Ada Blackjack was 23 when she boarded a ship heading toward Wrangel Island, a barren stretch of ice north of Siberia. She was hired as a seamstress and cook, meant to keep a crew of four young men warm and fed through the Arctic night.
When a rescue vessel finally arrived almost two years later, the camp was deserted. The men were gone, either dead or lost to the ice. Only Ada remained, alive with the orange tabby cat named Vic that had sailed with them from Alaska.
The newspapers would call her the “female Robinson Crusoe.” What she lived was far harsher, with months of hunger, cold, and fear that she survived only to make it back to her young son.
Who was Ada Blackjack and what led her to the Wrangel Island expedition?
Ada Blackjack was born in 1898 in a small settlement on Alaska’s western coast. Her father died when she was still young, and she was raised in Nome by Methodist missionaries. They taught her English, reading, writing, and sewing, but she never learned the traditional survival skills of her people.
At sixteen, Ada married a musher named Jack Blackjack. The marriage was violent and unstable. She gave birth to three children, but only one survived. Her son Bennett was sick with tuberculosis, and in 1921 Jack abandoned them both. Ada walked forty miles to Nome, often carrying Bennett on her back.
With no steady income and Bennett’s health failing, Ada made the painful choice to place him in an orphanage. Each day she stitched clothes or scrubbed floors for pennies, every coin saved for his medicine. She swore to herself that she would one day bring him back. That vow guided her every decision.
That summer, Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson came to Nome looking for Alaska Native women who spoke English to join his latest project, a colony on Wrangel Island. The offer included fifty dollars a month, a rare fortune. Ada agreed, believing other Native families would join, though one by one they backed out.
By September 1921, Ada was the only woman left among four young men. She was afraid of the frozen island and the polar bears she had heard about, yet more afraid of never being able to reclaim Bennett. She signed on to the Wrangel Island expedition, determined to face what awaited her.
Why the Ada Blackjack expedition to Wrangel Island was doomed from the start?
On September 9, 1921, Ada boarded the Silver Wave with four young men: Allan Crawford, just twenty, Lorne Knight, twenty-eight, Fred Maurer, also twenty-eight, and Milton Galle, nineteen. Alongside them was an orange tabby kitten named Victoria, nicknamed Vic, given by the ship’s captain as a charm for good luck.
When the party landed on Wrangel Island, they planted flags to claim it for the British Empire, though Britain itself showed little interest. Ada’s unease deepened. Stefansson had stayed behind, raising money for other projects, leaving this inexperienced group to fend for itself on a barren and hostile shore.
They carried just six months of food, gambling on Stefansson’s belief that the Arctic would feed them. Ada knew how thin that promise was. As the ship disappeared into the fog, she stood crying on the gravel beach, left with strangers and the silence of the ice.
The first months on Wrangel were difficult but not yet desperate. Ada struggled to find her place, frightened by the wilderness and often clashing with the men. Knight once tied her to a flagpole for refusing to sew boots, writing later that kindness had failed. Ada endured humiliation but resolved to contribute.
“The seamstress refused to patch a pair of boots to-day, so I tied her to the flagpole until she promised to repair them. Kindness failing to accelerate, I am trying something more forceful.”
– From the diary of Lorne Knight, dated November 23, 1921
Through the long polar night of 1921 into 1922, Ada cooked, mended clothing, and helped keep the camp alive. By spring, seals, walruses, and foxes appeared in numbers, and morale lifted briefly. But when summer came, the relief ship never arrived. The Teddy Bear had been turned back by ice.
As the summer ended, the island’s game dwindled and sea ice locked them in again. Ammunition and rations grew dangerously low. By early 1923, the men were starving. Knight fell gravely ill with scurvy, confined to his bed. The others debated how to save themselves before winter consumed them entirely.
