The Cruelest Miles Quotes

“The man-dog contract goes back to before the invention of writing, before the invention of the wheel, even before the invention of agriculture. In that sense, living with dogs may be one of the oldest surviving cultural landmarks of our heritage, a surviving fragment of the Stone Age.”
― Gay Salisbury, The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic

“No record exists of Bear’s fate. He may have survived, but in all likelihood he never ran again—a horrible fate for an animal that lived and breathed solely to run with its pack down a moonlit trail. Some dogs just won’t accept being left out of the team and will howl and moan as the team leaves the yard. Sometimes they will sink into depression and die. Even those who accept their fate to sit by and watch the team leave always keep alive the instinct to one day run again. “If ever their master comes to them with harness in hand,” a modern-day musher wrote, “they will struggle on arthritic legs to ready themselves for the trail. There may be pain in their backs, but there is always hope in their eyes.”
― Gay Salisbury, The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic

“By 1925, most Native Alaskans had made their pact with the modern age. They still hunted, fished, and traded on occasion, but their bread and butter was in hauling supplies and carting the U.S. mail along the trails. These were skills handed down to them by their parents and their grandparents. If the serum could rescue Nome from the ravages of an ancient plague, then its safe arrival by dogsled would be a testament to the hard-learned survival skills and spirit of the Athabaskans and Eskimos.”
― Gay Salisbury, The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic

“Nature has many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his finity,” London wrote in his short story “The White Silence,” but “…The most tremendous, the most stupefying of all, is the passive phase of the White Silence. All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice. Sole speck of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead world, he trembles at his audacity, realizes that his is a maggot’s life, nothing more.”
― Gay Salisbury, The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic

“There are a few lonely places in this world, and the wastes of the great Alaskan Interior are the loneliest of them all.”
― Gay Salisbury, The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic

“SHANNON TRIED to rest in Tolovana, but he had the fate of Cub, Jack, Jet, and now Bear on his mind. In a few days, he would return to Nenana with all four dogs in his sled. Cub, Jack, and Jet would die not long after his return. Shannon’s own frostbite had been so severe that it would be weeks before he would once again be able to touch his own face with a razor and shave. Even then, it was a painful experience. He told a reporter that he had done nothing out of the ordinary, that his animals deserved all the praise.”
― Gay Salisbury, The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic

“A man is only as good as his dogs when he is on the trails of Alaska…and a dog is only as good as his feet,” a well-traveled dog driver once said.”
― Gay Salisbury, The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic

“Dogsledding had evolved in the Arctic over thousands of years as an integral part of an aboriginal culture well suited to the harshest climate and living conditions on earth. Isolated and unknown to the rest of the world, both the Athasbaskan Indians of the Interior and the Eskimos along the coast learned to survive by utilizing all of the limited resources at their disposal. The land, sea, and ice provided their food, clothing, tools, and shelter. Making much out of virtually nothing, their remarkable innovations in this most unforgiving environment rank as one of the high water marks of human achievement and ingenuity.”
― Gay Salisbury, The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic

“I am proud of my racing trophies,” Seppala once said, “but I would trade them all for the satisfaction of knowing that my dogs and I tried honestly to give our very best in humanitarian service to our fellowman, regardless of race, creed, color, in Alaska’s pioneer days. Often the going was rough—sometimes my courage was greater than my team’s—several times I was ready to quit but was ashamed because of the great fighting heart of the Siberian Husky.”
― Gay Salisbury, The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic

“The first rule of survival was to hang on to the team, because without the dogs you were dead.”
― Gay Salisbury, The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic

“THERE WERE few worse places on earth to build a town, but Nome had gone up almost overnight after two Swedes and a Norwegian found a nugget the size of a small rock in a creek near the beach.”
― Gay Salisbury, The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic

“An attorney named Albert Fink, who years later would defend Al Capone, would tip his hat whenever he passed a husky he particularly respected, and”
― Gay Salisbury, The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic

“Tex Rickard started his career staging boxing matches for Nome’s miners, then moved on to New York and built Madison Square Garden, becoming one”
― Gay Salisbury, The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic