They threw away the puppy because he was too small and too sickly to ever pull a sled. Twelve years later, that same little dog ran 261 miles through a -85°F blizzard and saved the lives of an entire town’s children.
His name was Togo.
He was born in 1913 in the kennel of a Norwegian-born musher named Leonhard Seppala, in the gold-rush town of Nome, Alaska. He was small. He was sickly. He had a swollen throat. Seppala took one look at the runt and decided this dog would never make it on the trail.
