Ada Blackjack never asked for adventure, but it found her nonetheless. By 1921, the young Iñupiat woman found herself widowed with a young son. In order to earn money to care for him, she joined a dangerous expedition to a frozen island north of Siberia. After two tragic years, she was alone once more, trapped with ferocious bears amid a sea of ice.

Her tale is considered one of the most extreme wilderness survivor stories in recorded history. When she returned to Alaska, some called her a hero, the “female Robinson Crusoe.” Others practically accused her of murder.

Wrangel Island sits in the Arctic Ocean about 100 miles north of the Siberian coast, and more than 250 miles from the nearest point in Alaska. For most of the year, the ocean freezes around its foggy shores, making passage nearly impossible. Nonetheless, at 80 miles long and anywhere from 18 to 30 miles wide, it’s a sizeable piece of land. And in the early 20th century, one person wanted to claim it. Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson lobbied for his government to fund an expedition, but Canada refused to entertain the deadly mission.

In 1921, he assembled a crew and sent them anyway. His new plan was to claim the island for Britain.

The four men assigned to Wrangel Island — Americans Frederick Maurer, E. Lorne Knight, and Milton Galle, and Canadian Allan Crawford — began preparations. They decided to recruit an Eskimo family as well, to help maintain camp and cook while they studied the land, according to Stefansson’s book, The Adventure of Wrangel Island. Several families expressed interest; however when the day came to set sail, only Ada Blackjack showed up.

Blackjack was raised in the once-thriving port city of Nome, Alaska, where the expedition ultimately departed, and attended mission school. She and her husband gave birth to three children, but two died as infants. Her remaining son was sickly, and after her husband died in a drowning accident, Blackjack became desperate. Her expert sewing skills are what earned her passage to Wrangel Island, but the young mother had no background in wilderness survival.

The crew of the Wrangel Island expedition of 1921. Ada Blackjack (center) would be its lone survivor. (Wikimedia)

On September 9, 1921, the explorers and Blackjack left with six months of supplies for what they expected to be a two-year stint on Wrangel, the period of time international law deemed necessary to stake claim to unoccupied land. The plan was to set up camp and hunt the land until a ship replenished their supplies the following summer. Little did they know, some of their food would turn out to have spoiled, and the relief ship would never come.

The crew landed on Wrangel Island on September 16 and raised the British flag, claiming the island for King George. As the ship pulled back toward Alaska, Blackjack walked down the beach so the men couldn’t see her cry.

“When we got to Wrangel Island, the land looked very large to me, but they said that it was only a small island,” Blackjack said in Stefansson’s book. “I thought at first that I would turn back, but I decided it wouldn’t be fair to the boys. Soon after we arrived I started to sew.”

They busied themselves buckling down and soon fell into a routine. Blackjack fastened hoods to their reindeer parkas, as the others constructed furniture and a door for the snow house. They set up meteorological instruments and tended to the sled dogs, who seemed a bit weak. The men tracked geese and polar bear. In the evenings, Crawford told jokes and Blackjack sang hymns. Through it all, they journaled.

They spent those first couple of seasons relatively comfortable. But the lack of game on the island worried them. By January, they had only managed to kill nine foxes, two bears, and one seal. In spring, they began trapping but fresh tracks were rare. “It made no sense,” author Jennifer Niven wrote in Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic (2004). “All the game seemed to have vanished.”

Despite their worry, the group knew a supply ship would arrive in summer. So they carved through their supplies and waited.

On June 2, an icy summer storm whipped around the island. It froze the ocean around Wrangel. Their hopes of a ship reaching them dwindled. “Our names should be ‘hard luck’ or ‘incompetent,’” wrote Knight in his diary. Indeed, back in Alaska Stefansson hadn’t been able to raise the money for a relief ship. After appealing to the Canadian government for $3,000, he finally found a captain, but the Teddy Bear didn’t embark for the island until August 20, perilously late in a historically icy season.

By September 22, 1922, the supply ship returned to Nome. The relief crew had never set foot on Wrangel.

Wrangel Island is a remote outpost in the Arctic Ocean, about 100 miles north of the Siberian coast. (Wikimedia)

On the island, the men realized the window for a supply ship had closed. They scrambled to make ration plans, but supplies were already low. Plus, they had used all the wood in a two-mile radius of camp, so they would need to relocate.

In September, the crew managed to kill a couple of walruses. Blackjack cooked the heart with roots. Otherwise, the meat was tough. But they were grateful, and even gnawed on the flippers.

In January, Crawford and Knight left to scout the most solid ice. Knight felt unusually stiff, fatigued, and melancholy. He knew something was wrong. Back at camp, his mood worsened. The other men grew defensive but Blackjack knew she would have to step up and nurse her comrade’s health. He had scurvy.

In minus 56 degrees, Blackjack helped pack the sled for the remaining men. They took three precious 20-pound cases of hard bread, two five-gallon cans of seal blubber, tools, geological specimens, and the five remaining dogs. Galle promised Blackjack they would be back for her. On January 29, they left Blackjack and Knight alone. A massive storm rose the next day. The men were never seen again.

Knight worsened, but continued to write in his journal. Blackjack remained cheerful, but he wasn’t sure how much of it was for show. She kept a bag of warm sand on his feet and rotated sacks of oatmeal to prevent bedsores. She kept up camp and tended to him. When meat ran low, she checked the traps, deathly afraid a polar bear would attack her in the frozen wilderness. The traps were almost always empty.

Knight died on June 22. “There, with only a dead man as a companion, surrounded by seas of ice, Ada Blackjack wrote the real epic of the North,” reported The World magazine in 1927. She didn’t have much else to do.

“I must stay alive,” Blackjack recalled later. “I will live.”

On August 19, 1923, a rescue schooner arrived from Nome. The crew found a lonely, hardened Ada Blackjack. She had used Knight’s rifle to shoot seals over the summer, and chewed their skins to mold into shoe soles. Often, she read the Bible or stood on the beach and gazed out to sea. She had never buried Knight. His body still lay in the tent.

“I want to go back to my mother,” she told her rescuers through tears. “Will you take me back to Nome?” When they said yes, she collapsed.