Ada Blackjack

Badass Explorer and Survivor

She was born in 1898, eight miles from Solomon, Alaska in the remote settlement of Spruce Creek. An Iñupiat woman, little is known about who her parents were, nor are there many details of her childhood after her father died.

She would eventually be the unlikely sole survivor of an ill-fated expedition to the icy Wrangel Island and would be come to known locally as the “female Robinson Crusoe.”

Meet Ada Blackjack.

When Ada Blackjack, born Ada Deletuk, was eight years old, her father died from an unnamed illness. Her mother, left destitute, brought Ada and her sister, Rita, to Nome, Alaska and left them at a Methodist missionary where Blackjack spent the remainder of her short childhood.

She was married by the age of 16 to a dog musher by the semi-redundant name of Jack Blackjack. It’s said that he was abusive and neglectful, and the marriage ended in 1921 on the Seward Peninsula, where Jack left her and the one child who survived past infancy stranded and alone, mostly because he was a piece of shit.

Young Ada

In punishing conditions, Blackjack walked 40 miles back to Nome with her five-year-old son, Bennett, carrying him part of the time due to his ill health and sheer exhaustion. She would move back in with her mother who was now residing in Nome.

Blackjack was left penniless, and her son was suffering from tuberculosis. She was forced to leave him, at least temporarily, in an orphanage so that he could receive lifesaving treatment while she figured out a way that they could one day reunite.

That same year, a well-known Canadian explorer and ethnologist of Icelandic descent by the name of Vilhjalmur Stefansson had the bright fucking idea to lead an expedition to claim Wrangel Island because apparently taking things that aren’t theirs is what drives white dudes. The plan was to live on the uninhabited land for two years and then righteously (?) claim the territory for the British government.

The best part about this plan is that not once had Britain expressed interest in the ice-locked Wrangel, located more than 250 miles outside of Alaska and 100 miles north of Siberia. Because who the fuck would want THAT? Not Britain . . .

But it was an ego and glory thing and, capitalizing on the fame he’d already developed, he, along with an inexperienced up-and-coming Canadian explorer, 20-year-old Allan Crawford, recruited three intrepid yet utterly under-informed and unprepared men to join Crawford. Oh, yeah—Stefansson wanted the glory and was funding it, but he didn’t want to actually take part in this foolhardy mission, armed with about six months’ worth of food and a cat named Victoria.

Oh—and Ada Blackjack.

The early intention was to live off the supply of food they had brought with them as well as local game—Stefansson assured everyone that “the friendly Arctic” would provide ample game—and to be replaced by a shiny new crew of explorers the following year.

That was the PLAN . . .

Blackjack, desperate for money, had answered a help wanted posting, a call for someone who could sew clothing for the then four-person expedition in return for $50 per month and a promise that she would be well fed and protected without needing to participate in the some of the more backbreaking labor required of the expedition.

It was well-known in Nome that she was a skilled seamstress, so she fit the bill there, but she had major reservations.

First of all, she wasn’t raised in a traditional Iñupiat manner, she had no “living off the land” survival skills; she was raised by missionaries who taught her just enough English to study the Bible and trained her how to keep house, sew, and cook white-people food.

Secondly? She was terrified of polar bears and now she was headed to an island that was probably chock-full o’ fucking polar bears.

While the exhibition had expected other Iñupiat to join them, they all backed out, mostly because it was a BAD FUCKING IDEA.

But Blackjack stayed committed. Reservations aside, she signed a one-year contract because this money would be her ticket to reuniting with her son. She couldn’t afford NOT to go.

On September 9, 1921, the barely 5 foot tall, 100-pound Blackjack boarded a Seattle-based vessel called the Silver Wave with exhibition leader Allan Crawford, Lorne Knight and Fred Maurer, both 28, 19-year-old Milton Galle . . . and Victoria the cat (not sure how old Vic was). And they were off to Wrangel Island.

That first year on the isle wasn’t horrible. Stefansson’s promises of ample game weren’t far off, and they were able to supplement their supplies that had begun thinning out. But then summer came to an end, the game became increasingly scarce, and the sea ice grew thicker and thicker as the weeks went by.

There were zero signs of the promised relief ship.

Of course, there was no way for the party to know that the ship chartered to pick them up, the Teddy Bear, had been forced abandon its part of the mission due to impenetrable ice.

And as the conditions worsened, the folks who thought they were about done with their watch were faced with a horrifying reality: they would be stuck there for at least another year.

By the beginning of 1923, the party members had eliminated their rations. They were starving, and Knight was extremely ill with then-undiagnosed scurvy.

