| Susan
Butcher was born the day after Christmas in 1954. She grew up in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. Her parents are Charlie
and Agnes Butcher. She has a sister named Kate and she is a year
older. She has a brother Evan who actually died of leukemia in 1953.
Her family often spent summers in Brooklyn, a small town in Maine.
As a little girl, she loved the countryside and the rocky coast.
She did not enjoy the city-life at all. She always wanted to tear down her parents' city home and build a little log cabin that was surrounded by grass and open space. She wrote an essay when she was in 1st grade on how she hated the city and how she loved animals and when it would thunder and storm. She had a Labrador mix dog named Cabee who was her bestfriend. Her parents divorced at the age of 11 and her world turned upside down, her father moved out and her mother raised them alone. Therefore, she did not trust adults and rather be with animals. Susan had a troubled childhood. She had trouble in school, she was very good in math, but she was not good at reading and writing. Susan had dyslexia, she was smart, but needed help unscrambling words. On the other hand, she was a great athlete and a natural at sports. She was a star in softball, basketball, and field hockey. She loved swimming and school sponsored rowing outings in Boston Harbor. At the age of 15, her dog died. So her aunt bought her a Husky named Manganak and she bought a second husky and her mother didn't want two dogs in the house, so Susan left. She traveled to Nova Scotia and farmed and trained horses. She was going to sail around the world, but she didn't because of her dogs. After highschool, she headed west to Colorado, where her father and stepmother lived and she met a lady who raced fifty sled dogs, so she moved in with her and helped her. She used the lady's dogs to mush (drive a sled) with three to twenty dogs in the snow. She learned to keep it upright on a bumpy pth, and steering it around fallen trees and rocks. She learned to guide dogs by voice commands and on the weekends her and others competed. She also worked as a veterinary technician and mushed in Colorado for two hours. At the age of nineteen, she felt that Colorado was too crowded, and one of her dogs was stolen and the other was killed by a car, so she considered going to Canada, but she read an article in a paper that changed her mind. She read about the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, which was in 1973 which was the first annual running of a sled dog race in Alaska. Therefore, she headed to Alaska, which is where she lives today and where her heart belongs and where she has traveled over 1,160 miles in the Iditarod winning four times! |
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