Roth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and briefly worked in his father's business. He was the brother of suffragette Laura Witte.[1][2] He traveled to Europe, where he took art classes in several countries, including the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, and the Royal Academy in Berlin. He also studied animals in their natural habitat. When he returned to the United States, he continued his schooling at the New York Academy. By 1900, he was working professionally as a sculptor.[3]
The statue is bronze, and is set on a large granite rock near the entrance of Central Park at East 67th Street, by the Tisch Children's Zoo.[10] A plaque on the front is engraved with seven sled dogs running through a blizzard, and the following words:
Dedicated to the indomitable spirit of the sled dogs that relayed antitoxin six hundred miles over rough ice, across treacherous waters, through Arctic blizzards from Nenana to the relief of stricken Nome in the Winter of 1925.
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The statue is popular among tourists, especially children.
^Beese, Marianne. “Research on the Women's Movement and on Women's Studies in Rostock,” in Women's Studies in Rostock: Reports from and about Female Academics, Kersten Krüger (ed.), in Rostock Studies on University History, Vol. 9, pp. 16 and 35. Rostock, Germany: University of Rostock, 2010. (Citation translated from the Laura Witte article on German Wikipedia.)