I had never heard the extraordinary story of Ada Blackjack, her Alaskan way of life was transformed into a destitute single woman with a small child when abandoned by her dog-musher husband. She had no choice but to walk forty miles to Nome, Alaska, with a two-year-old ill with tuberculosis.
Upon arrival, she had no choice but to put the child in an orphanage. She was unable to care for him, and while in Nome, she joined an expedition to the Arctic Circle by four European men who wanted to claim the area for Great Britain. They were looking for skilled cooks and a seamstress. The promised payment of fifty dollars would allow her to be reunited with the suffering child. That is how her remarkable story began.
History Extra so much more on her fascinating story:
Under 5ft tall with no expedition experience, little desire for adventure and a crippling fear of polar bears, Ada Blackjack was an unlikely candidate for Arctic exploration. Born in 1898, she had been raised by Methodist missionaries in the tough Alaskan town of Nome. While many Iñupiat people were well-versed in Arctic survival, these skills were never deemed necessary in Ada’s missionary upbringing – instead, she was taught to clean, cook and sew.
But by 1921, 23-year-old Blackjack was a divorced and destitute single mother. After her abusive husband had abandoned her, she had desperately struggled to support her young son, Bennett, who was suffering from tuberculosis. But supporting him singlehandedly had become impossible, and Blackjack was forced to place him in an orphanage.
Blackjack was in desperate need of money in order to be reunited with her son when, in September 1921, a ship called the Victoria pulled into Nome. Hailing from Seattle, it carried four young men tasked with a daunting mission. At the behest of celebrated Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, they were heading to the remote Wrangel Island, 100 miles north of Siberia. The team – made up of Lorne Knight, Frederick Maurer, Milton Galle and Allan Crawford – planned to live on the uninhabited land for two years in order to claim the territory for the British government.
None of the men survived. Ada was rescued from the island after two years with her thoughts as her only companion.
On her return to Alaska, Blackjack was plunged into the middle of a media storm. The press clamoured to hear how the “female Robinson Crusoe” had survived an ordeal so ghastly it had claimed the lives of the other heroic explorers, the pressure intensifying when accusations were made that she had not done enough to save Knight. All this invasive media attention did not sit easily with the private Blackjack, who simply wanted to be reunited with her son.
With her salary from the voyage, Blackjack was finally able to take Bennett to Seattle for treatment. But while she may have escaped Wrangel Island, her fight for survival was not over. Though Stefansson and others profited from writing sensationalist books about her ordeal, Blackjack continued to be plagued by poverty and hardship throughout her life. She later had a second son, Billy, but money problems forced her to place him and Bennett in a home for nine years. She later moved back to Alaska to work as a reindeer herder and lived until the age of 85.
alienobserver has a fascinating comment on Ada and Wrangel Island.
Stefansson wrote a book called "The Adventure of Wrangel Island", (1925) which probably should have been titled "The Fiasco of Wrangel Island". Take the book with a bit of salt. Wrangel caused his reputation to suffer.
Wrangel was Russian territory of longstanding, but Stefansson, an explorer and author of a dozen books, got the idea of claiming it for other countries or colonizing it, which led to the ill-fated expedition.
Ada was hired as cook and seamstress for the expedition, but she had nothing to do with the death of Knight, who succumbed to scurvy, caused by a lack of vitamin C. He probably refused to eat his muktuk, a delicacy from the skin of the beluga whale, rich in vitamin C.
The captain of the vessel walked 100 miles to Siberia to get help, but it took time. Ada and Vic the cat were the only survivors.
If Ada had a dread of polar bears, Wrangel is the last place you would want to go--it is a motherland for polar bears. There are bear dens there that go back millenia. Not tbat humans are usual fare; Igor Oleinikov, the only permanent resident of the island, reports only 4 polar bear predators put down over 40 years for having killed a human.
Wrangel has a very long history of prolific life, as it was not glaciated in the Quatenary Age. It had 100 species worth of bird colonies, including the endangered snow goose; 417 plant species, more than any island in the Arctic Circle. A population of 100,000 walrus, herds of reindeer, a population of lemmings, fox, snowy owl, lots of life. Of course the climate is harsh and winters are long.
An account by Ada would likely have been interesting, but truth be told, very little actually happened there during the stay. What did Steffansson say? "An adventure (in the North) is a sign of incompetence." Roald Amundsen, the notable explorer, did not admire him, calling Stefansson "the greatest humbug alive".