Angel of the Yukon
Posted over 14 years ago by Stanley F Whittaker
Emily's mission: Dispensing the famous Nome serum
Visiting nurse says Nome's 'Angel of the Yukon' should be enrolled with the other heroes of the 1925 serum run
By MIKE DUNHAM
Published: March 14th, 2011 04:55 PM
Last Modified: March 14th, 2011 05:38 PM
ERIK HILL / Anchorage Daily News
Montana nurse Maria LaFond is a passionate promoter of Emily Morgan, a nurse who played a prominent role after mushers delivered diphtheria serum to Nome in 1925.
Every Alaskan knows the story of the 1925 Nome Serum Run, the historic rescue mission on which the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race is (loosely) based. How ice-bound Nome's only doctor diagnosed diphtheria and realized that an epidemic loomed that could wipe out the Gold Rush town. How he send out the SOS for serum and found none closer than in Anchorage, 1,000 roadless miles away.
Railroad men carried the medicine across recently laid snow-covered tracks to Nenana. There they handed the precious package to "Wild Bill" Shannon, the first musher in a relay of 20 men who, stage by stage, risked their lives in a race against death, struggling through minus-60-degree temperatures and arctic blizzards with hurricane-force winds.
Fingers froze. Faces were frostbitten. Dogs died. But five days from Nenana, Gunnar Kaasen drove his team down Front Street, handed the serum to Dr. Curtis Welch and Nome was saved!
Right?
Close, but not complete, says Maria LaFond.
"The serum still wasn't at its ultimate destination -- the patients," she says.
That vital final step in delivery was not accomplished by men and dogs, but by women, LaFond points out. Nurses risked their own lives, walking miles to reach remote huts and outlying villages, enduring the same kinds of conditions that the mushers had faced, entering quarantined zones, calming frantic, suspicious families and administering the shots.
And that's how Nome was saved.
LaFond, a traveling nurse from Montana who has been working at Providence Alaska Medical Center this winter, thinks the public should know about these frontier medicine women. And what better time than right now, during the 2011 Iditarod and Women's History Month?
She has a specific nurse in mind: Emily Morgan, who was at Dr. Welch's side in Nome. You can see her in footage re-enacting the mercy mission on YouTube under the title "Balto in news (part II)".
LaFond has researched Morgan's life. She was born to a homesteading family in El Dorado, Kan, in 1878. She graduated from nursing school in St. Joseph, Mo., worked in missions in India and as an army nurse during World War I. In 1923, the Red Cross sent her to the ultimate hardship post: Nome.
When children began dying, fevered and struggling for breath, it was Morgan who first realized how dangerous the situation was, LaFond says: "Dr. Welch didn't figure it out. He thought it was tonsillitis. But Emily had had diphtheria herself, years before, and she's the one who first recognized the symptoms."