Susan Butcher

Dog Musher

• Born: December 26, 1954
• Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: August 5, 2006
• Place of death: Seattle, Washington

Sport: Sled-dog racing

Early Life

Susan Howlett Butcher was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 26, 1954. Susan spent her childhood in Cambridge with her sister, Kate, and her parents, Charles and Agnes Butcher. Her early yearning for outdoor adventure was satisfied by spending summers on the Maine seashore. She enjoyed woodworking, dreamed of building a boat to sail around the world, and had a great fondness for animals. After her cherished Labrador retriever, Calev, died when Susan was fifteen, she was delighted to receive a Siberian husky from her aunt, soon joined by another Susan purchased herself. Given the choice by her parents of giving up one of her dogs or moving out, she opted to live with her grandmother in Maine.

By the age of seventeen, Susan wanted to live in the wilderness with many pet dogs. In 1973, she relocated to Boulder, Colorado, and shared a house with a woman who owned fifty huskies. This enabled her, over the next three years, to race a husky team on weekends, in addition to working as a veterinary technician. These experiences increased her knowledge of dog breeding and training and of racing techniques. In the same year, Susan read about the first running of the Iditarod, the race that came to be associated with her career as a musher.

The Road to Excellence

In 1975, Susan moved to Fairbanks, Alaska, hired by the University of Alaska to work on an environmental project involving the endangered musk oxen. She settled into a bush cabin in the Wrangell Mountains with her dogs and concentrated on developing a team of Alaskan huskies bred to travel more than one hundred miles a day while enduring snow-covered terrains, frozen rivers, and frigid temperatures dropping to fifty degrees below zero Fahrenheit. During the summers, Susan traveled to Fairbanks to work on a musk-oxen farm as a midwife. She developed the philosophy that high-performance dogs must be treated with respect and affection. Susan instilled loyalty, self-confidence, and trust into her eighteen dogs, gave them names associated with storybook characters, and permitted them to enter her home. This display of kindness and adoration for the dog as an athlete was unlike the behavior of other racers, who instilled fear in the animal.

Creating a winning sled-dog team demanded daily self-sacrifice. Rising at 5:30 a.m., Susan fed the dogs a breakfast of vitamins and meat broth before their practice runs. Winter runs could be as long as sixty miles, although a typical run was twenty miles, five days a week. The lack of snow in the summer required Susan to use a different practice strategy. Hitching a team of dogs to a terrain vehicle, she had them pull against the drag of the engine set in low gear. It took twelve to sixteen hours a day to train several teams of dogs, and several additional hours to massage the dogs’ sore muscles. Susan knew the importance of logging seven thousand miles yearly before attempting the treacherous Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. She also realized the need to maintain a high level of physical fitness, because the role of a musher required her to run behind the sled, pushing and pumping with one foot or the other.

The Emerging Champion

In 1977, the musk oxen project moved to Unalakleet, Alaska, where Butcher was introduced to Joe Reddington, Sr., the organizer of the Iditarod. He encouraged her and helped her find a sponsor for her first Iditarod Race in 1978, in which she placed nineteenth. Her three previous years of living in an area that was accessible only by plane and was twenty-five miles to the nearest village had prepared her for the twelve to thirty days of isolation sometimes required to complete the race. Susan had become accustomed to the lack of running water and electricity, and she seldom used a clock or calendar. She was familiar with the race’s 1,158-mile course that began in Anchorage, Alaska. She knew that blizzards often erase any signs of the trail that crosses the Alaska mountain range, veers west along the winding Yukon River, and twists north up the Bering Sea coast to Nome, Alaska. Susan’s determination to face the hairpin turns reflected the 1925 heroic efforts used to deliver lifesaving serum to eliminate a diphtheria epidemic in the gold mining town of Iditarod. From 1978 to 1982, Susan rose in rank to become one of the top ten competitors.

A tragedy occurred in the 1985 race. When Susan’s team was ahead of the sixty-one other mushers, a rogue moose attacked her sled, killing two dogs and injuring thirteen others before another contestant killed the animal. This forced Susan to drop out of the race and gave a competitor, Libby Riddles, the honor of becoming the first woman to win the Iditarod.

Continuing the Story

Over the next three years, Susan realized her dreams. With greater fortitude, she won the 1986 Iditarod in slightly less than twelve days, breaking all previous records. In 1987, she set a new course record of just over eleven days. She attributed her record times to her philosophy that participants do not win because they do one or two things well during the course of a race. Instead, competitors win because they correctly and consistently perform a thousand little tasks throughout the year, like training the dogs to peak at race time; feeding them a healthy diet of measured fish, beaver, and cream cheese; upgrading sleds with plastic runner materials and custom-fitted harnesses; and preparing for the subzero temperatures and sleeplessness. Mushers frequently receive only two hours of sleep nightly, although each participant is required to take a twenty-four-hour rest stop at one of the twenty-four checkpoints along the trail, where the dogs are examined for injuries and dehydration.

In 1988, Susan encountered two violent storms and snow-packed hills before crossing the finish line fourteen hours ahead of the nearest challenger. This victory earned Susan the distinction as the first sled-dog racer to win three consecutive Iditarod races. Adding to this honor, Susan’s world-record time and victory in 1990 matched the record of Rick Swenson, the only other racer to win four Iditarod races up to that time. Swenson won his fifth in 1991. In 1995, after many years of mushing as a competitor, Susan retired.

In 1997, Susan was inducted into the Iditarod Hall of Fame and remained close to sled-dog racing as a trainer. With her husband, David Monson, she founded Trail Breaker Kennel one hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle on the Chena River in Eureka, Alaska, where she trained more than 150 dogs year-round. In 2002, she was diagnosed with polycythemia vera, a blood disorder later seen to be a manifestation of acute myelogenous leukemia. Susan received chemotherapy at the University of Washington and a bone marrow transplant in May, 2006, after the cancer went into remission. With the resurgence of the cancer and the development of graft-versus-host disease associated with the transplant, she died on August 5, 2006.

Summary

As a woman pioneer in a traditionally male-dominated sport, Susan Butcher proved that personal sacrifice and perseverance were essential elements of a winning strategy. Her focused approach to training her dogs for speed and stamina, to cope with the challenging terrain of the Alaskan bush country, helped her become one of the greatest long-distance sled-dog racers of the Iditarod race. At the time of her death, she remained the only person to have won the Iditarod in three successive years. In an interview with Women’s Sport and Fitness in 1987, she stated that her goal had never been to be the first woman or the best woman, but to be the best sled-dog racer.

Bibliography

Bechtel, Mark. “Four-Time Iditarod Champion Susan Butcher.” Sports Illustrated 105, no. 6 (August 14, 2006): 17-18.

Duncan, Joyce. Ahead of Their Time: A Biographical Dictionary of Risk-Taking Women. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.

Harmon, Melissa Burdick. “Alone Against the Arctic.” Biography 3, no. 3 (March, 1999): 96-102.

“Whoa, Doggie!” National Geographic Traveler 20, no. 7 (October, 2003): 65.

Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Waterford, Conn.: Yorkin Publications, 1999.