A brief, incomplete history of the modern Alaskan husky
KASILOF, Alaska — When Aliy Zirkle set out to build a racing kennel, she went straight to the source. Instead of buying dogs from sprint kennels or Iditarod mushers, she traveled to villages near the Koyukuk River, a remote region of Alaska famed for producing tough, winning canines.
A team of these furry, hard-headed “village dogs” led her to victory in the 2000 Yukon Quest, and became the springboard for the Iditarod kennel she races today.
In going literally the extra mile - far, far off Alaska’s limited road system - Zirkle actually re-enacted a pattern of behavior that has gone on for decades, a pattern of buying and breeding between kennels across vast distances. Racing dogs were traded between Canada, the Koyukuk valley and Kotzebue and Nome. The net result of a century of dog deals by mushers - and before them, gold miners - transformed what once was a humble, hard-working village animal with a hint of wolf blood into the strange-looking but physically gifted genetic mutation now known simply as the Alaskan husky.
“You’re starting with a tremendously, biologically tough dog,” Zirkle said of the tough village stock. Toss in some Irish setter, Siberian husky, Saluki, stag hound and who knows what else to gain speed and a desire to please, select race-winning dogs for breeding, and the result is a world-class athlete with abilities far above other dogs, and most other species.
Some regions still retain strong ties to the past, such as the Eskimo dogs that won races for Herbie Nayokpuk and Isaac Okleasik. Iditarod teams from that cold, windy region still field dogs on the furrier side. Most Iditarod dogs, generally with ties to the explosion of sprint dogs emerging from the Koyukuk region, are thinner-coated and rangier.
Somewhere, buried among all those floppy ears, blue eyes and black-spotted tongues lies a prehistoric proto-dog that once helped villagers hunt, fish, draw water, lug firewood and travel from place to place.
Mushers talk about village dogs all the time, but rarely does anyone try to define the term. I didn’t have a solid definition either, so I thought I’d call a few people who are closer to the source and try to figure it out. It turned out that defining a “village dog” is about as easy and clear-cut as trying to unravel quantum physics.
“That’s sort of a hard term to cover,” mused George Attla, a living legend in mushing circles, who at 74 is now semi-retired from the sport.
“It’s something that is hard to put a finger on and say, ‘They’re this,’ or ‘They’re that.’ You can’t. There’s just so much that has been intertwined,” said Roxy Wright, past open class sprint racing champion, daughter of one of the chief architects of the modern racing husky, Gareth Wright, and mother of current Iditarod contender, Ramy Brooks.
Zirkle pointed out that it’s hard enough just agreeing on terms. Is a village dog one born and raised in the harsh, unforgiving Alaska bush that has the toughness to survive in 60 below eating fish, caribou or whatever is (or isn’t) available, or is a village dog an animal descended from elite lines that originated in some remarkable Yukon River racing kennels?
The answer is a little of each. Those tough dogs that predate written history laid the foundation for the fast sprint kennels that dominated racing through the latter half of the 20th century, kennels that rocketed almost miraculously from remote villages with populations of just a few hundred people. Villages like Huslia, Allakaket, Hughes and Ruby.
Technology spurred the rapid evolution of the Alaskan husky. First came the discovery of gold in Alaska at the turn of the 20th century, bringing miners and every conceivable breed of large dog to haul sleds. The advent of planes, trucks and especially the snowmobile further sped the transformation of the sled dog.
In Gareth Wright’s opinion, village dogs were exemplified in the largely pre-motorized era of his youth by the tiny teams of four to five dogs that every family relied upon. Each village developed its own distinct line of dogs, based on those that worked the hardest. Much like the Norwegian mushers do today to ensure a competitive team for Team Norway (piloted by Robert Sørlie in 2007) villages along the Yukon would pool dogs, sending their best athletes with one musher to compete in races. “You’d be racing against a team of leaders,” Wright said.
Just as the era of the reliable family trapline team was about to be annihilated by the introduction of the snowmachine, a few shrewd, hard-working and creative dog mushers flourished between both worlds. The most famous is George Attla.
Like a gifted orchestra conductor, Attla picked and chose and bred and bought, up and down the Yukon River, on his way to winning multiple sprint racing championships.
