Dan Seavey, a key figure in the early years of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and patriarch of the dog mushing Seavey family, died earlier this month at the age of 87.
Seavey ran the first Iditarod, placing third, his highest finish in five races. That was in 1973, when the race took the better part of a month, and organizers were still trying to figure out if a thousand-mile sled dog race across Alaska was even possible.
His son, Mitch, has won the Iditarod three times, and his grandson, Dallas, is the winningest Iditarod musher of all time, with six championships.
As chronicled in his 2013 book, "The First Great Race," the family's connection to dog mushing -- and Dan Seavey's career as a history teacher in Seward -- started after he drove his little family from Minnesota to Alaska.
Anchorage Daily News reporter Zachariah Hughes wrote about Seavey's life shortly after his passing.
Below is the transcript of an interview with Hughes on Alaska News Nightly. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Zachariah Hughes: I think he'd just always, growing up in Minnesota, just always been in love with the far north. Even when he and his wife met, my understanding is they had kind of both said, "You know, this is something we want to try." And when they moved to Seward in 1963, it was for sort of a trial run with a young family, like, "Can we do it? Like, let's get this adventure over with so we can start our, you know, real lives." And they fell in love.
And I think he got a puppy that was a sled dog, or sled dog lineage, pretty early on. And it just took. All of the accounts I've heard about those kind of early Seavey family years down on the Kenai Peninsula in the '60s, you know, they just really dove into the lifestyle.
In '64, the Good Friday Earthquake hit, and so they had not even been living in the state a year. And Seward was one of the coastal towns that was really hard hit by that. And from what I gather, that was a really big deal for their family, for their community, not just because they were around and helped restart the school and provide a little bit of a sense of continuity and normalcy after this devastating event, but it sounds like that was also a big deal in them putting down roots and really kind of committing.
Casey Grove: Yeah, like helping rebuild Seward and just the tightness of the community after that.
I guess, I mean, there wasn't, like, a manual for how to do long-distance, competitive dog mushing. And for somebody like Dan Seavey, who was just getting into it in the mid-'60s, what are some of the things that he he wrote about that he learned that made, like, a good sled dog or that made for good dog mushing?
ZH: So Dan Seavey was one of this group of guys who helped Joe Redington Sr., and some of the other folks that we talk about a little bit more with the Iditarod's starting, kind of helped the logistics get off the ground in the two years leading up to it, just all that scut work around the edges that was required.
By his account, I mean, a great deal of his book is just about how nobody knew what they were doing, and it was a lot more like this kind of wilderness camping trip slash experiment. Like people legitimately did not think they were going to make it there. And even some of the mushers, in accounts I've read, were like, "We'll see how far we can go."
He was, you know, running with some other people who came from rural Alaska and had a little bit more experience just out in wilderness and country. People were starting to get hungry. There was not this elaborate system of food drops (like today). But Dan Seavey has a story that I always really liked in his book, about he how he and George Attla at one point just started kind of figuring out, like, "Should we go and look for a moose to get some meat to feed our dogs?"
You know, the story of those first couple Iditarods is like, "Can we do it?" And he was one of the guys that did it. He came in third place his first year. You know, a history teacher from Seward. Third place.
CG: What kind of happened after, I guess, that first Iditarod for him?
ZH: He told me in an interview in 2022 it was just too much trying to balance his job and getting the time away from teaching. The Iditarod is in the middle of March, and now we think of it as like a week and a half-ish, two weeks. Back then, I mean, it took them like three weeks to just be out in the wilderness, never mind all the prep time around it.
So, you know, he remained engaged with mushing for years and years after that, involved in a lot of the organizational parts of it, so the (Iditarod) board, and he was really a true stickler for history. During our interview, he talked at length about how the Iditarod trail, the traditional trail, Anchorage was not really a part of it, was never really important. It was in Seward, his town, his adopted town, which is true.
You know, the Iditarod history has kind of, in some ways, like morphed into this thing that's really blurred some of the accurate parts of territorial and, you know, different parts of Alaska history. But he got the traditional Iditarod Trail designated a National Historic Trail and stayed involved, including with his progeny and going to Nome for finishes for many, many years, including when his own son and grandson have won the race.
CG: What do you think Dan Seavey's legacy is that he leaves dog mushing and the Iditarod?
ZH: I think a big part of it is that Mr. Seavey was part of this quirky group of folks who started this bizarre event, and the event took hold, and now it's part of our state culture, and it's one of the things Alaska is known for. And, you know, it's the Iditarod. He was one of the founding principles, not just because he was at the starting line and made it all the way to Nome, but because he was a person who was willing to work behind the scenes, and, like I said, do that kind of scut work that doesn't get as much recognition. And there's a there's a group of people, and there's a couple books about the first Iditarod, and their names are kind of knitted throughout.
But, you know, it wasn't like Joe Redington Sr. said, "So it goes," and it was willed into existence. It was a lot of people that were working after their day jobs and contributing. And yeah, I think obviously his family, not just Mitch and Dallas, but some of the other grandkids, and now even great grandkids, that are involved in mushing, are formidable presences and contributing members in one way or another. There's that.
But, you know, I think Dan Seavey, in my own experience, and this is what I've heard from other people too, he was just really nice. He didn't have to be as charitable. I think the first time I ever interviewed him, he talked with me for like an hour. He didn't have to do that, you know, I was just some Joe Schmo calling him up for a news article. But he was just willing to kind of share himself. And I think that's, for people that knew him, I think that might be a little bit more enduring than any of the particulars of his mushing career.
