Dr. Joseph Romig, The Dog Team Doctor

In 1896 Dr. Joseph H. Romig traveled to Bethel, Alaska, and opened the first doctor’s office and hospital west of Sitka, at a time when there were very few non-native people living in remote southwest Alaska. Four decades later a book would be written about the good doctor’s adventurous and life-saving exploits across the vast northern territory, and one reviewer would observe that the doctor’s extraordinary life ‘read almost like fiction.’

Joseph Herman Romig was born into a family of missionaries in Illinois in 1872. His parents were descendants of Moravian immigrants, and young Joseph grew up as one of ten children at the Chippewa Mission Farm near Independence, Kansas. In exchange for his pledge to serve for seven years without salary as a doctor at a mission, the Moravian Church sponsored his medical training at the Hahnemann Medical School in Philaephia. In 1896, Joseph married Ella Mae Ervin, a nursing student he met at the school, and the couple moved to Bethel to join Joseph’s older sister and her husband as missionaries to the Yup’ik people of the YukonKuskokwim Delta. Joseph’s brother-in-law, John Henry Kilbuck, was a linguist and a full-blooded Delaware Indian who had been teaching the local native peoples and had established a good rapport with them, and Dr. Romig felt this relationship might smooth the way for the success of his mission.

Joseph Herman Romig, M.D., Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, wearing a buckskin costume like those worn by medicine men of interior Alaska. Pluming the cap are feathers of the raven, thought by the Eskimos to be the great creative spirit of the human race. The picture was taken in 1922.

Bethel was barely a village at that time, consisting of only four houses, a chapel, an old Russianstyle bath house and a small store. The Romig home was a simple two-room structure, and included the first hospital: one room with two homemade beds. Joseph and Ella had four children: Robert Herman (born in 1897), Margaret Maryetta (1898), Helen Elizabeth (1901), and later, after leaving Bethel in 1903, they added Howard Glenmore (1911).

The villages in the Yukon-Kuskokwim area were beset by epidemics of influenza, tuberculosis, whooping cough and other ailments, and broken bones, surgeries, and maladies of various description were treated by the doctor. Over time the local people pronounced him “Yung-Cha-wista,” person working for others, or “Remaker of People.”

Dr. Romig was known as “Yung-Cha-wista,” person working for others, or “Remaker of People.”

For a time, Dr. Romig was one of the only physicians in Alaska, and he became an expert at driving a dog team, as his practice stretched for hundreds of miles, and when the land was frozen a good dog team provided the best access to outlying areas. Romig became known as the “dog-team doctor” for traveling by dog sled throughout the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in the course of his work.

An excerpt from the book by Eva Greenslit Anderson tells of the doctor’s first year at Bethel:

Bethel in 1896. [This and other photos from the book, Dog-Team Doctor.]

“The Yung-cha-wista was now familiar with all important Eskimo life events and rites: birth, death, marriage, and worship of spirits and ancestors. He had shared their dried fish, and slept in their kashimas. The language of the Kuskokwim was becoming his own and he could tell a ‘nightly story’ with the best of them.

“The doctor was known as a wizard with a dog team, and had made runs through seemingly impossible storms to spend the long nights in lonely igloos, waging a battle for the life of a child choking with croup, a hunter stricken with pneumonia, a fisherman’s wife dying of tuberculosis. Many had he brought back, haltingly—their hands in his—from the long, deep shadows.

“In spite of the grilling work and unspeakable hardships, there was peace in his soul. Through his ministrations, might not God speak to hundreds of brown-skinned heathen? Health, cleanliness, better standards of living, and an understanding of the Infinite. All of these, he craved for the children of the Northland.

“With greater responsibilities, can greater resources and power as he matured on the job. His strengths were knowledge of science, superb physique, stately bearing, resourcefulness and calm in time of danger, kindness to those in sorrow, and sheer magnetism of personality.

“The natives instinctively turned to him for healing, comfort, and food. He even helped them negotiate trades, and sometimes himself sold their furs, worked into parkas and mukluks. Besides being the Yung-cha-wista, who ‘remade’ people, he was fast becoming Un-gia-kuk, or ‘Big Boss, to all who looked for guidance.

“Duties pyramided. Life speeded up, and he had to accelerate his pace even to keep abreast of the demands. Long trips by dog team and bidarka became more frequent and prepared him well, as it turned out, for the crisis of the winter of 1899.”

The crisis was precipitated by an inexperienced ship’s captain who, carrying the winter’s supplies for mission at Bethel, could not find the mouth of the Kuskokwim River, and sailed away without landing the much-needed cargo. Dr. Romig secured the assistance of about twenty men and a small fleet of light skin boats, canoes, bidarkas, and rowboats and headed upriver to portage across the divide between the Kuskokwim and the Yukon and down to Russian Mission for supplies. They found that supplies were scarce there as well, so the doctor secured passage on a small steamship and continued down the Yukon River to St. Michael where he was able to buy supplies and freight them back to where his small armada waited. The return trip was not easy, with loaded boats, fighting hordes of mosquitoes, and relentless bad weather. When the group finally got back to Bethel, they had covered more than a thousand miles in the relief mission.

Malemutes as they were driven hundreds of miles each year by the Yung-cha-wista.

Another excerpt, describing the ‘dog-team doctor:’

“A familiar sight in Eskimo villages along the Kuskokwim was the big doctor, running behind his twelve-foot sleigh, drawn by those thirteen spirited dogs: one mother, ten of her off-spring, and two other beauties. Tied to the towline by their collars, the leaders were hitched singly; the others in pairs.

“Yarn tassels, tinkling bells, racing malemutes! Fifty miles a day was their usual run, and the team could carry at a trot an average of fifty pounds a dog. One frosty night his dogs dragged down the home trail instead of bounding as usual. The native who rushed forward to care for them eyed the Yung-cha-wista reproachfully.

