived. Kreevanka and
Tserko were the most influential of these males, who, along with the legendary Togo,
his father Suggen, and the beautiful leader Fritz, probably figure in the pedigree of every Siberian Husky living-if one were
to trace back that far.
The
dogs developed by the Seppala-Ricker partnership eventually went to Harry Wheeler
of St. Jovite, Canada,
in 1932 when Elizabeth Ricker married the explorer Kaare Nansen and gave up her
dogs. From these, in turn, came the animals that would form the three most influential kennels in the establishment and development
of the AKC-recognized Siberian Husky: Milton and Eva Seeley’s Chinook Kennels,
Nicholas and Lorna Demidoff’s Monadnock Kennels, and Mrs. Marie Lee Frothingham’s Gold River Kennels.
Chinook
In 1929 shortly after his return from the Antarctic on the first Byrd expedition Arthur Walden sold
Chinook Kennels to Milton and Eva Seeley.
Milton
had just been diagnosed with diabetes and was advised by his doctor to take up country living. It was at Chinook that
the dogs were trained for Byrd’s second and third Antarctic expeditions, and there that most of the Search and Rescue
teams used in World War II were developed. Like Elizabeth
Ricker before them, the Seeleys bred both Alaskan Malamutes and Siberian Huskies, and are seen as doing
much of the important foundation work in both breeds. For their Siberian stock, they combined animals from Harry Wheeler and chose coming directly from Alaska
to produce several of the first champions in the breed after AKC recognition. Their most famous and influential animals were
probably Ch. Wonalancet’s Baldy of Alyeska (sire of the extremely influential Izok of Gap Mountain) and Ch. Alyeska’s
Suggen of Chinook, both of whom proved important to the development of the Demidoffs’ Monadnock line along with many
others. Milton Seeley died in 1944, but Eva (affectionately known to all as “Short”)
continued to be very influential in the breed (judging, driving, breeding, and serving in many capacities for the Siberian
Husky Club of America, of which both Seeleys had been founding members) for decades thereafter. When Short Seeley died in
1985, Chinook Kennels became an official historic landmark of the State of Vermont,
and can be visited to this day.
Monadnock
Lorna Demidoff became interested in sled dogs while married
to Moseley Taylor, who was the owner of the Boston Globe. Moseley purchased Lorna
her first Siberians from the Seeleys, along with a dog named Tuck who was from the Mike Cooney/John "Iron Man" Johnson kennels
in Alaska.
Lorna became the first woman to win a race, finished her first champion (and first Group placer in the breed) in 1939, her
first home-bred champion in 1941, and became, for the next three decades, the most prominent breeder of Siberian show dogs
and breeding stock in the United States. Having divorced Mosely Taylor, she married Nicholas Demidoff,
an émigré Russian prince, in 1941, becoming affectionately known as "the Princess." She fielded competitive teams through
the 1950s and continued to drive her pleasure teams until well into her sixties. Her animals may have won more National Specialties
than anyone else's before or since, and her Ch. Monadnock's Pando was possibly the most influential stud dog in the history
of the breed. (When he was shown for the last time in the Veterans' Class at age 14 in Philadelphia,
he not only received a standing ovation, but was discovered to be the progenitor of 100 of the 103 Siberians shown that day!)
With his son, Ch. Monadnock's King, he won every major Best Brace in Show award for which they competed, and virtually spearheaded
the black-and-white, blue-eyed fashion in the breed. Lorna once told me the author said she regretted having started "that
craze" and also regretted letting Pando be used at stud on so many bitches. "But, you know' she said, "There were so many
shy dogs in those days that if the bitch had a good temperament I usually accepted her for breeding." I think this is a very
telling comment because, although she was known (quite rightly) for establishing consistency of type in the breed, her greatest
gift was probably in the area of making more consistent the confident, friendly temperament we so much value in the Siberian
today. Until her death in 1993, Lorna Dernidoff remained the "premier" breeder-
judge of Siberians and one of America's
most respected Group and Best in Show judges.
Cold River
Affectionately
Known as ”the Duchess," Mrs. Marie Lee Frothingliam did not
follow her friends Short Seeley and Lorna Demidoff into the show ring, with the
consequent stronger focus on greater consistency of type, markings, and furnishings. However, she did produce several influential
show champions, most significantly Ch. Helen of Cold River (Dr. Roland Lombard's great racing leader) but her focus remained racing. Though
she never drove a team herself she fielded some of the most competitive teams of her time, 1936-56,
often two top-flight teams per race. When she retired, some of her better animals were passed onto her then driver/trainer
team, Lyle and Marguerite Grant, to form their famous Marlytuk Kennels. Many
of these dogs, though still very capable running dogs, became dominant show dogs, particularly the multiple-Specialty winner
and famous producer, Ch. Marlytuk's Red Son of Kiska, sired by the last great Monadnock stud, Ch. Monadnock's Akela.
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