The Nome Nugget

Scotty Allen
Racing
Over
Old Trails

SAN FRANCISCO
Scotty Allen started running back in Dundee, Scotland, a good many years ago, and it wasn't any time at all before he became their neighbor and speed champion. Since that time he has crammed a lot of races into his lifetime, 600 or so, he figures, and finished in the money every time. Not all of them were won by virtue of his own speedy feet, though. He quit relying on them quite a while back, and went over to horses. That's what brought him to America bringing over a load of thoroughbred from Northern Scotland to the Dakotas where he became an American citizen.

Next, he went on to Alaska. And that took him to Gold mining, the lure of the Arctic, the friendliness of those young adventurers with whom he shared life kept him there. The North had always been his first love. At 20 he had gone into the Arctic with Hudson Bay Co. At 30 he was an "old timer" to the Circle and knew the Klondike - Nome and Fairbanks as his home.

Lives Here with Son

At 74 he is in San Francisco, living with his son, George Allan at 232 Bowdoin St. But he doesn't forget the North. Keeping its memory fresh with him, as with some 300 others in the whole Bay area are the meetings, on the last Friday of every month at the Sourdough Club. That's no local organization. It is international. Even down in Singapore and over in Moscow, there may be a few members who get together to recall the old days. But the biggest units are in Seattle and here, for these ports still seem close to the North to Alaskans of the '90s and the early decade of this century.

With dinner and a dance the main events of the evening ("We don't fool around with much business," laughs Scotty) the group gathers in the Masonic Hall, 55th and Shattuck Ave., Oakland, every month. And the old races are run again, the old claims re-settled, the old adventures relived.

Scotty Allen, one of the oldest and hardiest of the members is a good sample. "People say we are clannish. We stick together too much. Well we're like any other family," he explains. "We share the same past."

Way Back in 1907

Racing isn't just incidental to a Sourdough's interest. Not when like Scotty, you've got a record that includes helping to start the annual big spring Alaskan dog sled run of 400 miles, from Nome to Candle, on the Arctic Sea, and back again. That was back in 1907. Scotty wasn't betting then because he'd promised his wife he wouldn't. But the other betters challenged him. So he left his hardware business to itself for a while and helped organize the most sensational race in the North. And two years later, won it. He has a watch for that, and a record of being one of the best mushers that ever came from Alaska.

The same record for handling belongs to Judge E. Coke Hill, former federal jurist in the Territory. He, too, lives in San Francisco, now. He, too, spent more than 40 years in the Far North, his first court house in a tent in Nome.

"I suppose I went there to make a lot of money, like everybody else did," he reflects. "But I stayed, just to be a lawyer. Alaska's a great country. Assuming the world goes on as it is, some day those valleys will be very populous, with enormous farms feeding a lot of America."

Judge Hill, and his wife, are "Sourdoughs," too.

To Scotty this war means something in the way of memories. He saw service of a strange sort in the last one. He was commissioned to take 440 Alaskan dogs to the French Alps, where they pulled ammunition on sleds. "They could go right up to the front at night without a sound. I lost only 20 of the whole lot. Today descendants of those dogs are all over the mountains of Europe. I suppose they are seeing service in this war."