By Alexandra J. McClanahan, CIRI Historian

A new book about Inupiaq Eskimo Ada Blackjack Johnson, who survived against all odds when she was marooned alone on Wrangel Island, nearly 100 miles off the northeast coast of Siberia, celebrates her role in an ill-fated scheme to colonize the tiny uninhabited Arctic island.
The book is “Ada Blackjack, A True Story of Survival in the Arctic,” by nationally acclaimed writer Jennifer Niven, who previously authored a book on Vilhjalmur Stefansson released in 2000, “The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk.”

Niven says in her preface that she became interested in Johnson while researching her first book. As a result of that work, she learned that four men and Ada Blackjack were sent by Stefansson to Wrangel Island in 1921 and that Blackjack was the only survivor of that expedition. She was rescued in 1923.

“In the annals of Arctic exploration, many men have been hailed as heroes, but a hero like Ada was unheard of at the time. She was a young and unskilled woman who headed into the Arctic in search of money and a husband. What she found instead was a nightmare rivaling even the most horrific folktales she had grown up hearing from the storytellers in her village,” Niven says.

Ada Blackjack Johnson was born near Solomon on May 10, 1898, and was just 23 years old when she was hired as an Eskimo seamstress to accompany four other members of an expedition charged with colonizing Wrangel Island. She had been married to a man named Jack Blackjack and had three children with him, two of whom died as infants. Her surviving child, Bennett, suffered from tuberculosis and later spinal meningitis. She went on the expedition because she desperately wanted to earn enough money to get medical care for her son.

The team that Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson sent in 1921 included Blackjack and three other Americans as well as a Canadian. They were Frederick Mauer and E. Lorne Knight, both 28-year-old Americans, American Milton Galle, 20, and Canadian Allan R. Crawford, also 20, and the man Stefansson designated as the group’s leader. Stefansson’s secret hope was that including a Canadian would force the Canadian government into accepting its “responsibility” for claiming the island.

On Jan. 28, 1923, Crawford, Mauer and Galle left for Siberia. That was the last Blackjack or anyone ever saw of the trio. And from that point on, Blackjack’s life became a battle for survival. She did not know how to hunt and trap, but she learned quickly because Knight was too ill to be of any assistance.

By February, he had become bedridden. She kept a bag with warm sand at Knight’s feet and sewed pillows of oatmeal sacks stuffed with cotton to ease his bedsores. When he died later in the spring, she was completely alone and at the mercy of the many polar bears that frequented the island.

After a number of close calls, Blackjack was finally rescued Aug. 19, 1923. Incredibly, Blackjack found her return to the more populated world to be nearly as harrowing as Wrangel Island. She was criticized by one of her rescuers for not finding a way to save Knight’s life, although Knight’s parents eventually vindicated her after meeting with her and issuing a statement that Blackjack had done everything possible to save their son’s life.

Still, poverty dogged Blackjack for much of her life. She married and divorced a man named Johnson and had another son, Billy, who eventually became a leader in the Thirteenth Regional Corp. Because she had little money and was not well, Billy and Bennett were put in the Jessie Lee Home in Seward for nine years.

She eventually moved to Anchorage and became a CIRI shareholder. When her health failed she moved to a nursing home and died in Palmer May 29, 1983.