On January 28, 1923, Crawford, Maurer, and Galle left camp, hoping to cross ninety miles of ice to Siberia and bring back help. They promised Ada they would return. She was left to nurse Knight, who was too weak to move. The three men never returned. They vanished into the storm.
Ada Blackjack, not yet twenty-four, remained the only able-bodied person on Wrangel. Alone with a dying companion and the cat Vic, she faced the endless night of the Arctic with nothing certain but the wind, the cold, and her own will to survive.
What happened to Ada Blackjack on Wrangel Island?
For the next six months, Ada Blackjack carried the entire burden of survival and caregiving. What had once been the combined work of five now rested on her alone. She tended to the dying Knight day and night, while also forcing herself out into the brutal Arctic cold to hunt, trap, and gather firewood.
This was not work she had been trained to do. Ada had grown up sewing and cooking, not hunting, but the circumstances left her no choice. Every morning she pushed past her fear of wild animals, stepping into subzero temperatures to check traps, collect wood, or search for food that might keep them alive.
Her diary entries from this time reveal the immense physical and emotional strain. Knight, weakened and frustrated, often turned on Ada in his delirium. He accused her of withholding food and blamed her for his decline. She, in turn, wrote about the insults, the exhaustion, and the overwhelming labor of filling four men’s roles.
One of her diary passages captures the frustration plainly: “He never stop and think how much it’s hard for [a] women to take four mans place, to wood work and to hunt for something to eat for him and do waiting to his bed and take the shiad [shit] out for him.”
Knight’s journal turned bitter as his illness advanced. He wrote of fears that Ada was starving him. In truth, she trudged miles to check empty traps, passed most of what little food she found to him, and tended his sores until her own strength nearly collapsed.
Despite her constant effort, Knight’s condition continued to decline. On June 23, 1923, he finally succumbed to scurvy. Ada, shaken by grief and the terror of being completely alone, turned to the typewriter. She left a brief, matter-of-fact record: “He died on June 23d… written by Mrs. Ada B. Jack.”
“Wrangel, Island.
June. 23d. 1923.
The daid of Mr. Knights death
He died on June 23d
I dont know what time he die though
Anyway I write the daid, Just to
let Mr Stefanssom know what month he
died and what daid of the month
writen by Mrs Ada B, Jack”
– From the diary of Ada Blackjack, typewritten insert
That single typed line was all she left of the moment. With Knight gone, the island was hers alone. Eighty miles from Siberia, no ship in sight, Ada lived with only the cat Vic beside her and the thought of Bennett waiting far away.
She showed signs of scurvy herself and battled deep loneliness, but she refused to collapse. Later, she explained her motivation with simple words. She was a mother, and she needed to survive in order to see Bennett again. That love became her secret weapon, her strongest source of hope.
Ada abandoned the filthy main hut, where Knight’s body remained sealed in his sleeping bag, carefully barricaded behind boxes. She moved into a storage tent, reinforcing it against the elements. She built a gun rack above her bed and even constructed a small platform outside to watch for polar bears at night.
With trial and error, Ada taught herself the skills she had never learned as a child. She set traps and caught arctic foxes for food and fur. She practiced with a rifle until she could shoot birds cleanly. She even pieced together a canvas and driftwood boat to hunt seals.
Her journal captures her pride in small achievements. In one entry she wrote, “I shot right in [the tin can target], that’s pretty good for first time shooting.”
“I was over to the traps today nothing but raven track and I shoot a shot gun one time. I took empty tea tin and shot it I shot right in it, thats pretty good for first time shooting. And I clean both shot gun’s”
– From the diary of Ada Blackjack, dated May 21, 1923
In another, dated April 1923, she left instructions that all her belongings should be given to Bennett if she did not survive.
“If anything happen to me and my death is known, there is black stirp for bennett school book bag, for my only son. I wish if you please take everything to Bennett that is belong to me. I don’t know how much I would be glad to get home to folks.”
