Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die: The Arctic Solitude of Ada Blackjack

In September 1923, a passing whaling ship spotted a figure on Wrangel Island. Small, solitary. Waving frantically. A woman, wrapped in furs, looking more ghost than human. When they brought her aboard, she didn’t cry. She didn’t collapse. She simply asked for a cup of hot coffee. Black.

Her name was Ada Blackjack. She had survived two Arctic winters alone — a seamstress from Nome turned castaway heroine, wrapped in silence and frostbite. Most of the world had forgotten the expedition she was part of. Until she walked out of the ice, alive.

What she endured sounds like fiction. But it wasn’t. Her story, too often footnoted or flattened, remains one of the most astonishing tales of human endurance — and one of the loneliest.

A Reluctant Adventurer

Ada was not a thrill-seeker. She didn’t dream of Arctic exploration, polar bears, or empire. She wasn’t white, male, or educated — the usual criteria for fame in the Age of Heroic Exploration. She was Iñupiat, born in Solomon, Alaska, in 1898. Taught to sew by missionaries. Married young. Left by a husband who beat her.

When she signed on to join the Wrangel Island expedition, she didn’t know she was stepping into history. She just needed money. Her five-year-old son, Bennett, had tuberculosis. He was in a home in Nome. The $50 a month offered by the expedition could help bring him back.

So she boarded a ship in 1921 with four men — all young, white, idealistic — and a cat named Vic. They were headed for Wrangel Island, a remote stretch of Arctic wilderness north of Siberia, claimed by no nation. Or rather, claimed by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a former explorer and grandiose schemer who wanted to plant a British flag there, conveniently ignoring that the island had long been known and traversed by the Chukchi people. Stefansson was a master of spin and white-paper empires. He had funded the trip but stayed behind, sipping cocktails in New York while dispatching others to freeze.

The four men — Crawford, Maurer, Galle, and Knight — were boys, really. One was a journalist. One was an Eagle Scout. They thought they were adventuring for king and country. They were, in truth, under-provisioned, under-prepared, and tragically overconfident.

Ada went along to cook and sew. She didn’t even know how to hunt.

The Cold Gathers

At first, Wrangel Island was almost romantic. A land of snowy foxes and auroras, wide skies and illusions of permanence. They built a cabin. Took photographs. Wrote letters back home with the cheerful bravado of people who think rescue is only a ship away.

But by the first winter, no ship came. The sea ice thickened. The food ran out. The men grew gaunt. Tensions rose like wind over tundra. And Knight — the most fastidious of them, the one who kept the journals — fell ill. Probably scurvy. His gums bled. He couldn’t walk.

The others decided to walk 700 miles across ice to Siberia to get help. They took the cat. They left Ada to care for Knight.

She had no choice.

She wrote later that she cried for days when they left. She prayed. She read the Bible aloud. She sewed and fed Knight as best she could. But he got worse. Much worse. Delirious. Demanding. And eventually, dead.

Ada was now completely alone.

Two Winters in the White Void

We like to imagine ourselves as survivors. We fantasize about deserted islands, about strength we’ve never had to prove. But solitude in the Arctic isn’t a metaphor. It’s wind that peels skin. It's silence that eats your mind. It’s the sound of your own breath against fur. And nothing else.

Ada Blackjack had no training. She was terrified of polar bears. She hated the cold. But she learned to shoot. To trap. To skin foxes and make fire. She turned driftwood into tripods. She wrote a diary, a small, strange marvel filled with spelling errors and heartbreaking resolve:

“I am not very big and i am all alone on this island but I have God to help me and he is with me all the time.”

There were days she thought of dying. Days when food ran out, when a bear circled her shelter, when she heard voices that weren’t there. But she didn't die.

She waited. For months. For a second winter. For a ship that might never come.

The World Finds Her

And then, one morning in August 1923 — nearly two years after she’d arrived — the ship Donaldson appeared on the horizon. The men who came ashore expected a graveyard. Instead, they found Ada. Alive. Thin. Weathered. But unbroken.

She didn’t meet them with fanfare. Just that request for coffee.

When news of her survival hit the papers, it should’ve made her a national heroine. A single mother. An Indigenous woman. The last survivor of a doomed expedition. She should have had a book deal. A lecture tour. A comfortable life.

Instead, the press twisted the narrative. Stefansson, always ready to manipulate the plot, cast Ada as a “faithful Eskimo girl” — erasing her agency, her terror, her grit. Others whispered that she must have let Knight die. That she hadn’t done enough.

She had survived the Arctic. But not the headlines.

What Survival Costs

Ada never sought the spotlight. She hated the attention. The fame brought her no wealth. Just accusations, invasions, and more solitude. She retrieved her son. She stayed quiet. She sewed, moved often, and refused interviews.

Later in life, her family said she rarely spoke about Wrangel Island. When she did, she described it as something she had to do. A necessity. Not a choice.

But the trauma never left. Her diary shows it. In the repetition. In the simple, aching lines. In the need to remind herself, again and again, that she wasn’t entirely alone.

“I want to go home. I want to see my son.”

She died in 1983, in relative obscurity. No medals. No statues. Just a name mostly forgotten outside of footnotes in Arctic exploration history.

But survival — real survival — is its own legacy. Wrangel Island today is a Russian nature reserve, a haven for polar bears and walruses. No monuments mark her presence there. But maybe that’s fitting. Ada wasn’t a symbol. She was a woman. A mother. A survivor not because she was fearless — but because she was afraid, and still went on.

Why We Remember

In the current era of survival reality shows, TikTok adventurers, and mental health hashtags, it’s easy to retroactively mythologize Ada Blackjack. But to do so risks missing her deepest truth.

She wasn’t looking for glory. She didn’t want to be part of an empire-building farce. She just wanted to earn enough to bring her son home. What followed was tragedy, isolation, and a kind of raw heroism that doesn’t announce itself with flags or speeches — just footsteps in snow and the refusal to disappear.

Ada Blackjack’s story isn’t about the romance of the Arctic. It’s about endurance. About the cold clarity of grief. About how, sometimes, survival isn’t triumph. It’s just survival. And that’s enough.