No longer overlooked: Ada Blackjack, survivor of a harrowing polar expedition
This article is part of Overlookeda series of obituaries about notable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, were not reported in The Times.
When Ada Blackjack arrived on Wrangel Island in 1921 as part of a polar expedition, she knew virtually nothing about surviving in the Arctic.
She had never built a house or shelter before. Guns and knives frightened her, as did polar bears. And she had never stocked provisions or caught small game.
Despite a lack of essential skills, she braved the harsh conditions in the far north – desperate for money for her son’s tuberculosis treatment – and stayed alive through sheer force of will.
She was hired as a seamstress to accompany a crew organized by the polar explorer Vilhajamur Stefansson, who wanted to claim the deserted island between Alaska and Russia for the British Empire.
But more than two years after the party was stranded on that barren patch of land, a rescue operation revealed that Blackjack was the sole survivor of the Wrangel Island expedition.
“Filling in the gaps between her short, reluctant sentences, the stern truth is pieced together,” she read an article from the Los Angeles Times in 1924. ‘The stronger, bigger white men died because – in a biological sense – they were not fit for survival. There was game, but they didn’t know how to catch or kill it.”
Woefully underprepared and undersupplied, three of the company’s young men left their base on the island in an attempt to cross the sea ice into Siberia and seek help. They were never heard from again.
A fourth man, seriously ill with scurvy, was placed under Blackjack’s care until his death.
She was left to her own devices and learned to conquer the elements. She carried firewood for miles, killed foxes, built an umiak and made a parka from reindeer skin.
Upon her return, the press dubbed her the “female Robinson Crusoe” and followed her every move. But Blackjack had a modest position.
“In later years, when people called her brave, she would tilt her head to the side and stare at them, unblinking, with dark brown eyes,” recounts a 1973 article in The Denver Post. “After a while she simply replied, ‘Brave ? I do not know. But I would never give up hope while I’m still alive.’”
Ada Delutuk was born on May 10, 1898 in an Iñupiat settlement in Spruce Creek, Alaska. Her father died when she was eight, and her mother entrusted her to the care of Methodist missionaries in nearby Nome, who taught her math, reading and writing, in addition to doing household chores, sewing and cooking.
She married Jack Blackjack, a dog lover, at age 16 and had three children before she was 21, two of whom died. Her husband beat her and left her to starve, after which he abandoned the family.
“Leg-poor, almost naked from lack of clothing and without money,” the Los Angeles Times quoted her as saying: she placed her surviving son, Bennett, in an orphanage.
In 1921, Stefansson, infamous for organizing a polar expedition from 1913 to 1918 that claimed sixteen lives, had founded the Stefansson Arctic Exploration Company and found four young men – Allan Crawford, Lorne Knight, Fred Maurer and Milton Galle – to join him. collect. behind his new vision to claim Wrangel Island.
In preparation, the men sought an English-speaking seamstress who could repair their gloves and boot soles during the expedition.
Hoping to earn enough to bring Bennett back from the orphanage and get him proper care, Blackjack reluctantly agreed to join the venture for a promised salary of $50 a month – assuming that other Iñupiat would also participate.
As the ship prepared for departure, however, she realized she was the only Alaskan resident and the only woman on board. She was assured that before their final destination the ship would stop at a “settlement between Nome and Wrangel to hire families for Ada to take her place.” However, no such stop ever occurred and she continued to Wrangel Island.
In a statement printed in Stefansson’s 1925 book: “The Adventure of Wrangel Island”, Blackjack wrote: “The country seemed very big to me, but they said it was only a small island. At first I thought I would return, but I decided it wouldn’t be fair to the boys.”
Upon arrival, Blackjack attempted to marry Crawford or one of the other men, believing they would protect her. Instead, they rejected her advances, and she became hysterical as a deep fear took over.
She ran into the mountains, tried to poison herself and refused to work. To punish her insubordination, the men tied her to a flagpole and denied her food.
And then, just as quickly, she adapted to the environment.
“She sewed, cooked, washed dishes, scrubbed their clothes and scraped their hides,” wrote Jennifer Niven in “Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic” (2004).
“She got up at six in the morning to bake bread,” Niven added. “She was pleasant, cheerful and friendly. It was hard to believe that there was ever a time when she hadn’t done her part.”
But conditions quickly deteriorated. A ship that promised to bring new supplies failed to arrive when it encountered sea ice, and the expedition was dangerously short of food. Crawford, Maurer and Galle, who set out to seek help on January 29, 1923, are believed to have died during their journey across the Long Strait to Siberia.
Blackjack stayed behind with Knight and became “doctor, nurse, companion, servant and hunter,” wrote The Los Angeles Times, as the explorer cursed her and blamed her for his illness.
In broken English Blackjack wrote in a diary that she started keeping in March 1923: “He never thinks about how hard it is for women to take the place of four men, working wood and hunting for something for him to eat.”
In no time, she ignored his scathing comments and decided to face the dangers of the island alone, except for the company of Vic, the expedition cat.
“If she made a mistake once, she won’t make it again,” Niven wrote. “When she fell ankle deep into the mouth of the harbor, she learned.”
“If she shot too far to the left or right and scared the birds away without hitting any, she noticed,” she continued. “When she pulled the trigger and forgot she had already set the hammer, she almost fell over, but she was not injured. And she never forgot it. She also learned to keep the fox skins out of reach of the cat, which kept trying to eat them.”
According to Blackjack’s diary, Knight died on June 23, 1923.
Two months later, a rescue ship arrived, found Blackjack and returned her to Alaska.
There she reunited with Bennett and took him to Seattle for tuberculosis treatment, even though her existence remained fraught with hardship.
Her entire promised wages from the expedition were never deposited. She was criticized for not caring enough for Knight, and she was manipulated into sharing her story for the benefit of Stefansson and others. She eventually fell into poverty and was so miserable that she longed for the solitude and hardship of Wrangel Island.
Her second marriage ended in divorce. Her son from that marriage, Billy Blackjack Johnson, died in 2003. Her son Bennett died in 1972 at the age of 58.
“I consider my mother, Ada Blackjack, one of the most loving mothers in the world and one of the greatest heroines in the history of Arctic exploration,” Billy said, according to a 2018 article in The Nunatsiaq News. “She survived against all odds.”
Blackjack died on May 29, 1983 in Palmer, Alaska. She was 85. On her gravestone, a simple plaque reads: “Heroine – Wrangel Island Expedition.”