Mail by dog sled across Alaska

A sepia postcard from about 1910 shows a group of unidentified mail contractors posing with their sled and dog team. The National Postal Museum keeps a photograph of the card. Its record says dog sleds carried mail in parts of the northern United States and the Alaskan Territory during the winter months, and that contract carriers used them across Alaska from the late nineteenth century into the early 1920s.

Why the mail went by dog team

Gold brought the crowds. In the 1890s thousands of Americans went north to the Klondike and Alaska, and word from home was one of the few comforts in a strange, hard country. It fell to the Post Office Department to keep those stampeders in touch with family thousands of miles away. When the rivers were free of ice, steamboats and canoes carried the mail. In the long dark winters most contractors used dog sleds, and remote settlements sometimes had no other contact with the outside world for much of the year.

Letters were awaited with real hunger. At Valdez, mail piled up for several months because it could not be taken further north, and the postmaster, only recently appointed, panicked and fled both the post office and the territory. In Dawson, in Canada's Yukon Territory, Americans stood in hours long lines for their mail. In 1898, the museum notes, 90 percent of Dawson's population was American born.

Weight decided what traveled

Every pound counted for the dogs. Sled loads were not supposed to go over 400 pounds, though real loads varied a great deal. Carriers took first class letters and usually refused newspapers, magazines and packages unless there was room to spare. Those waited for spring, when a steamboat or wagon might bring them in. Some people slipped newspaper clippings and small gifts inside their letters, but a carrier who found an envelope suspiciously thick might leave it behind for the boats.

The trails were dangerous. A letter written from Dawson in January 1902, now in the collections of the University of Alaska, Anchorage, reports that two mail carriers had drowned on unsafe ice and their mail was lost.

One family's sled

The museum owns a real mail sled. Contract carrier Ed Biederman, who lived from 1861 to 1945, used it on his 160 mile route between Circle and Eagle, Alaska. Sam Olson built it of hickory in 1922, with moose hide lashings, iron runners, a brake and springs, and cotton cords to hold the mail in place. Frostbite crippled Biederman in 1935 and he retired. His son Charlie took over the route, and his days as a dog sled mail carrier ended in 1938. Charlie kept the sled in the family and later gave it to his nephew, Max Beck, who donated it to the museum in 1995.

Dog sleds stayed in use until airplanes became common in the territory. The museum dates the last regularly scheduled dog sled route in Alaska to 1963, when contract airplane service replaced Chester Noongwook's team on St. Lawrence Island. The Postal Service historian gives the same year for the last dogsled route, from Gambell to Savoonga.

From the National Postal Museum collection, record A.2009⁠-⁠38.