Museum swap bring bones of hero dog back to Alaska

More than 100 years after he ran the longest stretches in a heroic dogsled mission to bring lifesaving medicine to snowbound Nome, Togo has returned to Alaska.

Or, to be more precise, Togo’s bones have returned. The skeleton of the famous dog that led legendary musher Leonhard Seppala’s team for 261 miles of the 674-mile Serum Run in 1925, which delivered lifesaving medicine to a diphtheria-stricken Nome, is now at the University of Alaska Museum of the North in Fairbanks.

It is a fitting resting place for Togo’s remains, said Link Olson, the museum’s curator of mammals.

“He’s probably one of the most beloved dogs in the history of humankind,” Olson said.

Togo’s bones, which arrived at the museum on Sept. 1, were sent as part of a trade with the Peabody Museum at Yale University. While the Alaska museum gained the remains of the famous dog, the Peabody Museum gained more than 1,000 specimens of small mammals from Cambodia, including treeshrews, a bamboo rat and microbats.

The museum trade plan goes back two decades, when Link and his friend Eric Sargis, the Peabody Museum’s mammal curator, were collecting specimens in Cambodia. The idea was to split the specimens evenly, storing some at the Alaska museum and some at the Yale museum.

But until recently, the Yale museum lacked the technology to properly store and protect the specimens, so they all came to Alaska. “We had this world-class collection of Southeast Asian mammals, the biggest collection to this day of Cambodian mammals, including a bunch of tissues. And we had liquid nitrogen cryo facilities, and at that time Yale didn’t,” Olson said. “So I basically sat on them for 20 years.”

The Peabody Museum underwent a recent renovation and expansion, and now it has the proper facilities. Additionally, it is on what is considered a geographic museum corridor that gives researchers from different institutions who are interested in Cambodian mammals easier access. All that made it logical for the Peabody Museum to be the repository of rare Cambodian specimens.

Alaska was already home to other parts of Togo’s body. A mount made from his skin and face is on display at the Iditarod Trial Committee headquarters in Wasilla.

The return of Togo’s bones actually started as a quip while plans were being made for distributing the Cambodian specimens, Olson said. “I started joking, ‘Hey, we want Togo back,’” he said.

The joke became reality, though not quite in time for the centennial of the Serum Run, which was last year.

Not all the Cambodian specimens were sent back east. The Alaska museum is keeping a lot of them. Even though its official name is “University of Alaska Museum of the North,” it has a lot of non-Alaska and non-northern specimens in its collection — including the skeleton of an elephant that died in Cambodia after falling into a hole left by an explosive mine during the Vietnam War. The elephant skeleton is useful for comparison to the museum’s woolly mammoth and mastodon specimens, Olson said.

At the Peabody Museum, Togo’s bones were assembled — “articulated,” as museum experts put it — and displayed intermittently as a full skeleton. They arrived in Alaska still articulated, though the hind legs got a little detached during shipment, Olson said.

Eventually, they will be put on display in the Fairbanks museum, though details are yet to be determined, he said.

The cultural history is well known. Togo’s story is part of Alaska lore.

His life started without signs that he would be a star sled dog. As a puppy, he was small and sickly. Seppala, figuring Togo would not be fit for a team, gave him away to be kept as a pet.

But in a famous episode, Togo escaped his new home by breaking through a window and running back to Seppala’s kennel.

To calm the rambunctious Togo, Seppala later harnessed him as a wheel dog in a team embarking on a work trip in the Nome area. In that first run, Togo proved himself to be lead dog material. After that, he led Seppala’s teams to victories in the All-Alaska Sweepstakes, an important Alaska sled dog race based in Nome.

Then came the Serum Run.

Twenty dog teams traveled relay style from Nenana, where the medicine had been delivered on the Alaska Railroad, to Nome. Conditions in the middle of winter were particularly harsh. Togo, leading Seppala’s team, traveled the longest, including the stretch over treacherous Norton Sound that continues to challenge mushers and dogs in the modern Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

The medicine was delivered in time to save Nome, and some of the participants in the Serum Run became national celebrities.

Later, Togo retired in Maine. His health deteriorated, and four years after the Serum Run, he was euthanized. It was a significant enough event to warrant a New York Times obituary.

“The big, shaggy Siberian husky which four years ago raced across the Alaskan wastes at the head of a dog team with serum for the diphtheria-stricken inhabitants of Nome went painlessly across the Big Divide to the dog’s Valhalla on Thursday night,” said the Dec. 9, 2029, story, which mentioned that Togo’s body was donated to the Peabody Museum.

Many years later, the mount made from Togo’s skin and face was shipped to the Iditarod Trail Committee headquarters in Wasilla, where it remains on display.

Immediately after the Serum Run — and in the years and decades to follow — a different sled dog got much of the attention: Balto, the lead dog in the final team that pulled up to Nome.

There was prominent national news coverage. “The north country has written on the pages of its history in large letters the name of Balto, lead dog of Gunnar Kasson’s team,” the New York Times reported on Feb. 4, 2025.

There was a statute erected in New York’s Central Park. There were numerous children’s books about him. There was a hit animated movie released in 1995 with ties to reality that are somewhat loose; for example, the movie version of Balto has a love interest whose cartoon appearance was modeled after the face of Hollywood icon Audrey Hepburn.

Though some Alaskans still complain that Balto’s celebrity overshadowed Togo’s accomplishments, the latter also got recognition.

Fictional detective Nancy Drew, in the books chronicling her adventures, named her pet dog Togo. Statues of both Balto and Togo were erected at the Cleveland Metropark Zoo. There was a live-action movie released in 2019 titled, simply, Togo. Closer to home, Camp Togowoods, a 400-acre site near Wasilla operated by the Girl Scouts, is named for the hero dog.

In 2011, Time magazine named Togo the most heroic animal of all time for his role in the Serum Run.

“The sled dog who did the lion’s share of the work was Togo. His journey, fraught with white-out storms, was the longest by 200 miles and included a traverse across perilous Norton Sound — where he saved his team and driver in a courageous swim through ice floes. Togo, we salute you,” the magazine feature said.