– From the diary of Ada Blackjack, dated April 1, 1923
During calmer days, she allowed herself moments of hope. She sewed a tiny pair of fur slippers for Bennett, picturing the day she could hand them to him. She also found a camera left by the men and managed to take photographs of herself, thin but composed, outside her lonely camp.
For almost three months, Ada lived entirely alone on Wrangel Island. By August 1923 she had adapted so completely that later rescuers believed she could have continued another year. Yet the psychological toll of such isolation was immense. She longed for relief, and her eyes searched the horizon for ships.
On August 20, 1923, she finally saw one. A schooner named the Donaldson appeared through the fog, sent by Stefansson’s associates to check on the colony. Ada ran from her lookout post to the beach, torn between excitement and fear, still hoping against reason that the missing men might return.
When the rescuers came ashore, they found the camp silent except for a young woman and a cat. Ada, gaunt and dressed in ragged fur garments she had made herself, greeted them quietly. Vic clung to her side. She was alive, exhausted, and yet strangely composed after everything she had endured.
The rescuers stared in disbelief at the young woman before them, thin but steady, a cat pressed against her chest. After nearly two years in the Arctic, eight of them utterly alone, Ada’s first question was not about herself. She asked when she could see Bennett.
What happened to Ada Blackjack after the Wrangel Island expedition?
News of Ada Blackjack’s survival spread quickly and set off a frenzy in the press. Headlines hailed her as an unlikely heroine, the quiet Inuit seamstress who had lived through the Arctic when all the men around her had perished. She was called the “female Robinson Crusoe” across newspapers.
Journalists marveled that a shy woman from Nome had outlasted men who had been presented as seasoned adventurers. Ada herself wanted nothing of the praise. She avoided interviews, refused invitations to appear in public, and told anyone who insisted she was a hero the same thing: “I am just a mother who wanted to get back to my son.”
Photographs captured her thin figure in a fur parka, standing awkwardly beside rescuers. In nearly all of them, Vic the cat is tucked safely in her arms. For a brief moment, Ada was celebrated as a national figure of survival, though she never felt comfortable with the sudden attention.
Behind the fanfare, her return home in the fall of 1923 was bittersweet. She finally reunited with Bennett after two long years apart. With the modest wages she had earned and the payment for furs she trapped, Ada took her son to Seattle to seek tuberculosis treatment, determined to restore his health.
The pay she counted on never arrived in full. Stefansson handed her sixteen hundred dollars, far less than the agreement. Two years later he published The Adventure of Wrangel Island with her journals at its core, and kept every cent of profit for himself.
Some newspapers, influenced by Stefansson’s circle, smeared her name. They suggested she had been negligent, even that she let Knight die without care. Knight’s own diary disproved the charges, showing her tireless devotion, but the damage was done. Ada was deeply wounded by these lies and withdrew from reporters altogether.
After a brief burst of publicity, she slipped away from public life and tried to live quietly. She wanted no more than the simple life she had always known. What followed were years of hardship mixed with resilience, a cycle of illness, recovery, and the determination to keep her family together.
In 1924, a year after Wrangel Island, Ada remarried and soon had a second son, Billy Blackjack Johnson. Within a few years her own health collapsed. She contracted tuberculosis, the same illness that plagued Bennett, and was too weak to care for either child for much of the next decade.
Between 1927 and 1937, Ada had to place both Bennett and Billy in a children’s home while she underwent treatment. When her health allowed, Ada returned to Alaska. She spent years in remote camps, herding reindeer and setting traps, choosing the same quiet, self-reliant life she had known before Wrangel. The spotlight had once chased her, but she wanted no part of it.
In later years, Ada lived in poverty. She never received fair payment for the many articles and books written about her survival story. Even so, she took pride in being a mother above all else. Both of her sons grew into adulthood, one staying close, the other serving his community.
Bennett remained devoted to her until his sudden death from a stroke in 1972, at the age of fifty-eight. Billy served in the United States Army and later became active in Alaska Native organizations. He lived until 2003, carrying his mother’s story with him into the next generation.
