Ada Blackjack - The Female Robinson Crusoe

By Kristy McCaffrey

Ada Blackjack, a petite Inupiat woman born in Alaska, was known as “The Female Robinson Crusoe” after living alone for two years as a castaway on an uninhabited island north of Siberia.

In 1921, Ada set sail on an expedition to Wrangel Island in the Arctic circle. She was given a one-year contract as a seamstress and cook, accompanying four men into the unknown wilderness.

Despite her Inupiat heritage, Ada wasn’t raised with any knowledge of hunting or wilderness survival. Her upbringing by Methodist missionaries ensured that her English was good and gave her a background in the Bible, housekeeping, sewing, and cooking white-people food.

Ada Blackjack and her son, Bennett, in 1923.

At the age of 16, she married Jack Blackjack, a local dog musher, and together they had three children—two of whom who died—before Jack abandoned her. Her surviving child, a five-year-old son named Bennett, suffered from tuberculosis and general poor health, and Ada was forced to place him in an orphanage because she was destitute. But she vowed to find a way to earn enough money to retrieve him. It was at this time that she learned of an expedition heading for Wrangel Island, and they were looking for an Alaska Native seamstress who spoke English.

The expedition was the ill-conceived venture of Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. He recruited four young men to claim Wrangel Island for the British Empire, despite that Britain had never shown any interest in wanting it. Although Stefansson picked the team and funded the trip, he never intended to accompany them, and instead sent the very inexperienced crew into the unknown with only six months of supplies.

Although Ada had reservations about going on expedition with four men, she simply couldn’t pass up the salary of $50 a month, an unheard-of sum for a woman at the time. On September 9, 1921, she boarded a ship with Allan Crawford, 20, Lorne Knight, 28, Fred Maurer, 28, and Milton Galle, 19, and a cat named Victoria.

Ada Blackjack and the expedition crew to Wrangel Island.

For the first year on Wrangel Island, the team was able to supplement their supplies with local game, but when winter descended and the promised boat to fetch them never came (it had to turn back due to impenetrable ice), they were forced to stretch their meager supplies for another year.

At the beginning of 1923, their circumstances had deteriorated. Everyone was starving and Knight was ill with scurvy. On January 28, 1923, Crawford, Maurer and Galle made the decision to set out on foot across the ice to Siberia in search of help, leaving Ada to care for the deathly ill Knight. The three men were never seen again.

The camp at Wrangel Island in late autumn.

For six months, Ada was alone with Knight and cared for him, but it wasn’t easy. She struggled to do the work of four men while playing nursemaid, and Knight, in his misery, constantly berated her. On June 23^rd, Knight died. After his death, Ada refused to fall into despair and was determined to survive.

For three months, Ada was alone. During this time, she learned to set traps for the foxes, taught herself to shoot birds, built a platform above her shelter so that she could spot polar bears in the distance, and crafted a skin boat from driftwood and stretched canvas. She even experimented with the expedition’s photography equipment, taking photos of herself standing outside camp.

On August 20, 1923, almost two years after first landing on Wrangel Island, she was rescued, along with the cat, Vic. Heralded as a hero and praised for her courage, Ada shied away from the attention, insisting that she was simply a mother who needed to get home to her son.

She was soon reunited with Bennett and used her payment, which was less than she had been promised, to seek treatment for his tuberculosis in a Seattle hospital. She later had a second son, Billy, and returned to live in Alaska.

While Stefansson and others profited from the story of the tragic expedition, Ada received none of the money, and smear campaigns against her character later emerged claiming that she had callously refused to care for Knight. Bennett’s health issues were never fully resolved, and he died of a stroke in 1972 at the age of 58. Ada passed a decade later at the age of 85, and she was buried beside Bennett.

Surviving Winter: Now and Then

It's mid January here in Chicago, the temperature has dipped to something-teen and we're digging out from a snowstorm. I'm tired of winter already. But when I go inside my house with central heating I can forget about it for a while. Also if I have to go anywhere, I have a car which also has heat. In the event I'm running low on food, I can take my warm car to the supermarket where someone has thoughtfully loaded shelves with food I can select and take home. So, I have the luxury of escaping the cold. Survival is more a matter of keeping up my spirits.
But what about the peoples who had to live through winters on the frontier? Keeping warm and planning ahead was a matter of survival. How did they do it?

Some of the Native Americans picked up and moved to more hospitable winter locations--like some retirees today. For the Plains Indians this meant moving the tipis. At a first glance, the tipi doesn't look like a thing you'd want to hole up in for the winter, but in actuality they were quite cozy. The buffalo hide is an excellent barrier to the wind (It worked for the buffalo too.), and the openings at the ground and hole at the top create an updraft for the fire blazing in the middle. Inhabitants slept together under buffalo robes to share body heat.

Indian camp in winter

Not always as weather resistant was the frontier cabin, could be drafty by comparison.  If you were lucky enough to live in a sod house (and that's not a sentence I'll probably ever use again), you'd have the advantage of being better insulated from the cold. But, in either case the frontiersmen tended to build small one or two room cabins, which are easier to keep heated by a fire or stove. Families gathered together in front of the fire to wait out winter evenings. Some of these cabins had sleeping lofts for the children, and heat rises so it would be warmer up there. The children would bundle up in one or two beds under layers of quilts and blankets.

Togetherness in a frontier cabin, Iowa. 

Means to transport the heat from the fire to help warm beds, or to make the carriage ride more pleasant were developed. We've all seen the long handled bed warmer that was filled with hot rocks and slid under the covers. Similarly, metal boxes fitted into a wood frame or heated soapstone wrapped in rags were used as foot warmers in bed and in the carriages.

Ride in a one-horse open sleigh, brrrr. (oil painting by Cornelius Krieghoff)

One common winter survival trait to both Native American or settler families: togetherness. In modern times we have central heating, but that also allows family members to retreat to separate rooms in the house. I wouldn't trade my modern comforts, but I do wonder what we gained and what we've lost. How different would family life be? Would such togetherness bring everyone closer under trying times bring us closer? Or would the lack of privacy and personal space wear everyone out? Would they even been aware of such concepts?
What do you think? Can you picture you and your family hunkering down together in an isolated, one-room cabin?