[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 18]
[Senate]
[Pages 23579-23581]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        TRIBUTE TO SUSAN BUTCHER

  Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, this past August, Alaska lost a great 
hero and the Stevens family lost a cherished friend. Susan Butcher was 
the four-time Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race Champion and the first and 
only woman to mush her team to the summit of Mt. McKinley--with her 
friend and Iditarod race founder, Joe Redington, Sr. She is the reason 
we say ``Alaska--where men are men and women win the Iditarod.'' Susan 
left behind her husband David Monson and daughters Tekla and Chisana, 
and friends and admirers everywhere.
  In the solitude of the unforgiving Arctic terrain, this tough, 
focused, intelligent woman traveled and ran many thousands of miles 
with her dog teams over the years--a distance greater than a trip 
around the world. In David's words, she was the most driven woman on 
the face of this earth.
  Susan's skill as a musher was matched only by her great and abiding 
love for her dogs. If her dogs were happy, Susan was happy.
  Whether on the trail or at home, Susan always took care of her 
huskies before tending to her own needs. With only her ax and a parka, 
she once fended off a moose attacking her team along the trail. The 
moose killed two dogs and stomped 13 others. In another harrowing 
experience, she was rescued by her dogs when her sled broke through the 
ice on a remote river in the Wrangell Mountains. After that escape, 
Susan said she looked at every moment of her life as a gift. Susan did 
it all--living a life without many regrets and always great humor.
  Susan was blessed with a wonderful partner when she married fellow 
musher and lawyer David Monson. He gave her the love, laughter and 
relentless support that carried her through their years together. They 
expanded their family beyond their 100 huskies with the birth of their 
daughters Tekla and Chisana. Susan embraced motherhood with even 
greater passion, energy and devotion than she had in her life as a 
musher. And the girls blossomed in a home and cabin filled with books, 
music, Native Alaskan culture, and, of course, dogs.
  In December 2005, Susan was diagnosed with leukemia and began the 
toughest fight of her life. At the time, her husband David said ``We're 
going to do everything we can to make sure she has the best care. She 
does have the best attitude. Someone said this might be a tough 
disease, but this leukemia hasn't met Susan Butcher yet.'' Throughout 
her treatment in Seattle, Susan actively campaigned to help others by 
increasing donations to the National Marrow Donor Program and support 
for leukemia and lymphoma research.
  Over the past 20 years, Susan often traveled to Washington--bunking 
with our family--sled dogs, cat, kids and all. Presidents Reagan and 
George Bush, Sr., invited her and her lead dogs to the White House. She 
drove her team in the inaugural parades--the last time in 2001, with 
both her daughters in the sled. With her lead dog, Granite, she was 
welcomed by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to her Supreme Court chambers, 
and to the Pentagon by her friend General Colin Powell, then chairman 
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
  Susan had a gift for inspiring others to never give up, to test their 
limits, to see their way through to the finish line, and to always try 
the path less traveled. It is no wonder her favorite poem reflected her 
New England roots--Robert Frost's ``The Road Not Taken.''
  On a winter day in 1994, near her home in Eureka, AK, the reporter 
Skip Hollandsworth watched Susan and her dogs: ``She whispers a 
command, and in unison the dogs pull forward. The sled slips across the 
snow. Soon, Butcher and her dogs are like a mirage in the distance. A 
few moments later, the cold, silent land swallows them up.'' 
``Sometimes when she leaves,'' David says, ``I wonder if she ever wants 
to return home.''
  Some day in the years ahead, Susan and David's beautiful daughters 
Tekla and Chisana will graduate from high school. We hope they and 
their friends will find the same inspiration to challenge themselves as 
Susan's words instilled in our daughter Lily's Holton Arms class in 
1999.
  Mr. President, Alaska lost one of its brightest stars when Susan 
Butcher passed away. We will always remember this remarkable and 
courageous woman.
