On Time Delivery: The Dog Team Mail Carriers by William S. Schneider (review)

Today’s Iditarod and Yukon Quest sled dog races are reminders of a vast overland trail system in Alaska on which dog team mail carriers once transported mail and supplies. For nearly half a century, the trails—now mostly abandoned, overgrown, and unused—provided a rich communications and commerce network for the state’s interior. In On Time Delivery: The Dog Team Mail Carriers, William S. Schneider engagingly describes the mail routes’ history and the quotidian yet heroic activities of its carriers.

During the late 1890s, regularly scheduled mail service in Alaska grew out of several factors: prospectors’ demands that the US government provide mail service, a growing number of merchants fueled by the gold rush, and problems created by prospectors’ inability to cope with a shortage of supplies. The trail system that evolved “led from year-round ice-free ports on the coast far into the interior where gold was discovered and where there was a population of prospectors” (xi). Catalyzing the trail system’s development was completion of the Alaska Railroad, a military road from Valdez to the interior, and a telegraph system connecting Nome to the continental United States.

Then, in the 1940s, dog team mail service ended on most routes with the advent of cheaper airplane mail and supply service. That savings came at a heavy price: abandoned trails, broken connections between communities, and the loss of the steady stream of news from mail carriers. Schneider openly laments the loss, writing, “When the dog team mail carriers were definitively replaced by the aviators, we lost more than the trails: we lost a way of life represented by a generation that sustained and supported themselves on the land” (104).

“The trails in winter and the rivers in summer created a network of communication and a level of connection not seen today,” Schneider said (108). “In the mail carriers’ day, the trails were the connecting link for mail, people, and the latest news that traveled from camp to camp, roadhouse to roadhouse” (x). The trail system, with its centers of commerce, also provided work for many Alaskan natives who had previously lived a subsistence lifestyle. The way of life extended to the carriers’ support system—often family members, such as the wife of a mail carrier who made clothes for her husband and nine children, sewed booties for his sled dogs, and helped cut and dry fish to feed the dogs. In addition, wrote Schneider, “Mail carriers rode, if not facilitated, the rising wave of literacy in interior Alaska, and the mail—with its magazines, newspapers, and catalogs—exposed those living in isolated villages and settlements to the ‘outside’ world” (29).

But the work itself was grueling. Carriers were expected to deliver mail and supplies on a regular schedule regardless of weather or trail conditions. A trip of up to thirty miles was considered “a decent day’s work unless you encountered bad conditions” (35–36). One traveler said he had seen “a reluctant mail-carrier chased out at 60 degrees below zero, on pain of losing his job” (56–57). Mail carriers’ dog sleds sometimes climbed steep mountain divides and often hauled hundreds of pounds. Some carriers broke miles of trail on snowshoes; others fell through river ice during their runs; a few had to give up runs after freezing their feet.

Schneider, the oral history curator at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, for thirty years, combines oral history with assiduous research (a bibliography, index, and endnotes comprise nearly a quarter of the book’s 142 pages) to pen On Time Delivery with a sense of poignancy and urgency. He includes extensive oral history passages not only from children and grandchildren of mail carriers but also from elders for whom knowledge of the trails provided “but dim recollections.” Schneider notes, wistfully, “Their accounts are a reminder that we have captured only the tail end of this important era” (xi). By collecting first-hand interviews...