On January 28, 1923, Crawford made the decision to leave Blackjack behind to care for the now mostly incapacitated Knight and headed out on foot with Maurer and Galle to Siberia to search for help.

They were never seen again.

Blackjack taught herself to set traps to lure wild game like the arctic foxes indigenous to the area, taught herself to shoot birds, and built a platform above her shelter so that she could spot polar bears in the distance. She also crafted two sturdy skin boats from driftwood and stretched canvas so she could hunt more successfully; the one boat they had brought to the island was too small and flimsy and was subsequently lost in a storm.

Meanwhile she was alone with Knight, who was constantly enraged at the situation and took it out on Blackjack. He threw books at her, endlessly berated her, telling her that no wonder her husband had abused and abandoned her, and that her two children had died because she was a shitty mother.

Though Blackjack was also starving, she always gave Knight most of the game she hunted. But to hear him talk, she was trying to kill him by starving him.

As stated by the LA Times in 1924, she served as “doctor, nurse, companion, servant and huntswoman in one.” She made Knight’s bed upon a stack of oatmeal sacks that she could rotate to prevent bedsores, and she kept warmed bags of sand over his feet to keep them from getting frostbite. Not that he seemed to appreciate any of that.

Blackjack wrote in her diary, “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.”

For months she was there alone with Knight (and Vic) as he withered away, finally succumbing to his illness in June.

Blackjack penned:

“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.”

It was just Blackjack and Vic now.

The hope of reuniting with her son fueling her, she was determined to survive. She left Knight’s body in his sleeping bag and surrounded it with boxes to protect it from wild animals. She moved into the storage tent to escape the smell of decay.

She reinforced the weather-beaten storage tent with driftwood and built a cupboard out of boxes where she would store her ammunition, and she built a gun rack above her bed so that she wouldn’t be caught off guard if those fucking polar bears paid a visit to her camp.

She toyed with the expedition’s camera equipment and learned how to use it, taking self-portraits standing outside of camp.

Her diary is mostly filled with her dread that she wouldn’t live to see her son again. She drafted an informal will to provide for him if she shouldn’t survive:

“This very important noted in case I happen to died or some body fine out that I was dead I want Mrs. Rita McCafferty take care of my son Bennett. My sister Rita is just as good his on mother I know she love Bennett just as much as I do I dare not my son to have stepmother. If I got any money coming from boss of this company if $1,200.00 give my mother Mrs. Ototook $200.00 if its only $600.00 give her $100.00 rest of it for my son.”

Finally, on the morning of August 20, 1923—nearly two years after arriving to Wrangel Island—the schooner Donaldson, led by a former colleague of Stefansson’s, arrived to rescue a very thin but smiley Blackjack who was at this point, along with Victoria, doing pretty well on her own all things considered.

Survivors aboard the Donaldson

“Blackjack,” the crew of the Donaldson wrote, “mastered her environment so far that it seems likely she could have lived there another year, although the isolation would have been a dreadful experience.”

She found herself a bit of a local celebrity, the press hailing her as a courageous hero and dubbing her the “female Robinson Crusoe.”

Blackjack did her best to hide from the attention though, insisting that she was simply a mother trying to reunite with her son, which she did.

She took her payment—which, big surprise, was considerably less than she had been promised—to seek treatment for Bennett’s tuberculosis in a Seattle hospital.

Ada and Bennet in 1923

Stefansson—who wasn’t even present at the expedition—and others—also not with the expedition—profited from the grand story behind the tragedy of it all. Blackjack received no compensation from the books that were written about her and her ordeal.

Then a narrative was developed that she failed to or refused to care for Knight, leading to his death. Of course, as the only woman in the poorly executed clusterfuck of an expedition that was slapped together by celebrated explorers, all of whom had at least some prior experience, sure . . . this was clearly her fault.

One accuser was a man who was on the rescue boat. For whatever reason, it was super fucking important to this guy to make it seem as if Blackjack, instead of staying by Knight’s side, hunting, cooking, and caring for him while receiving abuse for months on end, had purposely let Knight die.

To support this theory, he tore pages out of her diary that clearly stated the contrary.

His fuckery was later brought to light, and he apologized.

And if this story wasn’t already incredible, it’s also tinged with this unbelievable irony:

Unbeknownst to Stefansson, Wrangel Island—that, did I mention? Britain didn’t even want—had already been claimed by Russia five years before his doomed expedition ever took place, making all of it just that much more pointless in the end.

Blackjack’s son, Bennett, died of a stroke in 1972 at the age of 58. Blackjack died just over ten years later in a nursing home in Palmer, Alaska at the age of 85. She was buried by Bennett’s side.