Alaska in Cleveland

By Eilene Lyon

During my recent visit to Cleveland, Little Brother and I spent a morning at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Unfortunately, they are undergoing a renovation and all the major exhibit halls were closed. In addition to the few exhibits in the open hallways, and a small space upstairs, there was a planetarium presentation and two short 3-D films. They had an outdoor wild animal section, but anything zoo-like I find too depressing. Plus, it was raining and not inviting to be outside.

W examined a large case of glittering mineral samples. One wall had a black & white photographic study of bird nests with eggs. Upstairs we found a collection of Andy Warhol screenprints of threatened and endangered animals from a private collection.

I loved seeing this life-sized model of the famous Australopithecus afarensis, Lucy. The artist’s rendering seemed quite lifelike.

The planetarium program, narrated by a young man with a delicious, deep voice, had the usual constellations. The special program featured solar eclipses. Cleveland will be in the path of totality for a full solar eclipse in April 2024.

I learned more about annular, partial, and full eclipses, both lunar and solar (we had a near-total annular eclipse here in October). I remain somewhat mystified as to why any given place on earth can go centuries without being in the path of totality, given that the moon orbits earth every 28 days.

One of the films featured monarch butterfly migration. The other was about the Titanosaur, a sauropod recently discovered in South America that now reigns as the largest terrestrial animal of all time.

The final two items we saw both had a connection to Alaska. Perhaps because most of the museum’s 40,000 artifacts are currently off limits, a curator brought one out and stood in front of the gift shop, just waiting for someone like me to call out, “Is that from a narwhal?”

With a pleased grin, she brought the tusk over and answered all my questions, except one. The male narwhal grows a tusk, which is a type of tooth, much like an elephant tusk, but not ivory. They have no other teeth in their mouths. The tusk always grows from the left side, straight out and always twisted the same direction. The narwhal tusk may have been the inspiration for the horn of the mythical unicorn.

The one unanswered question (“We don’t know”) was “Do they ever use the tusk to break through the ice?” According to Google, that is not a behavior that’s ever been observed—nor have any of the many other speculative uses for the tusks. What is known is that the narwhal uses his tusk to detect changes in the environment, such as water temperature, salinity, and the presence of a possible meal.

The other Alaska-related exhibit was a taxidermical mount of a sled dog named Balto. A sled-dog team including Balto, and their musher, Gunnar Kaasen, completed the final leg (53 miles) of the 1925 serum run from Nenana to Nome, Alaska. Being the ones to arrive in Nome with the desperately needed diphtheria antitoxin, they were hailed as the heroes. But there’s more to the story.

When children in Nome began experiencing sore throats in December 1924, the local doctor originally misdiagnosed them with tonsilitis. By January, it was clear that a diphtheria epidemic had begun and the local hospital’s supply of antitoxin had expired. An emergency call was put out. The nearest supply was in Anchorage.

The serum traveled to Nenana by train and from there, went 624 miles by dog sled. The relay involved 20 mushers and about 150 sled dogs. The lead musher, and owner of many of the dogs, was Leonhard Seppala. Both Kaasen and all the dogs on his team worked for Seppala. Seppala indicated that Balto was never a lead dog.

Seppala and his team, led by Togo, traveled 170 miles from Nome to meet the relay, then did a 91-mile leg that included the most treacherous terrain of the entire route. Their 261 total miles dwarfs that of any of the other teams. In reality, Seppala and Togo had rights to be known as the true heroes of the day.

A statue of Balto was erected in New York City’s Central Park in December 1925, and remains there today. What happened to the dogs themselves is another story.

Balto, who was neutered, had no use as a breeder. He and his team wound up on the vaudeville circuit. They were eventually sold and left chained up at a novelty museum in Los Angeles. There, a businessman from Cleveland, George Kimble, found them and was shocked at their condition and treatment.

Kimble arranged for the dogs to be taken to Cleveland where they received a hero’s parade and lived out their lives in a comfortable setting at the Brookside Zoo (now the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo).

Balto died in 1933, was mounted by a taxidermist, and donated to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Though Alaska made an effort to bring Balto back permanently, Cleveland declined to honor the state’s wishes. They did loan Balto for two exhibitions in Anchorage in 1998 and 2017.

Feature image: Display photo of Gunnar Kaasen and Balto with the Central Park statue at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1925_serum_run_to_Nome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Togo_(dog)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balto