  I ask unanimous consent that Ms. Butcher's commencement address to 
the Holton Arms School be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

         The Holton-Arms School Commencement Address--June 1999

       Thank you very much. I'm very honored and excited to be 
     speaking here today. And thank you to the class for asking 
     me. It's especially exciting for me to be here because of my 
     great friend, Lily Stevens, who I watched grow up since she 
     was just a tiny little girl.
       I certainly would be surprised to hear if any of you were 
     going to follow me in my chosen occupation as a dog musher. 
     So I don't think that's why you have asked me here. I live in 
     Alaska about a hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle. I 
     own a hundred dogs, and I travel about 6,000 miles a year by 
     sled and dog team. So my life is very different from what we 
     see here. I thought, when I was asked to speak on 
     achievement, that it would be easy to do. But getting to the 
     soul of what motivates a person to excel cuts to the core of 
     each person's dreams, desires and beliefs. Sometimes it goes 
     beyond words. So I will speak for myself, and try and tell 
     you how and why things have worked for me.
       It's really exciting to see such youth and promise before 
     me. And it certainly takes me back to my high school 
     graduation in 1972, when I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I 
     was very good in math and sciences. But I am dyslexic, so I 
     struggled very hard in school. My strong loves were the 
     wilderness, animals, science, and sports. I had a hobby for 
     the last couple of years of working with my two Alaskan 
     huskies, trying to teach them to be sled dogs. I feel that I 
     was very lucky because even at that young age, I knew my true 
     passion. It was to live in the wilderness and work with 
     animals. But what sort of a career was that? So I started 
     with veterinary medicine, which I also loved. I moved to 
     Colorado where I went on with further schooling, and to 
     enhance my career. By then, my mushing was becoming more than 
     just a hobby. I had eight dogs and was starting to run in 
     smaller races.
       In those days though, the Iditarod race didn't even exist. 
     There was no such thing as a professional musher. And yet my 
     dream still was to go and live in the wilderness with my 
     dogs. Shortly after I turned 20, the Iditarod was run for the 
     first time, and I said ``that's for me.'' I packed up my 
     dogs, my cats, and my Volkswagen Bug, and I drove up to 
     Alaska--all my belongings and against all parental advice, 
     but not without their blessings--I lived way out in bush 
     Alaska, teaching myself the art of dog mushing. Still at that 
     time I had no clue that I was going to be able to make this 
     passion into a career and a livelihood. In the summers I 
     supported myself working on a musk ox farm and through 
     fishing for salmon.
       I can only say that when I reached Alaska and was working 
     out there, I knew this was perfect for me. I was content in 
     my soul. I knew that I had found my dream. The relationship 
     that I was able to develop with my dogs was deeper and 
     stronger than anything that I could have possibly imagined. 
     Perhaps I can describe that to you a little bit in this 
     story. I worked very hard to try and develop a trust with 
     each one of my dogs individually. And a number of years ago, 
     when I was with my dog team in the Wrangell Mountains and I 
     traveling on a trail that I had been using all year long that 
     crossed a frozen river, my lead dog at the time kept veering 
     off to the right. I kept calling her back to the left, 
     telling her ``haw''--that's the command we use. But she kept 
     going off to the

[[Page 23580]]

     right. She had never disobeyed me before, so I couldn't 
     understand. So I let her have her lead, and just as she 
     pulled myself and the team off to the side of the trail, the 
     entire river collapsed. She had a sixth sense that saved us 
     from drowning. It's this mutual trust--mine and their 
     guidance, and their ability and instinct in the wilderness--
     that has not only gotten us to the finish line many times, 
     but has also saved our lives.
       Success did not come easy for me at all. I struggled for 
     many years with barely enough money to feed myself and my dog 
     team. I was working seven days a week, at least twelve-hour 
     days, trying to train myself and the dogs for the races. I 
     did fairly well in many of the races that I entered, but it 
     took me nine years before I was able to win. I lived alone 
     for nine years in a 16' x 19' log cabin. Today my husband and 
     I have built quite a complex, and we have a couple of diesel 
     generators now. But back then I had nothing. I had no 
     electricity, no phone. I hauled my water from the creek, and 
     I had very few neighbors. In fact, there were only eight 
     people in 2,500 square miles. So this was my childhood dream 
     come true!
