Esther Birdsall Darling was an American author and poet; she also opened and ran a

sled dog A sled dog is a dog trained and used to pull a land vehicle in Dog harness, harness, most commonly a Dog sled, sled over snow. Sled dogs have been used in the Arctic for at least 8,000 years and, along with watercraft, were the only transport ...

kennel in Alaska. She studied at

Mills College Mills College at Northeastern University is a private college in Oakland, California and part of Northeastern University's global university system. Mills College was founded as the Young Ladies Seminary in 1852 in Benicia, California; it was ...

and traveled in Europe in her youth. After her marriage in 1907 she moved to

Nome, Alaska Nome (; ik, Sitŋasuaq, ) is a city in the Nome Census Area in the Unorganized Borough of Alaska, United States. The city is located on the southern Seward Peninsula coast on Norton Sound of the Bering Sea. It had a population of 3,699 recorded ...

, where her husband ran a hardware and expedition outfitting business. Darling and

Scotty Allan Allan Alexander "Scotty" Allan, born in Dundee in 1867, who died in 1941, was a Scottish-born American dog musher, businessman and politician. In 1907, several mushers based in Nome, Alaska, calling themselves the Nome Kennel Club, which promoted ...

established a sled dog kennel in Nome and organized the first long distance dogsled race. Descendants of Baldy, and other dogs from the Darling-Allen Kennel, were purchased by the French military in

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

and transported to Europe where they worked pulling vehicles and carrying messages and cargo. In 1917, the dogs were awarded a military medal, and Darling received it on their behalf. Her books include ''Baldy of Nome'', about a champion sled dog, and a series of followups. She also wrote a poem about Alaska's state flower, the

forget-me-not ''Myosotis'' ( ) is a genus of flowering plants in the family Boraginaceae. The name comes from the Ancient Greek "mouse's ear", which the foliage is thought to resemble. In the northern hemisphere they are colloquially known as forget-me-nots ...

. In 2009, at the Mushing History Conference, a presentation on Darling was given by Jane Haigh. The Anchorage Museum of History and Art has a picture of her with three sled dogs.

Bibliography

*''Up in Alaska'' (1912) *''Baldy of Nome: An Immortal of the Trail'' (1913) *''Navarre of the North'' (1930) *''No Boundary Line'' (1942)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Darling, Esther Birdsall 20th-century American women writers Mills College alumni Year of birth missing Year of death missing Poets from Alaska People from Nome, Alaska 20th-century American poets American women poets