In the early 1920's,
settlers came to Alaska looking for gold. They traveled by boat to the coastal
towns of Seward and Knik, and from there by land into the gold fields. The
trail they used to travel inland is known today as the lditarod Trail, one of the
National Historic Trails designated by the congress of the United States. The
Iditarod Trail quickly became a major thoroughfare in Alaska, as the mail and
supplies were carried across this trail. People also used it to get from place
to place, including the priests, ministers, and judges who had to travel
between villages down this trail was via god sled.
Once the gold rush ended, many gold-seekers
went back to where they had come from, and suddenly there was much less travel
on the lditarod Trail. The introduction of the airplane in the late 1920's
meant dog teams were mode of transportation, of course airplane carrying the
mail and supplies, there was less need for land travel in general. The final
blow to the use of the dog teams was the appearance of snowmoniles.
By the mid 1960's most Alasknas didn't even
know the lditarod Trail existed, or that dos teens had played a crucial role in
Alaska's early settlements. Dorothy G.Page, a self-made historian, recognized
how few people knew about the former use of sled dogs as working animals and
about the Iditarod Trail's role in Alaska's colorful history. To she came up
with the idea to have a god sled race over the Iditarod Trail. She presented
her idea to an enthusiastic musher, as dog sled drivers are known, named Joe
Redington, Sr. Soon the pages and the Redintons were working together to
promote the idea of the Iditarod race.
Many people worked to make
the first Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race a reality in 1967. The Aurora Dog
Mushers Club, along with men from the Adult Camp in Sutton, helped clear years
of overgrowth from the first nine miles of the Iditarod Trail. To raise
interest in the race, a $25,000 purse was offered, with Joe Redington donating
one acre of his land to help raise the funds. The short race, approximately 27
miles long, was put on a second time in 1969.
After these first two
successful races, the goal was to lengthen the race a little further to the
ghost town of Iditarod by 1973. However in 1972, the U.S. Army reopened the
trail as a winter exercise, and so in 1973, the decision was made to take the
race all the way to the city of Nome-over 1,000 miles. There were who believed
it could bot be done and that it wad crazy to send a bunch out into vast,
uninhabited Alaskan wilderness. But the race went! 22 mushers finished that
year, and to date over 400 people have completed it.
In 1925, when a diphtheria
outbreak threatened the lives of people in the remote town of Nome, the
government used the Iditarod Trail to transport medicine nearly 700 miles to
the town. If the author chose the include this fact is the passage, it would
best fit in
The history of literature really began was the earliest of
the arts. Man danced for joy round his primitive camp fire after the defeat and
slaughter of his enemy. He yelled and shouted as he danced and gradually the
yells and shouts became coherent and caught the measure of the coherent and
caught the measure of the dance and thus the first war song was sung. As the
idea of God developed prayers were framed. The songs and prayers became
traditional and were repeated from one generation to another, each generation
adding something of its own. As man slowly grew more civilized, he was
compelled to invent some method of writing by three urgent necessities. There
were certain things that it was dangerous to forget and which, therefore, had
to be recorded. It was often necessary to communicate with person who were some
distance away and it was necessary to protect one’s property by making tools,
cattle and so on, in some distinctive manner. So man taught himself to write
and having learned to write purely for utilitarian reasons he used this new
method for preserving his war songs and his prayers. Of course, among these
ancient peoples, There were only a very few individuals who learned to write,
and only a few could read what was written.
The war song evolved out of
