Alaskan Mail Run

I often marvel at what people will do to get their mail, and in this photo by B.B. Dobbs from Alaska’s Digital Archives we see Martin Victor “Sport” Smith, with his dogs and friends, bringing mail ashore from the S.S. Corwin on June 2, 1907. In this photo, Mr. Smith, and what a sport he must have been, is five miles out on the ice of the Bering Sea, apparently as close to the shore as the Corwin could come.

“It’s a fierce game, that carrying the mails in the winter,” he once observed. This “summer” run must have been a lark for him.