Her tale is considered one of the most extreme wilderness survivor stories in recorded history. After two tragic years, she was alone once more, trapped with ferocious bears amid a sea of ice.
In order to earn money to care for him, she joined a dangerous expedition to a frozen island north of Siberia. By 1921, the young Iñupiat woman found herself widowed with a young son. (Rauner Special Collections Library)Īda Blackjack never asked for adventure, but it found her nonetheless. All the while, she was tricked and exploited by those who should have been her champions.įilled with exciting adventure and fascinating history, Ada Blackjack is a gripping and ultimately inspiring tale of a woman who survived a terrible time in the wild only to face a different but equally trying ordeal back in civilization.Ada Blackjack, 1898–1983. Only on one occasion - after being accused of a horrible crime she did not commit - did she speak up for herself. Journalists hunted her down, but she refused to talk to anyone about her harrowing experiences. Upon Ada's miraculous return after two years on the island, the international press heralded her as the female Robinson Crusoe.
Soon after, she found herself totally alone. When three of the men made a desperate attempt to seek help, Ada was left to care for the fourth, who was too sick to travel. As months went by and they began to starve, they were forced to ration their few remaining provisions. But as winter set in, they were struck by hardship and tragedy. They took with them six months' worth of supplies on Stefansson's theory that this would be enough to sustain them for a year while they lived off the land itself.
Only two of the men had set foot in the Arctic before. It was controversial explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson who sent four young men and Ada Blackjack into the far North to desolate, uninhabited Wrangel Island. In September 1921, in search of money and a husband, she signed on as seamstress for a top-secret expedition into the unknown Arctic. Divorced, impoverished, and despondent, she had one focus in her life - to care for her sickly young son. There, surrounded by seas of ice, Ada Blackjack wrote the real epic of the North.Īda Blackjack was an unlikely hero - an unskilled 23-year-old Inuit woman with no knowledge of the world outside Nome, Alaska.
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