Ada Blackjack: The Unsung Woman Hero of Arctic Exploration and Her Incredible Survival Story

It’s 1923, and a lone woman stands on the frozen shores of Wrangel Island, surrounded by nothing but ice, snow, and the vast Arctic wilderness. This is Ada Blackjack, and her story is one of the most incredible tales of survival you’ve probably never heard.

In the harsh and unforgiving landscape of Arctic exploration, few stories are as gripping yet tragically overlooked as that of Ada Blackjack. Born in 1898 in Spruce Creek, a small settlement near Nome, Alaska, Ada’s journey from struggling single mother to sole survivor of a harrowing Arctic expedition is an engrossing tale of maternal love, human resilience and the indomitable will to survive.

Ada’s early life was marked by hardship and cultural displacement. After her father’s death from food poisoning when she was eight, Ada and her sister Rita were sent to a Methodist mission school in Nome. There, she learned English and Western domestic skills but was cut off from her traditional Iñupiat upbringing, and lacked the survival typically possessed by her people. This unconventional education would later prove both an asset and a liability during her Arctic ordeal.

At just 16, Ada married Jack Blackjack, a local dog musher. The union brought more pain than joy, resulting in three children, only one of whom – Bennett – survived infancy. Ada’s life took a turn for the worse when Jack abandoned her and their young son on the Seward Peninsula. Left destitute with a sickly child, Ada made the 40-mile (64 km) trek back to Nome, where she was forced to make the heartbreaking decision to place Bennett in an orphanage while she struggled to make ends meet.

It was in this desperate situation that Ada’s path intersected with that of the famous (or perhaps infamous) Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. In 1921, Stefansson was recruiting for an expedition to claim Wrangel Island for Britain – a dubious endeavor given that Russia had already laid claim to the island years earlier. Ada, driven by the desire to reunite with her son and provide for his tuberculosis treatment, signed on as the expedition’s seamstress and cook for a promised salary of $50 per month.

What Ada didn’t know was that she was walking into a tragically ill-conceived venture. Stefansson had cobbled together a team of four young, inexperienced men: Allan Crawford, Lorne Knight, Milton Galle, and Fred Maurer. None were truly prepared for the harsh realities of Arctic survival. To make things worse, the expedition was woefully undersupplied, with only six months’ worth of provisions for what was intended to be a year-long stay.

On September 21, 1921, Ada set sail on the Silver Wave with the four men and a cat named Victoria. From the moment they set foot on Wrangel Island, Ada was plagued by doubts. The island was larger and more barren than she had been led to believe, measuring about 80 miles (128 km) long and 30 miles (48 km) wide. Game, which Stefansson had assured them would be plentiful, was scarce. As Ada confided in her diary, “I thought at first that I would turn back, but I decided it wouldn’t be fair to the boys.

The first months passed with relative calm. While the men hunted, cared for the sled dogs, and set up meteorological instruments, Ada repaired their clothing. However, when the expected relief ship failed to arrive in the summer of 1922, the expedition’s fortunes took a dark turn. Unbeknownst to the stranded party, Stefansson had failed to raise funds for a relief ship, and his belated appeal to the Canadian government came too late in the season to mount a rescue.

By January 1923, the party was starving. Temperatures hovered around -56°F and Lorne Knight had fallen ill with scurvy. In a desperate bid for survival, the three healthy men set out across the pack ice for Siberia, leaving Ada alone to care for the ailing Knight. They were never seen again.

For the next six months, Ada became Knight’s companion, nurse, doctor, hunter, and woodsman. Despite Knight’s deteriorating mental state and verbal abuse, Ada cared for him tirelessly. She hunted for food, giving him the choicest cuts and most of the game she managed to catch. She fashioned a bed of oatmeal sacks that she could rotate to prevent bedsores and placed warm bags of sand over his feet to prevent frostbite.

But Knight’s treatment of Ada was deplorable, going far beyond mere irritability or ingratitude. As his health deteriorated, he launched deeply personal attacks on Ada, striking at her core vulnerabilities as a mother and a woman. In his most vicious moments, Knight told Ada that her husband had been right to abuse and abandon her, implying that she somehow deserved such treatment. This was a particularly cruel barb, given Ada’s history of domestic abuse and the hardships she had already endured.

