A diphtheria outbreak, an iced-in port and the only medicine 674 miles away. Twenty teams relayed it through a blizzard. A 12-year-old husky named Togo ran the longest and most dangerous stretch. Another dog ran the last few miles into town and got the statue.
Led Leonhard Seppala's team 170 miles out to meet the serum, then 91 miles back with it, straight across the open sea ice of Norton Sound in the dark.
BALTO55 MI
Led Gunnar Kaasen's team on the final leg into Nome at 5:30 in the morning on February 2. His statue went up in Central Park that December.
Every runner has a Balto.
The lore
The dog nobody wanted
1913
I · The runt
Admiral Heihachirō Tōgō, 1907. The dog was named after him.
Togo was born in Alaska on October 17, 1913, a small, sickly Siberian husky. He was named after the Japanese admiral Heihachirō Tōgō. Yes, there's a hachi in his name too.
His owner, the musher Leonhard Seppala, didn't think he'd ever pull a sled, so at six months old he gave him away as a pet. A few weeks later Togo jumped through a closed glass window and ran miles back to Seppala's kennel.
Seppala let him join the team. On his first day in harness, Togo ran more than 75 miles. Every trencher who was counted out early knows this dog.
January 1925
II · The sea ice
Diphtheria broke out in Nome. The town's antitoxin had expired, the port was frozen shut and the nearest serum sat at a railhead in Nenana, 674 miles away. Twenty mushers and about 150 dogs relayed it across Alaska in five and a half days, in temperatures down to −62°F.
Togo was 12. He led Seppala's team 170 miles out to meet the relay, then turned for home with the serum and took the shortcut no one else would: about 20 miles straight across the open sea ice of Norton Sound, in the dark, with a wind chill near −85°F and the ice breaking up behind them. They covered 84 miles that day. In all, his team ran 261 miles, the longest leg of the run by far.
Leonhard Seppala and six of his dogs, about 1924–25. Togo is on the far left, tongue out. The writing across the bottom calls him the most traveled dog in Alaska. Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum, public domain.December 15, 1925
III · The statue
Balto led the last team, about 55 miles, into Nome on the morning of February 2. The newspapers were waiting at the finish line. Ten months later, Balto's statue went up in Central Park.
Togo retired to Maine and died in 1929, at 16. He didn't get a statue of his own until 2001. Time later named him the most heroic animal of all time.
I never had a better dog than Togo.Leonhard Seppala, 1960
Today
IV · The trenches
Nothing changed. On pump.fun, the dev who builds the chart does the work, and a copy with a louder account gets the volume. Same name, same ticker, same art, five minutes later.
Even Togo got vamped. Search pump.fun for $TOGO and you'll find dozens of them, dead at a few thousand dollars, and not one of them told his story. That's the Balto problem: the copy gets the statue, the runner gets forgotten.
Now
V · The serum
So we're done building statues for copies. $TOGO launches on Garlic, the launchpad where a coin that copies another's name, ticker and art can't launch at all.
And the runners get paid. Play the Serum Run below: every hour, the longest run by a $TOGO holder wins half of that hour's creator fees, bought back as $TOGO and sent to their wallet. You run, the trenches pay.
We are the team that ran the ice. Mush.
The Serum Run
Run the sea ice
Lead Togo's team across Norton Sound. Dodge the cracks and open water. Past mile 180, copies start cutting into your lane. Togo made it 261 miles. How far do you get?
THE SERUM RUN
Steer with ← → or A / D. On a phone, tap the left or right side.
Connect a wallet to post your run to this hour's board.
TOGO
