FOLLOWING THE DISPERSAL of the Markovo Kennels stock in the summer and autumn of 1975 came a period of confusion and readjustment for Seppala strain. The sale had been managed so that each of the three successor kennels had a strategic spread of breeding stock. All the best dogs were not concentrated in any one person's hands. It was to be hoped that those three, together with others who had bought breeding pairs or even single animals, would maintain contact and co-operate as a group, trading pups and stud services and lending one another mutual support; that the three main kennels would become breeding and promotional centres for the newly-rescued Seppala strain covering Eastern Canada and New England, Western Canada, and the Western U.S.
IT WAS NOT TO BE. Within a year Barbara Bailey had sold half of her stock to cross-strain breeders who used none of the Seppalas they bought for pure-strain breeding. Curt Stuckey managed to breed only four litters, lost several dogs to the shotgun of an irate neighbour, and lasted only around five years. Bruce Morrow lasted a little longer; he bred five litters, then sold the remainder of his stock in 1982. Several of the dogs Morrow bred have long since become virtually household words in Seppala circles.
JEFFREY HAD SPENT THE WINTER of 1975 - 1976 organising data and writing The Seppala Siberian: A Breeder's Manual, so that those who had purchased the Markovo stock would have a ready reference for the breeding of Seppalas, a good historical grounding in the strain, and knowledge of where all the dogs had gone. In the book additional pure Seppala stock, still alive at that time, was pointed out, stock that was not included in the Markovo programme. It was hoped that the successor kennels would be able to expand the gene pool by seeking out and making use of those individual Seppalas. That, too, never happened.
INSTEAD OF EXPANSION of the Markovo Seppala gene pool, what took place was a sharp contraction. Breeding efforts were almost immediately concentrated on the progeny of a single mating of Markovo Seppalas. Doug Willett, the middle-distance racer who bought out Bruce Morrow, found early success with UELEN'S ALI, UELEN'S BARON OF SEPP-ALTA, and UELEN'S BEOWULF OF SEPP-ALTA. These three progeny of SURGUT OF MARKOVO and HELEN OF MARKOVO came to dominate the pure-strain breeding by the mid-1990s to such an extent that in many lines over half the total ancestry consisted of ALI, BEOWULF and BARON. (We now routinely use an "ABB Index" to monitor inbreeding on this bloodline.) It is fortunate for all of us that ASH OF MARKOVO and POWDER OF MARKOVO were among the few dogs produced by the much-maligned Curt Stuckey, because without these two progeny of NUTOK OF MARKOVO we would not have the HANK and POWDER pillars. Today their bloodlines are a vital counterbalance to the ABB lineage.
CROSS-STRAIN BREEDING OF SEPPALAS with mixed-lineage stock was emphasised right from the beginning of the post-Markovo period. ROSIE OF MARKOVO (seen in the photo to the right) produced a litter in 1976 by NATOMAH'S KAMIK, a mixed-lineage male, which was Willett's first Sepp-Alta litter. SMO-KI-LUK'S SERYA (also of Natomah background), KODIAK'S LAYLA and KODIAK'S LILY quickly followed, resulting in the establishment in the early 1980s of what Doug Willett's 1986 book described as "two strains of part Seppalas" based on Markovo cross-strained with Natomah and with White Water Lake.
ONLY A DOZEN of the Markovo-bred progeny actually contributed to the main trunk of pure Seppala lineage surviving today in Seppala Siberian Sleddogs. Now in the first decade of the New Millennium, the Markovo Seppala line still exists for the moment (in 2003 Seppala Kennels had forty-six Markovo-Seppalas ). Nevertheless the scattering and wastage of the Markovo progeny, taken together with the persistent cross-straining, have left as legacy of the post-Markovo period a population of "part Seppalas" (as described in the 1986 and 1992 Willett books) many times larger than the authentic McFaul/Shearer Markovo Seppala trunk. The perhaps transient popularity of Seppalas in one narrowly-defined mode of middle-distance racing during the post-Markovo period was achieved at a heavy cost, namely that of placing the long-term survival of Seppalas at risk once again.