       I was absolutely dedicated to the care and the training of 
     my dogs. All my focus was on becoming the best long-distance 
     sled dog racer in the world. I had put together a great team 
     that was very fast and well cared for. But I kept coming in 
     second in more races than I cared to remember. Clearly, some 
     essential element was missing. It was vision--the winning 
     spirit. I didn't actually see myself as a winner. I believed 
     wholeheartedly that someday I would win the Iditarod, but I 
     didn't see myself as a winner today. I often finished with 
     the strongest, fastest team--in second place. I often 
     finished an hour or--in two instances, a split second--behind 
     somebody else. In 1986, I learned how to pull together. I 
     told myself that not only could I win, but that I deserved to 
     win, and that I would win today. I saw myself crossing the 
     finish line, and I lived and breathed that vision for a year. 
     I told myself the 1986 race was mine. I was able to hold that 
     image eleven days into the Iditarod, when with just 44 miles 
     to go, I was neck-and-neck in a sprint for the finish with a 
     musher named Joe Gamey. I had slept less than 20 hours in 12 
     days. I had run up every hill between Anchorage and Nome. I 
     was exhausted. Joe made a big push and he passed me, gaining 
     a 2-minute advantage. I was demoralized. I said to myself, 
     ``Well, I guess second place isn't that bad.'' But then, 
     through the blur of fatigue, I again saw myself winning the 
     race. I got off my sled and I ran, pumped with one leg, and 
     pushed the sled until I was able to pass Joe and win my first 
     Iditarod. Once I learned that lesson, I won a lot of races.
       I quit fishing and musk ox farming, and I dedicated myself 
     solely to my dogs all year 'round. To maintain consistency 
     and excellence, you are always looking over the horizon, past 
     the finish line, to the next race and the next record time. I 
     found that it wasn't enough to just say to myself ``Well, I 
     want to win again.'' I had to reach deep within and challenge 
     myself. No racer had ever run in four long-distance races in 
     a year. So in 1990 I decided to try to attempt to run in 
     five. I set my goal to win all of them, and to win them in 
     record time. All of these were between 300 and 1,100 miles in 
     length. And some of them were as close as just five days 
     apart. I ended up winning four in record time and coming in a 
     close second in the fifth. So I didn't reach my ultimate 
     goal, but by challenging myself like that I was able to set 
     four new world records. I try to examine each race that I 
     run, even the ones that I have won, to see what little steps 
     I can take to keep getting better.
       Let me speak now of failure, because I have had very many 
     of them and each one of you will. It's how you deal with 
     these failures and your setbacks that's the most important 
     thing. In 1991, I was at the top of my game. My team was said 
     to be the best team in the history of the Iditarod that year. 
     I ran a very aggressive race. Mother Nature threw every curve 
     at me and my team that she possibly could. For over 500 
     miles, me and my team broke trail through storms, leading all 
     the other mushers, until we finally reached the village of 
     White Mountain an hour in front of our next competitor. We 
     were only 77 miles from Nome. The awesome power of nature is 
     very humbling and it must be respected. I went out first into 
     an Arctic blizzard for six hours, losing the trail, regaining 
     the trail, searching to make it through to Nome and win 
     another race, until finally I knew that I could ask my team 
     for no more. Because I continually challenge myself to win, I 
     know that sometimes I must fail. As I tried to become the 
     best, I know that there will be setbacks along the way. This 
     is the essence of competition--that there will be both 
     winners and losers. But I have learned at looking at losing, 
     it's just another step to attaining my final goal. Many 
     times, the pain of failure is very raw for me. But I have 
     great faith in myself, that I will turn my defeats into 
     something positive. I have learned many valuable lessons from 
     my defeats. But I think the best thing was summed up in the 
     words of an old Athabaskan Indian. He told me, ``There are 
     many hard things in life, but there is only one sad thing. 
