Ada Blackjack – Alone in the Arctic

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Ada Blackjack knew that the expedition she was to embark on was dangerous. Not five feet tall, slim, terrified of polar bears, and with no practical survival skills, she was the least likely Arctic explorer you could imagine. But she was also a mother, whose ill son, Bennett, desperately needed hospital treatment which Blackjack could not afford – the $50 a month she was offered was too good to be true, and certainly too good to turn down. So, placing her son in a mission home, she left with four young white men, under reassurances that other Iñupiat families were to join, and that supplies would be aplenty. But no other families came, and supplies soon ran low. When a relief team arrived just two years after the quintet set out, the only person left alive would be Ada Blackjack.

Blackjack was born in 1898 and raised Methodist – as such, the Arctic survival skills many other Iñupiat people were taught were not deemed necessary for her to learn. She did, however, know how to speak English, clean, cook, and sew. By 1921, Blackjack was a destitute single mother, struggling to make a living after her abusive husband had abandoned her. When a ship called the Victoria pulled into Nome, Alaska, looking for an Alaskan native who spoke English to work as a seamstress for them, Blackjack had no other choice but to join. 

On 9th September 1921, the Silver Wave pulled away from Nome on the journey to Wrangel Island with Blackjack aboard. Accompanying her were:

Ada Blackjack (central) with her team (L-R): Crawford, Maurer, Knight, Galle
  • Allan Crawford, the team leader despite being just 20 years of age;
  • Frederick Maurer, a 28-year-old, relatively experienced explorer;
  • Milton Galle, the youngest recruit at 19;
  • Lorne Knight, 28, also with some expedition experience;
  • Vic, the ship’s cat, who also survived Wrangel with Blackjack

Interestingly, the man who had actually organised the expedition, Vilhajalmur Stefansson, did not join them, and indeed never had any intention of doing so. It’s possible that things may have gone significantly differently had he joined, as he was a celebrated explorer and had been to Wrangel Island before (as had Maurer, on the same expedition). 

Still, the team had only been equipped with six months’ worth of provisions – which, allegedly, could last two years in a pinch. But they made no effort to ration, assuming that the island’s seemingly never-ending supply of wild game would keep them afloat (and expecting a relief vessel to resupply them in the summer).

On both counts, they were wrong. As the winter of 1922 drew in, hunting opportunities diminished to the point of being next to non-existent, and the relief vessel, the Teddy Bear, had been forced to turn back. The mood in camp began to sour and Blackjack seemed to regret her decision. The men grew irritated by her, with Knight writing, ‘it is NOT funny for the four of us to have a foolish female howling and refusing to work and eating all of our good grub.’

Ada Blackjack in the Wrangel Island campsite

However, it’s difficult to blame Blackjack for her anguished mood. No doubt she was desperate to get back to her son, and it’s hard to believe that the men weren’t just as frustrated as she. 

By January 1923, Knight was seriously ill with undiagnosed scurvy, and all the expedition members were growing increasingly weak. With very few options left to them, Crawford, Maurer, and Galle set off together across the frozen sea in a desperate attempt to fetch help. None of the men were ever seen again. 

Blackjack was especially sad to see Galle go, as he had been kind to her. Now alone with Knight, Blackjack was forced to teach herself the skills she needed to both take care of Knight and keep herself alive. She was, according to the 1924 Los Angeles Times, “doctor, nurse, companion, servant and huntswoman in one”. Knight was not a grateful patient and repeatedly insulted Blackjack, even throwing books at her and criticising her inability to provide good meat – far from Blackjack’s fault. 

Still, Blackjack did the best she could, despite becoming ill herself. Knight finally died on 23rd June 1923, and, fearing she too would perish, Blackjack noted the date down for a prospective rescue team to find. Too weak to bury him, she left Knight’s body where it lay in his sleeping bag and constructed a wall of supply boxes to protect it from animals and the elements. It would stay there until the rescuers arrived a few months later.

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 [shit] out for him.

Ada Blackjack in her diary, complaining of Knight’s treatment of her during his illness

Truly alone (save for Vic the cat), it would have been easy for Blackjack to give up. But she still had Bennett to return to, so she ploughed on. After Knight’s death, some animals began to return to the island and, with her newfound hunting and trapping skills, Blackjack was able to survive.

Blackjack aboard the Donaldson after her rescue

The rescue ship – the Donaldson – arrived on 20th August 1923. At first, Blackjack assumed it was ‘a duck or something’, but when she finally realised her ordeal was over, she broke down sobbing. From Wrangel Island, she brought back photographs, her own diary along with Knight’s and fragments of Galle’s (Maurer, Crawford, and Galle had disappeared with theirs when they tried to cross the ice), fifteen fox skins which she sold for $38 apiece, and Vic. 

Unfortunately for Blackjack, though she had been rescued, her trials were not over. Dubbed the ‘female Robinson Crusoe’, she was enveloped in a media storm, which she hated. Further, Stefansson and others profited from selling her story, but Blackjack received none of the royalties and continued being plagued by poverty, especially after she had her second son, Billy, and her marriage to his father broke down. 

A smear campaign against her also started up, suggesting that she had purposefully neglected Knight during his illness in favour of herself. Blackjack handled the incident with grace, however, and calmly and indisputably refuted the accusations. Even Knight’s parents supported her, his father writing, “I still maintain that Ada Blackjack was a real heroine and that there is nothing to justify me in the faintest belief that she did not do for Lorne all that she was able to do.”

Money problems followed Blackjack for the rest of her life, and she was once again forced to put Bennett and now Billy into a home for nine years. She spent her last years in Alaska working as a reindeer herder, and gave one more interview at Billy’s encouragement. When asked if she often thought of her Wrangel Island ordeal, Blackjack replied, “I can’t think of anything else.”

Ada Blackjack died in 1983, aged 85, quickly fading into obscurity. She was buried next to Bennett, who had predeceased her by a decade. 

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