Ada Blackjack, Alone on Wrangel Island

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In the spring of 1923, on an island in the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia, a young Iñupiaq woman sat in a canvas tent and wrote a note in her diary for whoever might find her body. She asked that a black strip of cloth go to her son, for his school book bag. She had come to the island as a seamstress, with no experience as a hunter, and the only other person left on the island was dying in his sleeping bag a few feet away. Today: Ada Blackjack, and the two years she spent on Wrangel Island.

Welcome to Hidden History. Take a break from the modern world and journey into the far North in the early 1920s, to a gold-rush town on the coast of Alaska and a frozen island almost nobody wanted.

Ada was born in 1898 in Spruce Creek, a small Iñupiaq settlement on the Seward Peninsula. When she was eight, after her father died, she was sent to a Methodist mission school in Nome. The missionaries taught her to read, to write, and above all to sew. She married at sixteen. Her husband, Jack Blackjack, beat her, and within a few years he had left her and their small son, Bennett. The boy had tuberculosis. Ada could not pay for his care, so she placed him in a children's home and worked as a seamstress and cleaner, saving to get him back.

In 1921 the police chief in Nome told her about an expedition that needed a seamstress. It belonged to Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a famous Arctic explorer with very large ideas. Stefansson pictured an Arctic of future air routes and weather stations, and he wanted Canada, and the British Empire behind it, to own Wrangel Island, a mountainous, ice-bound piece of land of about three thousand square miles, which Russia regarded as its own. His plan was simple. Put a few people on the island, let them live there, and the occupation itself would build a claim.

He did not go himself. He sent four young men: Allan Crawford, a Canadian, in charge; Lorne Knight and Milton Galle; and Fred Maurer, who had already survived months on Wrangel Island in 1914 after the wreck of an earlier Stefansson ship. Stefansson told them the island had plenty of game, and they took supplies for about six months.

Several Native families were meant to go along, and they backed out. Ada signed on anyway, as seamstress, for fifty dollars a month, more money than she had ever been offered. She would be the only woman and the only Iñupiaq on the island. She was afraid of polar bears, and she was not sure about living alone with four strange men. She thought of Bennett, and of tuberculosis treatment in Seattle, and she went.

They landed in mid-September 1921, with a cat named Vic who had been born aboard ship. The first year went reasonably well. The men hunted, Ada made their fur clothing, and they raised the Union Jack and declared the island British. But the following summer the ice around Wrangel Island never broke up enough, and the relief ship sent in 1922 could not get through. No supplies came. The game they had been promised was thin. By the second winter the food was nearly gone, and Knight was sick with scurvy, his legs thin and covered in blue spots.

On the twenty-eighth of January, 1923, Crawford, Maurer and Galle loaded a sled and set out with the dogs to walk across the frozen Chukchi Sea toward Siberia, in temperatures around fifty below, hoping to reach help and send it back. Ada cried when they left. They promised to come back for her and Knight. Nobody ever saw any of the three again.

That left Ada and a man who could no longer stand. For the next five months she did everything. She hauled and chopped the wood. She learned to set and check the fox traps, walking out to them in storms. In March she began a diary, and it reads like a work log. "I was over to the traps no fox or tracks." "I caught one female fox, it tasted like chicken." She nursed Knight, cooked for him, cleaned him, and took his complaints. When he turned cruel and blamed her for everything, she wrote that down too, noting that the two of them had no witness.

Twice she stopped to write instructions in case she was found dead. She wanted her sister Rita to raise Bennett, and not his father. "I just write noted," she explained, "in case polar bear tear me down or case I fall in some thin ice, because I am hunting pretty near every day."

She was hunting now with a rifle and a shotgun she had barely handled before. She practiced on targets. She built a board to rest the rifle on, and a lookout on top of the storage tent so she could watch the ice for bears. In early June she wrote that Knight was "just dying, he could hardly talk." Later that month, after one last night when he saw her crying, she found him dead in his sleeping bag. She could not move him. She built a barricade of wooden boxes around his body to keep the animals away and moved into the storage tent.

Then, on the twenty-seventh of June, she went after a seal in front of the camp and killed it with a single shot. "That's a first seal I ever got in my life," she wrote. The next afternoon a polar bear and a cub came up near the tent. She fired over their heads until they ran.

For the rest of that summer she lived on the island with the cat. She dried seal meat, made a canvas boat and paddles from driftwood, and sewed herself a new reindeer-skin parka with fancy trimming. On the twenty-third of July she saw a bear with two cubs at the end of the harbor and wrote, "I thank God for living." On the first of August she was sewing beads onto a pair of slippers for Bennett.

Three weeks later a ship came out of the fog. It was the schooner Donaldson, sent by Stefansson under a man named Harold Noice, carrying a new party of colonists. Ada asked where the other three men were, and learned they had never arrived anywhere.

The newspapers called her a female Robinson Crusoe, and then some of them, encouraged by Noice, suggested she had neglected Knight. Knight's own father came to her defense and called her a real heroine. Stefansson wrote a book about the expedition, drawing on her diary. She said she received little beyond her wages and a few hundred dollars for furs. The new colonists did no better: in 1924 a Soviet gunboat arrived, removed them, and settled the question of who owned Wrangel Island. It has been Russian ever since.

Ada used her money to take Bennett to Seattle for treatment. She lived to be eighty-five, mostly avoiding anyone who wanted the story, and died in Alaska in 1983. Her headstone in Anchorage reads, "Heroine, Wrangel Island Expedition."

That's our story for today. Thanks for listening to Hidden History.