     And that is giving up.'' So I know that in the future, I will 
     continue to try very hard, and in the end--I will prevail.
       Adversity is a very large part of life, and learning to 
     overcome it can be very difficult. When I started racing, I 
     believed that I would win when I made everything run 
     perfectly, when I was able to train all year round, when I 
     didn't get lost or break my sled. So when I would have 
     trouble, I wouldn't completely give up, but I would often 
     settle for second place. Now I know that winning is 
     overcoming adversity. I don't win because I run a perfect 
     race. I win because I deal with the problems that the dogs 
     and I encounter better than my fellow competitors.
       I have actually learned to love adversity. In 1988, I had 
     every type of trouble that you could ask for. My sled broke 
     five times. I got lost and I ran into ground storms of 80 
     miles an hour as I crossed the frozen Bering Sea. I could 
     hardly see my lead dog in front of me, let alone the next 
     trail marker. But I won the race despite all the problems the 
     dogs and I encountered. We finished fourteen hours in front 
     of the second place musher, who couldn't make it through the 
     storm. So I learned that no matter what the obstacles, I 
     always had the chance of winning and should never give up.
       It is true that I raced in a totally male-dominated sport. 
     I was a pioneer for women in long-distance racing. But you 
     won't hear me talking very much about that. I think the most 
     important thing was that I saw no gender barriers. And anyone 
     who tried to put me in that box and say, ``well, Susan is the 
     best woman racer,'' I would quickly correct them. I was not a 
     woman racer, I was a racer. It was my plan to be the best 
     musher, and I did that.
       Perhaps I have been able to say something here today that 
     will strike a chord with each of you, or some of you. Many of 
     my lessons have been learned from my heroes--my dogs. I'd 
     like to share the story of one of my animals. Twenty years 
     ago, I had a puppy born to my kennel, who didn't look like he 
     was going to be much of a dog. He had a very poor hair coat. 
     He had cowhocked legs, which is basically knock-knees in the 
     back end, and he had no confidence whatsoever. Most mushers 
     would have given up on this puppy and just sold him to 
     someone as a pet dog. But on my runs in the woods with he and 
     his littermates, I saw a special spark in this dog that was 
     not yet ignited. It was a challenge that I couldn't resist to 
     try and make him into a champion sled dog. So I worked with 
     him very hard physically to bring him around, through special 
     nutrition and training. But mostly I concentrated on his lack 
     of confidence. I gave him a strong name--Granite. He soon 
     learned to draw from my strength and confidence, and we 
     became a very powerful team. Granite grew into a 58-pound, 
     deep-chested dog who compensated for his cow-hocked legs with 
     a very powerful gait. All that extra work paid off because he 
     not only turned into a good sled dog, but a great leader. He 
     ended up leading me to victory in the 1986 and 1987 
     Iditarods, both of those in record time, along with countless 
     other races between 300-500 miles in length. In October of 
     1987 while we were training for what we hoped would be his 
     third consecutive victory, he became very seriously ill. I 
     had to rush him down to Anchorage to a veterinary hospital to 
     try and save his life. We set up a cot next to his kennel so 
     that I could sleep with him there, day and night, tending him 
     and willing him to live. After two weeks, the veterinarians 
     told me I could take him home, but that he was never going to 
     be able to run again, that he had permanent damage to his 
     heart and liver and kidneys along with damage to the 
     hypothalamus in the brain, which controls body temperature. 
     But Granite had grown to be a magnificent canine athlete who 
     loved to run and race, and all the dogs loved competition. 
     They understand when they have won. They have as much pride 
     as any human athlete. Granite was determined to get back on 
     the team. Every time I would take other dogs out on runs, he 
     would cry and howl, wishing that he could go out with us. 