Despite all she endured, Ada valued the time she had with her sons. A photograph from late 1923 shows her sitting proudly with Bennett, finally reunited after her Arctic trial. She had risked everything for him, and for a brief time mother and son were together again, her mission fulfilled.
Her quiet heroism had always been fueled by love for Bennett, though that fact was often lost in the headlines of the 1920s. In the decades that followed, she stayed out of the public eye. When asked, she answered politely, but she never sought recognition. She credited Providence and her duty as a mother.
What books and films tell Ada Blackjack’s story today?
For decades, Ada Blackjack’s name faded from public memory even as Wrangel Island became a cautionary story in exploration circles. Stefansson and his associates kept the attention, along with the profits, while Ada’s role was pushed aside. Only late in the twentieth century did her contribution begin to be fully acknowledged.
In 1983, Ada died at the age of eighty-five in a nursing home in Palmer, Alaska. She was buried in Anchorage, where her gravestone now carries a plaque that reads: “Heroine – Wrangel Island Expedition.” The words were a belated honor, a recognition that her family and community had always known she deserved.
Her story has since been retold in books, films, and articles that ensured her survival is remembered. In 2003, Jennifer Niven’s biography Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic brought her life to a wide audience. In 2016, Peggy Caravantes’ Marooned in the Arctic introduced Ada to younger readers.
Her own voice survives through her diary, preserved in Dartmouth College’s archives. The journal contains stark lines about her struggles, tender messages to Bennett, and unpolished but moving reflections. Reading her words offers a glimpse into the mind of a woman navigating fear and exhaustion in one of the world’s harshest landscapes.
Ada’s life has also been brought to screen. In 2020, an Alaska team produced a short film titled Ada Blackjack Rising, based on Niven’s book. With Inupiaq actresses and a six-minute dramatization, the film captured her isolation on Wrangel Island. It premiered online on Indigenous Peoples’ Day as a proof-of-concept project.
The filmmakers hoped to expand it into a longer feature or series. For them, Ada was not just a historical figure but, in their words, “an absolute powerhouse hero.” Through such projects, her survival reached new audiences, inspiring admiration and respect far beyond Alaska’s borders.
Writers and historians have also helped keep her story alive. Atlas Obscura called her the “forgotten sole survivor of an odd Arctic expedition,” highlighting the injustice of her obscurity and the resilience that carried her through. More recent accounts continue to elevate Ada as one of history’s great survival figures.
Today, Ada is celebrated alongside explorers and survivors who endured the impossible, yet her story remains unique. She never sought adventure or fame. She was an ordinary Indigenous woman who found within herself the courage and ingenuity to accomplish what trained adventurers could not when their strength failed.
Ada’s survival on Wrangel Island parallels other modern stories of endurance at sea and in the wild. Readers interested in another harrowing account can explore the Deborah Scaling Kiley survival story, where a young woman spent five days adrift after a yacht disaster, facing sharks and loss before making it home alive.
Sources
- Ada Blackjack’s diaries and the accounts of her expedition companions (notably Lorne Knight) were critical in piecing together her story. See for instance the digitised diary at Dartmouth: Dartmouth Library Digital Collections.
- Modern analyses and biographies, such as Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic by Jennifer Niven and Marooned in the Arctic: The True Story of Ada Blackjack by Peggy Caravantes, provide comprehensive overviews.
- Key information was drawn from the National Park Service article on Wrangel Island.
- The Atlas Obscura feature “Ada Blackjack, the Forgotten Sole Survivor of an Odd Arctic Expedition” offered an accessible narrative of her ordeal.
- A JSTOR Daily essay titled Ada Blackjack’s Secret Weapon provided insight into her mindset and survival.
- Contemporary coverage of the 2020 short film Ada Blackjack Rising appeared in the Anchorage Daily News.