Ada Blackjack

Ada Blackjack was born in a small settlement near Nome, Alaska, and raised by Methodist missionaries who taught her to sew and cook but not to hunt or trap. By 1921 she was 23, separated from an abusive husband, and her surviving son Bennett had tuberculosis. She could not afford his care.

That year she was hired as a seamstress for an expedition organised by the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson to claim Wrangel Island, off Siberia, for Britain. The four young men who went ashore with her had almost no Arctic experience. Stefansson assured them a relief ship would come the next summer. It did not; the ice kept it out.

By January 1923 food was nearly gone. Three of the men set out across the sea ice for Siberia to fetch help and were never seen again. The fourth, Lorne Knight, was already sick with scurvy. Ada nursed him for months, hauled driftwood, learned to shoot the rifle she had once been afraid of, and built a platform to watch for polar bears. Knight died in June. She buried him as best she could and went on alone with the expedition's cat, trapping foxes and shooting birds and seals, keeping a diary and taking photographs.

A ship finally reached the island in August 1923. Newspapers called her a female Robinson Crusoe; she disliked the attention, went home to Alaska, and used what money she received on her son. She died in Palmer, Alaska, at 85.