Ada Blackjack travelled with four inexperienced young men on an ill-advised expedition to Wrangell Island in the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia. Stuck there for two years, the four young men died, leaving Ada to survive on her own.
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Ada, born Ada Deletuk, hailed from Spruce Creek just a few miles from Nome Alaska—far north of the Arctic Circle. Methodist missionaries raised Ada, and she studied the Bible in English, knew all about housekeeping, sewing, and cooking.
At 16 she made a tragic choice. She married Jack Blackjack. Ada Blackjack bore her husband three children, only one of whom lived, and Blackjack disappeared in 1921.
Ada’s surviving son, five years old, sick with tuberculosis, couldn’t walk so Ada carried him forty miles to Nome. With no money and no prospects, she couldn’t care for the boy. She placed him in an orphanage, promising him and herself she would earn some money and come get him.
And opportunity knocked—or seemed to.
An Arctic explorer named Stefansson, put together a breathtakingly ill-conceived expedition. He had attracted four inexperienced young men and he needed an English-speaking seamstress. Ada hesitated, but she desperately needed money to get her boy back.
Stefansson didn’t go with them, instead he dispatched the five of them to Wrangell Island north of Siberia in the Arctic Ocean to claim it for the British (not that the British particularly wanted it.) He equipped them with 6 months of supplies, assuring them that they could supplement those with game provided by the “friendly arctic” until a ship came to get them next year.
At first things worked pretty much like Stefansson predicted, but come winter and time to return to civilization, the Arctic Ocean and Wrangell returned to normal. Pack ice surrounded the island. The ship sent to get them, encountering the solid ice, turned back.
Scurvy sickened Knight, one of the four men, and the other three, facing a second year on Wrangell, elected to try to cross on the ice to Siberia for help. They simply disappeared.
For six months Ada struggled to care for and feed Knight. He died on June 23; left young Ada alone. Unable to bury him she left him in his sleeping bag and erected a barrier to keep wild animals away.
Ada adapted, taught herself to set traps, shoot birds. She even built herself a boat and experimented with the expedition’s photography equipment. Two pictures of Ada standing outside her camp have survived.
On August 20, 1923, after nearly two years, a ship arrived to rescue her. According to Atlas Obscura, “As news of the expedition’s tragic end spread, Blackjack found herself at the epicenter of a flurry of press attention lauding her as a hero…” She shied away from the attention, wanting only to get home to her son.
(Much of the information about Ada and the public domain photos come from an article by Tessa Hulls on Atlas Obscura.) Click here for the full story