Ada Blackjack - Unlikely Arctic Survivor
This remarkable woman was not an explorer, but her story needs to be more well-known. With no wilderness skills to speak of, she taught herself to survive alone on a remote, uninhabited Arctic island.
Ada Blackjack (Wikipedia)
Ada Blackjack, née Delutuk, an Iñupiat woman, was born in 1898 in Solomon, Alaska. When her father died, her destitute mother sent the eight-year-old Ada to live with a Methodist family in the gold rush town of Nome.
Although she was a Native Alaskan, Ada was never taught how to hunt or trap or to survive in the wild. Instead, during her time with the family, she learned how to speak English, to read the Bible, how to keep house and how to cook western-style food.
When she was sixteen, she married Jack Blackjack, a dog-musher, and had three children before she turned twenty-two. Sadly, two of her children died in infancy, and the one who survived, a boy named Bennett, was a sickly child.
Jack Blackjack was not a good husband; he beat Ada and starved her. And when he finally decided to abandon her in 1921, he did so when the family were about forty miles from Nome, on the Seward Peninsula.
Ada walked the forty miles back to Nome with Bennett, who was five at the time, carrying him when he became too weak to walk.
Working as a cleaner and seamstress, Ada struggled to make ends meet. Bennett continued to suffer poor health, exacerbated by tuberculosis. Finding herself in the same destitute position her own mother had been in, Ada finally placed Bennett in a local orphanage while she laboured to make enough money to care for him. She wanted to take him to Seattle where his tuberculosis could be treated effectively, but the cost placed it out of her reach.
It was around this time, Ada heard of an expedition heading for Wrangel Island, which wanted a Native seamstress who spoke English. The pay of $50 a month for up to two years must have seemed like a dream come true for her.
About 100 miles north of Siberia and 600 miles north-west of Nome, Wrangel Island was uninhabited and unclaimed by any country. The expedition was organised by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, an Arctic explorer who wanted to claim the island for the British Empire, even though Britain had never expressed an interest in it. His ‘brilliant’ idea was to have his team occupy the island for long enough so he could then claim it for Britain or Canada; he wasn’t fussed which country might want it, so long as one of them did.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson (Wikipedia)
A charismatic man and something of a notorious celebrity, Stefansson didn’t have much trouble assembling his team of four men – Lorne Knight and Fred Maurer, both 28, who had served under Stefansson on previous expeditions; Milton Galle, 19, who ran the projector on Stefansson’s lecture tours and had no expedition experience; and 20-year-old Toronto University student, Allan Crawford, who, it appears, was included because he was a Canadian citizen.
It was never Stefansson’s intention to join his own expedition, although he was funding it. The team only had supplies to last six months but were ordered to stay for two years. Stefansson assured them the game on the island would be more than enough to add to their supplies, and he would send a ship in a year’s time to further augment their stores. But he also stressed they had to hire locals to join the expedition, skilled hunters, obviously, and seamstresses to make clothing from animal skins to guard against the freezing temperatures.
Unfortunately for the men, it was obvious to the locals the expedition was ill-prepared and none were willing to accompany them. When it came to it, Ada was the only seamstress they could find. And, despite her misgivings, the only reason she went was for the money, which would allow her to properly care for her son.
The expedition left on September 9th, 1921.
During their first year on Wrangel Island, the men managed to shoot mainly seals and polar bears, adding to their supplies, which lasted them into the spring of 1922.
As winter approached, the number of animals lessened, and the pack ice closed in. The promised ship failed to appear. Unknown to them, the ship Stefansson had sent to pick them up had been forced to turn back, unable to get through the ice. The expedition realised their supplies would have to last another year; what had seemed enough was, in reality, woefully inadequate.
By December 1922, they were starving, and Lorne Knight, suffering the onset of scurvy, was sick and weak. The other three men decided they would travel over the ice to Siberia for help, leaving Ada to care for Knight. They left with the remaining sled dogs and most of the remaining supplies. They were never seen again.
Knight stayed alive for six months and all through, Ada cared for him; she was “doctor, nurse, companion, servant and huntswoman in one,” wrote the Los Angeles Times in 1924.
In despair and frustrated at his helpless state, Knight took it out on Ada through cruel words, saying awful things like it was no surprise two of her children had died. Although she kept her upset hidden from Knight, she confessed her true feelings in her diary – “He never stop and think how its hard for women to take four mans place, to wood work and to hund [hunt] for something to eat for him and do waiting to his bed and take the shiad [shit] out for him.”
Throughout the winter and spring of 1923, while caring for Knight, Ada also taught herself to trap and hunt, tasks that had previously been the responsibility of the men. It took her weeks to learn to trap. In the first month, she caught nothing; in the second, one fox. By the third month, she caught three in one day. She also learned to use Knight’s rifle.
Despite Knight’s constant verbal abuse, Ada confided in her diary that she would miss him.
When he finally died, she recorded the date of his death on Galle’s typewriter:
“The daid of Mr. Knights death
He died on June 23rd. I dont know what time he died though
Anyway I write the daid. Just to let Mr Steffansom know what month he died and what daid of the month
written by Mrs. Ada B, Jack.”
Too weak to bury him, she barricaded him with crates and moved into the cook tent.
Alone, with only Vic the cat for company, Ada was determined not to fall into despair, making every effort to survive for her son’s sake, if nothing else. She continued to set traps and, among other tasks, built a platform from which she could spot polar bears; she also experimented with the photography equipment.
After three months, in August 1923, as winter started to set in, she must have felt the hopelessness of her situation for she wrote out, what could be considered, a will.
However, on August 19th, 1923, the schooner ‘Donaldson’ appeared, under the command of Harold Noice, and Ada and Vic were finally rescued after almost two years on Wrangel Island.
Noice gathered all the men’s journals and correspondence, though whether it was to pass on to their relatives or because, even at that point, he recognised the possibility of a lucrative story, is unclear.
Back in Nome, Ada wanted nothing more than to be reunited with Bennett and stayed away from the press, barely speaking of her ordeal.
Having no such qualms, Noice went on to write a sensational story for the newspapers of the world. Shamefully, he chose to ignore Knight’s own journal, which showed Ada in a good light, as the one who cared for him during his illness, and, instead, portrayed Ada as a villainous woman, someone who neglected Knight and, quite possibly, hastened his end.
Ada, meanwhile, collected her payment – less than what she’d been promised – and took Bennett to Seattle to be treated for his tuberculosis.
And Vic the cat settled happily in a comfortable home.
Stefansson decided to write his own story, ‘The Adventure of Wrangel Island’, based on the journals of his team. In it, he defended his own actions, criticised Noice, and most importantly I think, totally defended and exonerated Ada.
Not surprisingly though, Ada did not profit from this story at all.
As resolute as ever, she got on with her life. Staying in Seattle, she remarried and had another son, Billy. She divorced and married again; that, too, ended in divorce. At some point, the family moved back to Alaska.
When she herself contracted tuberculosis, poverty, once more, came calling. Once more, she had to give up her sons, placing them in the Jesse Lee Home for Children in Seward. It took her nine years of struggling to recover her health before she was reunited with her sons.
In 1937, Ada returned to Nome with her boys. The skills she’d taught herself on Wrangel Island proved useful; she earned a living hunting and trapping, and herding reindeer.
Sadly, Bennett’s health remained poor and he died in 1972, aged 58.
In 1983, at the age of 85, Ada Blackjack died in a nursing home in Palmer, Alaska. She was buried alongside her dear Bennett.
She may not have made any major contributions to society, but her resourcefulness, bravery and courage as a mother makes Ada Blackjack’s story one that deserves to be spoken of more often.