“‘Big long far!’ the doctor responded to the question the servant dared not voice.

“‘Eighty miles! Broke my record today,’ he later reported to his wife. ‘I-I somehow felt I had to get home to you and the babies tonight.’”

Doctor Romig loved his dogs, and once wrote, “When I die let there be one tombstone of my choice, and let it be that of my dog Rover, in harness, standing over my grave.”

In 1903, when his seven-year term of missionary service was complete, Dr. Romig left Bethel, and moved his family to San Francisco. When the great earthquake hit that city in 1906, Dr. Romig ran an emergency hospital set up in a church during the aftermath, with little but some bandages, gauze, and a few pills. There were no beds, no water, and no useable toilets. The doctor dispatched soldiers to find blankets, sheets, pilllows, towels and drugs. For ten days Dr. Romig served as head of the emergency hospital, a red cross on his cap and on the front of his coat. But one night he stood helplessly and watched the building where his office, with all of his medical instruments and records, went up in flames. He was left with less than four hundred dollars in his bank account, but his family was safe.

Not long after the earthquake, Dr. Romig was called back to the north by the Nushagak Packing Company, offering him a job as company physician at Nushagak, in northern Bristol Bay. With his wife’s blessing he accepted, the family returned to Alaska, and Dr. Romig became the only full-time doctor for five thousand people.

In 1907 Dr. Romig obtained the first government mail contract from Bethel over Togiak Pass to Holy Cross, on the Yukon River, and he relished being on the trail with a good dog team again. Then, in 1909, he was assigned to oversee the 1910 census, supervising twenty-nine census takers in southwestern Alaska. When he was called to travel to Washington, D.C. in connection with the census taking, he took the opportunity to appeal to the Department of Justice for better courts in the Alaska Territory. From the book, Dog-Team Doctor:

“Cannery workers, he explained to the Department of Justice, were often lawless floaters. Neither the accused nor witnesses could leave work to go to Valdez, where criminal cases were tried. “Forced to go against their will, key men often conveniently ‘forgot’ all evidence.

“The first floating courts in western Alaska were made to function as the direct result of that conference. Revenue cutters, bearing a judge and staff of workers, headed into seaport towns to hold court just before the cannery season closed. Clerks and bookkeepers from canneries served as petit jurymen.”

In 1914, seeking to spend more time with his family, Dr. Romig took a position with the Alaska Northern Railway, based in Seward. The following year the struggling railroad was leased by the U.S. Government and eventually became the southern end of the Alaska Railroad.

In the following decades Joseph Romig played an eventful and important role in the growth of Alaska. In the 1920’s he set up a hospital in Nenana for the Alaska Railroad. In 1930, he was asked to head the Alaska Railroad Hospital in Anchorage. He would eventually be, in addition to a missionary, a doctor, and a U.S. Commissioner, a superintendent of schools and mayor of Anchorage (1937-38). He reportedly “did a commendable job, but found that politics was not in his nature.”

Map from the book, Dog-Team Doctor.

Ella Mae Ervin Romig died in 1937, and two years later Dr. Romig married Emily Craig, who had been chief of nursing at the railroad hospital and a longtime friend of both Ella and Dr. Romig.

In 1939, Dr. Romig was appointed the chief surgeon at Anchorage’s newly constructed state-ofthe-art Providence Hospital, but he retired shortly thereafter, and purchased land on what would later be called Romig Hill. From his log cabin on the property, he started a “Board of Directors” club which eventually provided the founding members of the Anchorage Rotary Club.

Joseph and Emily Romig moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where Joseph died in 1951. Although he was originally buried in Colorado, his remains were later disinterred and moved to Alaska to be buried in the family plot in Anchorage Memorial Park. J. H. Romig Junior High School, named in his honor for his dedication to youth and education and later renamed Romig Middle School, was built on Romig Hill in 1964.

Dr. Romig in 1939.

Dr. Romig’s life story and his adventures in southwest Alaska became the subject of a book, DogTeam Doctor: The Story of Dr. Romig, by Eva Greenslit Anderson, Ph.D., published in 1940 by Caxton Printers in Caldwell, Idaho.

The author, Eva Greenslit Anderson, was a Washington state educator, author, and politician, receiving a PhD from the University of Washington in 1937, and named Washington's woman of achievement in 1949. After becoming interested in the history of the Pacific northwest region, she published more than a dozen books on local history. Her book Chief Seattle was rated one of the 10 best on native Americans by the U.S. Department of the Interior. In 1954 she became a member of the Board of Curators of the Washington State Historical Society, received the Washington State Press Women’s Pioneer’s Writers’ Award in 1963, and in 1968 the Social Science building at Wenatchee Valley College was named Anderson Hall.

A review of Dog-Team Doctor appeared in the Feb. 15, 1941 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association: “The Moravian church sponsored the medical training of young Joseph Herman Romig, who was to dedicate his life to the welfare of the Eskimos in Alaska. Forty-four years ago he went there with his bride and a promise of an expense account of $50 a year, but no salary for seven years. They were virtually alone in administering to the medical needs of the people of southwestern Alaska for years. There were remnants of Russian occupancy, trappers and adventurers from all corners of the earth when he arrived in this bleak land. Through the days of the Klondike gold rush, days when river traffic grew to hundreds of craft, days of building of railroads and highways and the development of the fishing industry to the present, when the airplane has conquered these wide spaces, Dr. Romig has seen and shared in them all. He has been not only a medical missionary but a superindentent of schools, mayor of Anchorage, a railroad surgeon, a United States commissioner and an expert with a dog team which carried him hundreds of miles over the snow to administer to the sick. The story of his life work reads almost like fiction.” ~•~