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SUMMARY WINTER LEGENDS Mare Pit “The governor’s staff telegraphed E.G. Wetzler, Railway Mail Service in Nenana, instructing him to send the following message to U.S. Signal Corps stations between Nenana and the Bering coast: ‘Request the best musher and team in your section to stand by to receive the serum for Nome starting from Nenana tomorrow.”’ (20) The day was February the 28th, 1925. A package that could save hundreds of lives reached Nenana. The clock was ticking for twenty mushers, spread over the northern parts of Alaska, on whose shoulders laid the task to make a safe passage to Nome. Children were dying fast in this Inuit town on the Bering Sea. Diptheria had found its way to the small northern town which seemed to stand defenceless in its winter isolation. The natives were the first to be struck by this white man’s disease and the virus was spreading fast. Without a new supply of serum all the people of Nome and its surroundings could die. But how could this deserted place be reached in the middle of winter? The solution came with The Last Great Race to Nome which soon came to be known as the Great Race of Mercy. The lives of the people of Nome came in the hands of the local mushers. On their sleds and with their fastest and strongest dogs in front they would take the serum and pass it on until it reached its final destination. Knowing that the longer it would take them to deliver the small bundle with serum, the more there would die. The story of this sled dog race is a story full of heroes, of stories about brave men who faced the Arctic dangers. But the creation of these northern heroes and winter legends didn’t stay refrained to the past. In 1967, 37 years after the famous Race of Mercy, two thirds of the trail traveled in 1925 from Nenana to Nome brought new heroes to Alaska. De Iditarod Trail Sled Race heard its first starting signal. And from that day until now every first Saturday in March, Alaska and its people awake for the start of the toughest and biggest dog sled race known to mankind. The race remains a representation of the age old fight of man against nature and the age old alliance between man and dog. From the city of Anchorage the mushers leave for the deserted Alaskan plains, the dangerous mountain ranges and the treacherous Bering Sea coast. They know that there is a chance that not all of their four feet companions will survive this journey. The cold, pain and exhaustion take lives as well as they create legends. As the teams are on their way to no man’s land, the trail that once led to the goldmines of Alaska will take the winner this time to a different kind of gold. It will take him or her to the gold that each year is destined to go to only one man or woman, the winner of the Iditarod. This incredible journey provides until this day a fertile soil for stories about extraordinary people on an extraordinary adventure. To become legendary though isn’t a destiny to be fulfilled by just anyone, whether or not you become a hero depends on they who tell your story. The story of Winter Legends is a tale about the creation of heroes through modern day storytelling. The thesis that I will look into is why one becomes a hero and will stay forever alive through stories told or written, while another is forgotten, never to be heard of again. The essence is the role of oral history in defining the legends, in this creation of a gap between survival en oblivion. I indulge myself in the fairytale of the Iditarod and observe the choices of the different storytellers to either keep alive the romanticism and adventure and help write a happy end or open their eyes and break the enchantment. (20) Alaska Geographic (2001:23) |