The Great Alaskan Race (2019) on Netflix
PG20191h 27mActionAdventureDrama
In 1925, diphtheria spreads through Nome, Alaska, and the antitoxin waits in Nenana. Planes are grounded and ships icebound, so Leonhard Seppala must decide whether to leave his daughter Sigrid.
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- Netflix1.9/5
- IMDb5.4/10801 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes20%
Trailer
Plot summary
In Nome, Alaska, in 1925, Dr. Welch notices children coughing and finds diphtheria, and the town has no antitoxin in stock. He warns Mayor Maynard, and Nome goes under quarantine. The serum is in Nenana, but snowstorms keep the planes on the ground and the frozen sea holds back the ships. Mayor Maynard gathers the mushers and tells them the medicine must travel to Nome by dog team. Leonhard Seppala has won the Sweepstakes Race three times and raises his daughter Sigrid alone after her mother Kiana died. He does not want to leave her. Constance, a nurse who matters to Sigrid, persuades him to go.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Great Alaskan Race (2019)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film omits a real mishap on the last stretch of the 1925 serum run: Gunnar Kaasen's sled tipped over in strong Arctic winds and dumped the diphtheria serum into a deep snowdrift, and he dug it out and reattached it before carrying on to Nome.
- On the real final leg, the last musher Ed Rohn had fallen asleep with his dogs locked in a barn, so Gunnar Kaasen kept going himself, possibly aware of the acclaim awaiting whoever finished, and reached Nome at 5:30 am on February 1.
- The film gives Seppala's wife and Sigrid's mother the name Kiana and makes her an Inuk native woman, but in reality Seppala's wife and Sigrid's mother was Constance.
SPOILER
The film shows only two Inuit girls, Mary and Akina, dying before the antitoxin arrived, but in reality seven children died of diphtheria, among them seven-year-old Margaret Eide, three-year-old Billy Barnett and six-year-old Bessie Stanley.- The film doesn't mention that another 1,100,000 units of serum were gathered and shipped to Alaska, where a second relay of dog mushers carried them to Nome in another six days; the epidemic was lifted by February 15, 1925, four weeks after it began.
- "Wild Bill" Shannon was the first musher in the real relay to pick up the serum at Nenana, but unlike the film he never reached Whiskey Creek: he passed it to Edgar Kalland in Tolovana after more than 50 miles in an Arctic storm, losing four of his nine sled dogs.
- The film has Seppala hand the serum to Gunnar Kaasen, but in the real relay the two never met: Seppala carried it more than ninety miles from Shaktoolik across Norton Sound and passed it at Ungalik to Charlie Olsen, who took it twenty miles to Bluff.