Joe Runyan, who has won the Quest and Iditarod and is a well-known analyst of the sport, spent his formative dog-mushing years around Ruby, one of the hotbeds of early sled dog racing. He describes the villages in the Koyukuk region as if they were almost one big alliance at one point, tenuously glued together by Attla, a wiry man with a gimped-up leg from a childhood bout with tuberculosis and a gut-full of ambition to win. “He’d have such a network,” Runyan said. “He had connections at Tanana, Galena, Ruby and other villages. He’d let ‘em breed to his really good males. Then he’d come back in the spring or fall with a boat, and pay good money to buy the pups back.”
The modern Alaskan husky is little more than an extension of the dogs Attla and a handful of other pioneers developed, and most competitive mushers still have dogs descended from seminal athletes with names like “Scotty,” “Chris” and “Lingo.”
Attla’s take on the birth of racing dogs
“Let’s talk about the good village dogs, the good athletes,” Attla said in a February phone interview from his village in Huslia. “In his village alone, I remember when we started having good dogs. The cross breeding came from Ruby, a guy there named Johnny Honea. The Huslia village dogs were crossed with his village. Then also a guy in Koyukuk, named Sanders Cleaver, he was one of the first to have good dogs I noticed in my time, good race dogs. There was Cue Bifelt, Edwin Simon, Billy Sam – those guys crossed Sanders Cleaver’s dogs with Huslia village dogs. We got better dogs than we had before with those crosses.
“And we actually didn’t know we had such fantastic dogs, because we were just here locally,” he said. That all changed when a musher named Raymond Paul won the world championship in Fairbanks in 1954, and ventured to Huslia’s spring carnival to race. Paul promptly came in fourth. “Three of our guys beat him,” Attla noted.
There were plenty of other key figures, such as Harold Greenway and Harvey Drake. But one of the most influential along with Attla was Gareth Wright.
Wright, a young and ambitious dog driver from Nenana in the early 1950s, tried to copy his mushing hero Johnny Allen of Ruby, who had run dogs that were reportedly quarter wolf, quarter setter and half village lines. Wright got some dogs from Allen’s line, reintroduced setter into the mix, and called the resulting dogs aurora huskies. Wright promptly started winning big races, and that attracted Attla.
Now 78, Wright still obviously enjoys talking about the influential dogs that came from his kennel, and what it takes to stay atop of the game. He remembers dogs with names like Pluto, Rusty, Ruby, Joee and Odie - names that lie buried in the family trees of many sprint teams and most Iditarod contenders.
“It wasn’t maybe the toughness, but speed-wise and working attitude really improved being crossed with Gareth’s dogs,” Attla said. “In fact, in the ’70s, those were what I was running - village dogs crossed with Gareth Wright’s hound crosses. You got a superior dog.”
Roxy Wright couldn’t agree more. “I would say my dad was the foremost dog breeder in all of Alaskan history for breeding sled dogs. You can see his aurora huskies in all the top teams, sprint or distance, today. You can kind of’ pick ‘em out. I can tell them.”
Times keep on changing
The dogs winning Iditarod this year are not even at the pinnacle of the process, if there is such a thing as a pinnacle. The job requirement for a top sled dog is a moving target, and the breed will follow the most successful dogs. “It’s still an evolving thing, y’know,” Gareth Wright said, noting the introduction of short-haired pointer crosses about a decade ago, which swept sprint racing circles but stalled out somewhat among Iditarod kennels, where thicker fur, stamina and tougher heads still are needed on a dog’s resume. “What you’ve got to do is stay right on top of every breeding,” Wright advised. “When a guy comes up with superior dogs, you’ve got to breed into them, and then it takes two to three years to find out if you’ve got anything better.”
There’s still a remnant of old world dogs in the back eddies of Alaska, Roxy Wright noted. She recalls racing in the village of Venetie not too long ago, where a man there told a story about heading out on a hunt with relatives driving a team of sled dogs with wolf blood. The dogs were let loose and promptly helped the men hunt down caribou, she said. “That wasn’t that long ago,” she added, “because he was younger than me.”
Then she pointed out her opinion that racing, far from messing up the village dog bloodline, has boosted the caliber and number of sled dogs, which would have died off if they didn’t evolve.
“Our world is changing,” Wright said. “Take Alaska of 100 years ago, and it is just light years away. Racing didn’t do that. Technology and motorized vehicles did. You can’t go back to that. It’s yesterday. It’s gone. Yes, I think racing has sustained them, rather than hurt them.”