Even more heartlessly, Knight blamed Ada for the deaths of two of her children. He claimed it was “no wonder” they had died, attributing their deaths to Ada’s supposed incompetence as a mother. This was an unimaginably painful accusation for Ada, who had already suffered the profound grief of losing two infants.

Knight’s abuse extended to Ada’s current efforts as well. Despite the fact that Ada was literally keeping him alive through her hunting and caretaking, Knight continuously berated her for not caring for him properly. He complained ceaselessly about her efforts, never acknowledging the extraordinary lengths she was going to in order to keep him alive and comfortable.

Perhaps most shockingly, Knight even accused Ada of deliberately trying to starve him to death. This accusation was particularly absurd and hurtful given that Ada consistently gave Knight the majority of the game she hunted, as well as the choicest cuts of meat, often at the expense of her own nourishment.

Throughout all of this, Ada maintained a stoic exterior. She continued to care for Knight, feeding him, tending to his needs, and even devising creative solutions like the rotating oatmeal sack bed to prevent bedsores. However, her diary entries reveal the deep pain and frustration she felt. In one poignant entry, she wrote, “He never stop and think how much its hard for women to take four mans place, to wood work and to hund for something to eat for him and do waiting to his bed and take the shiad out for him.”

When Knight succumbed to his illness on June 23, 1923, Ada found herself truly alone, save for Victoria the cat. She recorded Knight’s death on a typewriter left behind by one of the crew, then warded off despair by single-mindedly resolving to survive in order to see Bennett again. Too weak to bury Knight, she stacked boxes around his body and left him in his bedroll.

For three long months, Ada endured complete isolation. She taught herself skills that had been foreign to her just months before – hunting birds, setting traps for Arctic foxes, and building shelters. She constructed a new boat out of animal skins, canvas, and driftwood to replace one destroyed in a storm. She even built a raised platform for spotting polar bears at a distance.

Throughout this ordeal, Ada’s thoughts remained fixed on her son. She even drafted an informal will, instructing that if she died, her sister Rita should care for Bennett and detailing how any money due to her should be distributed.

When rescue finally came on August 20, 1923, Ada’s transformation was complete (it had been nearly two years since she landed on Wrangel Island). She greeted her rescuers wrapped in a reindeer jacket she had sewn herself, with a smile that spoke volumes about her ordeal and triumph. The men of the schooner Donaldson were impressed, claiming that Ada had so mastered the Arctic environment that she and Victoria could have survived there for at least another year.

Upon her return to civilization, Ada was briefly hailed as a hero, dubbed the “female Robinson Crusoe” by the press. She was reunited with Bennett and able to afford his tuberculosis treatment in Seattle. However, her moment in the spotlight was short-lived. Unscrupulous individuals, including one of her rescuers, attempted to tarnish her reputation with false accusations of negligence in Knight’s death. Though these claims were eventually disproven, the damage to Ada’s public image was done.

Perhaps the greatest injustice was that Vilhjalmur Stefansson, whose reckless planning had led to the deaths of four young men and nearly claimed Ada’s life as well, emerged from the debacle relatively unscathed. He even capitalized on the tragedy, writing a book titled “The Adventure of Wrangel Island” and pocketing the profits.

Ada’s later years were marked by continued struggle. Despite her incredible feat of survival, she never escaped poverty. She remarried and had another son, Billy, but was forced once again to place her children in an orphanage for a time, only reuniting with them nine years later. Bennett, whose illness had driven her to join the expedition in the first place, passed away in 1972 at the age of 58.

Ada Blackjack died in 1983 at the age of 85, her incredible story largely forgotten by the world. Yet her son Billy remembered her fondly as a loving mother and “one of the greatest heroines of Arctic exploration.” Indeed, Ada’s tale of survival against all odds stands as a tribute to human fortitude and the extraordinary lengths a mother will go for her child – sometimes even in a geographical sense.

Sources: 1, 2