     Slowly but surely, his test results started showing 
     improvements that the veterinarians were astounded at. They 
     decided to let him start training with me and the puppies on 
     little 2-mile runs. He soon advanced to running with the 
     yearlings on 10-mile runs. And finally, by January, he was 
     once again running with the main team, and the veterinarians 
     okayed him for a 200-mile race. He towed that young team to 
     record-setting victory. Then, 1\1/2\ months later he went on 
     to do the impossible. He led me to victory in the Iditarod. 
     And he did it by pulling me through a blinding snow storm 
     that stopped all my competitors. So we finished 14 hours in 
     front of the second place musher, as I told you--through that 
     storm. That made Granite the only lead dog ever to win three 
     consecutive Iditarods.
       All of us will fall on hard times, and it's often hard to 
     find the key to help us with our problems. But if we can draw 
     from our inner strength and desires as Granite did, we can 
     overcome incredible odds. It's always important to look 
     around us and see that there are those whose problems are far 
     greater than ours. It's important to take time to give back 
     to your community, to youth, and to those less privileged. As 
     I am now a mother and a dog sled racer, I have taken more 
     time to contemplate my past Iditarod years. So I

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     want to leave you with one last story that sort of sums up 
     what I think of my career.
       I always felt that there was a division of duties between 
     myself and the dogs. The dogs were definitely better in the 
     wilderness, such as being able to sense thin ice or where 
     there were wild animals around us, and helping me through the 
     storms. But I was better when we were in Anchorage starting 
     out and there were cars and traffic lights and all sorts of 
     things in any of the villages, and I was also better at 
     strategy and understanding competition. In 1989 I was racing 
     towards the half-way point in the Iditarod. They give you a 
     prize of $5,000 for being the first into that checkpoint, and 
     nothing for being second, so it's quite coveted. Joe Runyon 
     and myself were the best two teams in the race that year, and 
     we had been vying for first place for miles. We had just left 
     the checkpoint of Ophir, and it was about a 90-mile run over 
     to the abandoned gold mine town of Iditarod. Throughout the 
     day, Joe and I had passed each other. You have got to imagine 
     that these are just two mushers out in the middle of nowhere, 
     so when you pass each other--even though you're very 
     competitive with each other--you definitely talk. And when 
     you see each other and pass, you will have a little 
     conversation. So just as it was getting dusk, I had put on my 
     headlight so that I could see through the darkness--a 
     battery-powered headlight, as had Joe--he put his new young 
     lead dog, Rambo, up in lead. He came flying by me. He 
     stopped--I had out my map and compass. He said, ``Where do 
     you think we are?'' I said, ``I think we have just passed the 
     Deshka River. Here it is on the map, so we must be about five 
     miles from the town of Iditarod.'' He said, ``That's what I'm 
     thinking too,'' and he passed me. I was using my lead dog, 
     Tolstoy, at the time. I starting pumping with one leg and 
     encouraging my dogs, saying ``Come on, let's get going.'' 
     They just were flat. They were not going to pick up and go as 
     fast as Joe's team. So I took Granite, who was in the team, 
     and I put him up in lead. I encouraged him, and I encouraged 
     the rest of the team. Still, they didn't respond. Five miles 
     should have taken us about thirty minutes. We went hour after 
     hour after hour. Three hours later, we were still on the 
     trail. I could see Joe's headlight--it's very hilly country 
     there--going up and down the hills, just a little ways ahead 
     of me. All of a sudden, Granite turned around and he looked 
     at me and he went, ``Now!'' And he kicked it into gear, all 
     the dogs immediately responded to him, and he passed Joe 100 
     yards from the finish line at Iditarod and we won the half-
     way prize. So I learned that not only do I not know as much 
     about the wilderness as my dogs, but I don't know anything 
     about competition. And it is my job to love the dogs, care 
     for them, feed them and nurture them, and hold on for dear 
     life.
       So in parting, I want to say to each and everyone of Holton 
     Arms' 1999 graduating class, I hope very dearly that each one 
     of you is able to find your dream. And when you do--love it, 
     nurture it, and hold on for dear life.

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