The Impossible Rescue (2012)
by Martin W. Sandler
An early winter in 1897 traps eight American whaling ships in the ice, threatening the lives of 300 crew. Frozen in and with insufficient food to get through the winter, President McKinley and staff plot a rescue so full of potential problems that it is surprising they started. McKinley sent three men to drive two reindeer herds over 1,500 miles of tundra in the dead of winter to bring meat to the trapped whalers. Sandler tells this amazing story using the journal entries of these three men. They fight the Alaskan winter and risk their lives driving these herds of reindeer, all the while not knowing if the whalers are already dead. One of the men ends up going ashore in Dillingham to begin his trek north.
