Ada Blackjack was an Iñupiaq woman who married at 16 and had three children before her husband abandoned her. Only one child survived infancy, and he suffered from tuberculosis. Blackjack walked 40 miles to Nome, Alaska, carrying her son Bennett in order to place him in an orphanage, because she couldn’t afford his medical treatment. She desperately wanted him back, and that’s why she signed on to the doomed 1921 expedition that Vilhjalmur Stefansson organized to explore the possibility of a colony on Wrangel Island, the uninhabited Russian island in the Arctic Ocean where the last woolly mammoths survived until 4,000 years ago. The plan was iffy, but the $50 a month pay was enticing.
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The four young men and one woman (plus a cat) only had six months worth of supplies. As the crew went into its second winter on Wrangel Island, they were starving. E. Lorne Knight was sick with scurvy, and the other three men left to try and reach Siberia, but did not make it. Blackjack was left to care for Knight, herself, and the cat, although she was only hired to be a seamstress for the crew. But she stepped up and hunted game, hauled firewood, built tools, and kept a diary of her experience. When a rescue ship finally reached Wrangel Island in August of 1923, Knight had been dead for 57 days, but Blackjack and the cat were holding on. Read how Blackjack spent two years on Wrangel Island and took on the work of four men to make it back to her son, at Jstor Daily. -via Damn Interesting
(Image source: Archive.org)
Source: neatorama