The blizzard came out of nowhere. Snow hammered the Yukon wilderness so hard it erased the horizon, and Louie and Otto Linken knew their dog team wouldn’t survive the night without shelter. The Linken brothers were rum runners working the frozen North in the early days of Prohibition, traveling the same lonely paths as trappers and mail carriers, but always with one eye on the law.

Stopping meant risking capture. Pressing forward meant risking their lives.

Louie climbed off the sled to guide the lead dogs through the whiteout, and the moment his boots hit the ground, his foot punched through a thin patch of ice and plunged into freezing water. He yanked it free fast, but the temperature was far below zero. There was no stopping to dry it off. They had to keep moving.

For the next half hour, Louie trudged through the storm with one soaked boot, the cold biting deeper with every step. By the time they reached shelter, he couldn’t feel his toes. When Otto pulled off Louie’s boot, the answer was right there in front of him. Louie’s big toe was frozen solid.

In the remote Yukon, frostbite that deep meant the toe came off, or the infection that followed would take Louie with it.

So Otto did what brothers sometimes have to do in the wilderness. There was no doctor within reach, no real medical supplies, and no good options. The toe had to come off that night, or Louie’s chances of seeing morning got a lot worse.

Otto grabbed their woodcutter’s ax. He did what he could to warm the blade, then set it against the frozen joint. One clean strike. In a drafty shelter somewhere in the Yukon dark, with a blizzard still hammering the walls outside, that was the surgery. No anesthetic, no sterile field, no second opinion. Louie bit down on whatever frontier courage looks like and Otto swung.

When it was over, they did the only sensible thing two rum runners in the wilderness could do. They dropped the toe in a jar of alcohol and called it a keepsake. The story goes cold after that, but the jar did not disappear forever.

Nearly 50 years later, in the 1970s, a Yukon explorer and saloon owner named Captain Dick Stevenson discovered an abandoned cabin near the small community of Carcross. Inside the cabin was an old jar. Inside the jar was a toe. A blackened, shrunken human toe.

Stevenson brought it back to Dawson City, and a local legend was born. He spent the rest of his life presiding over the tradition he created, watching more than 100,000 people work up the nerve to take the oath. He passed away in November 2019 at the age of 89. His daughter Dixie told CBC that among his final wishes was for his own toes to be preserved and donated to the club he’d built. The Yukon lost one of its genuinely original characters, but the jar lives on.

That grisly relic he carried out of that cabin became the foundation of the Sourtoe Cocktail, a challenge that has grown into one of the most infamous drinking traditions in North America. The rules are simple. Go to the Sourdough Saloon in Dawson City, order a shot of Yukon Jack or another strong liquor, and recite the oath.

“You can drink it fast, you can drink it slow. But your lips must touch that gnarly toe.”

If your lips touch the toe, you earn a certificate and lifetime membership in the Sourtoe Cocktail Club. The tradition has survived lost toes, swallowed toes, stolen toes, and at least one toe destroyed by overexposure to liquor. When a drinker accidentally swallowed a toe in 2013, the saloon fined him 500 Canadian dollars. The posted penalty now sits at 2,500 dollars, and the staff is not joking.

The modern Sourtoe Cocktail uses real dehydrated human toes, donated legally to the bar by people who lost them to frostbite or medical amputation. A dedicated Toe Captain oversees the ritual, dropping the mummified digit into the glass with the focus of someone handling evidence.

The original Linken toe is long gone, lost somewhere in the cocktail’s chaotic early years. But the story survived. A mix of bad weather, bad luck, and the particular stubbornness it takes to make it through a Yukon winter.

If you ever find yourself in Dawson City, about eleven hours by road from Anchorage and a world away from ordinary, you can take the oath too. Show up, order your shot, and find out what that oath actually feels like when there’s a toe in the glass.

For more stories like this, the ones that blend history, whiskey, and the wonderfully strange corners of drinking culture, listen to Rob and Mark on Whiskey at Work.