EP03 | Ada Blackjack: The Woman Wrangel Island Couldn't Kill — Part 2

By January of 1923, Ada Blackjack had been stranded on Wrangell Island for more than 16 months. The rescue ship that was supposed to bring them home never arrived. Their supplies were dwindling, and Lorne Knight was getting sicker by the day. So three of the four men made a desperate decision. They would leave Wrangle Island and attempt to cross hundreds of miles of frozen Arctic wilderness in search of help. Ada would stay behind with Knight. She had arrived on the island unable to shoot a rifle, terrified of polar bears, and depended on the men around her for nearly everything outside the camp. And now those men were walking away. And before long, Ada would be completely alone. What happened over the next several months would force her to become the one thing no one, including herself, had ever expected her to be: a hunter, a trapper, a provider, and ultimately the sole survivor. This is part two of the story of Ada Blackjack, the woman Wrangle Island couldn't kill. I even had a listener point out a few details about Ada's story that I wasn't aware of, so that was pretty cool. That's one of the things that I love most about starting the Real Unreal. I'm researching these stories and telling them to you, but I'm also hearing from people who know something I didn't or have a different experience or simply have become as invested in the stories as I did. And I really hope that continues to grow as the show grows. If you're new here, The Real Unreal explores extraordinary true stories, strange history, mysteries, survival, human behavior, and the kinds of things that make you wonder how something so unbelievable could actually have happened. And if you've been enjoying the show, subscribing or following, leaving a rating or review, or sharing an episode really does help more people find it. You can also find me on social media through the links in the show notes where I share more of the stories we cover and some of my own stories as well. So without further ado, let's get on to the show. Before we jump back in, if you happen to land on this episode without hearing part one, I definitely recommend going back and starting there. This is a continuation of Ada's story, and part one covers how she ended up stranded on Wrangell Island in the first place. But if you're already caught up, here's a quick refresher on where we left off. Ada Blackjack, Lorne Knight, Alan Crawford, Fred Moore, and Milton Gale had been living on Wrangell Island for more than a year. The expedition had been organized by Arctic explorer Wilhalmer Stephenson, who believed the island could eventually become strategically and politically important to Britain and the Canadian government, and who was convinced that a small group of people could survive there largely by living off the land. The only problem was that wasn't exactly how things were working out. The relief ship that was supposed to reach them in the summer of 1922 had failed to make it through the ice. Winter had returned, their supplies were dwindling, and Lore Knight had become seriously ill with scurvy. By January 1923, the expedition was running out of options. Game was scarce, their remaining provisions were running low, and Knight's scurvy had left him considerably weaker. According to Knight's own calculation, there was only enough food to support about three people until the seals and birds returned in the spring. The group had been considering a journey to Siberia, and the original plan was for Alan Crawford and Knight to make it together. On January 7th, 1923, they loaded a sled, harnessed the dogs, and set out across the frozen sea. But Knight's scurvy continued to progress, and after nearly two weeks, it became clear that he wasn't strong enough to continue. Crawford abandoned the attempt, turned around, and on January 20th, the two men arrived back at camp. But they still didn't have enough food for the five people, and now one of the two men, who had been expected to make the journey, was too sick to do it. Knight wrote the following day that because food was so short, it was essential for the party to split. So they made a new plan. Crawford would try again, this time taking Fred Moore and Milton Gale with him, while Ada remained behind with Knight. Crawford acknowledged that he would have preferred to leave one of the men with them, but after the first attempt had failed, he felt that having an additional man on the long journey gave them the best chance of succeeding. Their plan was to cross roughly 90 miles of frozen sea to the Siberian coast and then work their way south, eventually reaching Noam. If they made it, they could finally tell the outside world what had happened on Wrangell Island and get help for Ada and Knight. If they could reach the island by boat, they would. If they couldn't, they planned to return by dog team the following winter. On January 28, 1923, Crawford, Moore, and Gale loaded a sled with supplies, harnessed five dogs, and left Wrangell Island for Siberia. They never returned. No confirmed trace of the three men was ever found, and exactly what happened to them remains unknown. Somewhere during that journey across the frozen Chukchi Sea, they disappeared. Ada was now alone on Wrangel Island with a seriously ill man, and every part of their survival would depend on her. Before departing, Moore had left a map for Ada showing all the locations of his Arctic fox traps, so she began going out every day to check the line herself. At first, she had no idea what she was doing. She could only find six or seven of the traps, and when she finally located the rest, they were empty. For nearly a month, she caught nothing. While walking the trap line, she would constantly turn around to make sure there wasn't a polar bear behind her, because at the time she didn't even carry a rifle. All she had with her was a snow knife. Despite the empty traps and her overwhelming fear of the polar bears, she kept going out because night was sick and there was almost no food left in the camp. She knew she had to find something to eat. Eventually, Ada noticed fox tracks around one of the traps and she realized what she'd been doing wrong. She had been covering the traps with too much snow. So she changed the way she set them. And on February 22nd, 1923, Ada looked outside and saw something white near one of the traps. She had caught her first Arctic fox. Because Ada wasn't carrying a rifle, killing the fox was another ordeal that she had not been prepared for. She was forced to stun it with a stick and then she had to break its neck with her own hands. It was a brutal necessity, but one that their survival depended on. Once it was over, Ada brought the fox back to camp and skinned it herself. After this point, Ada began catching foxes more and more often, sometimes several in a single day. On one day in March, she caught three. Knight, however, initially continued to refuse it. This was the same problem he'd had earlier in the expedition. He said the smell was too strong and he wouldn't even take the fox soup. Eventually, though, Knight relented and tried it. According to the surviving account, he was surprised to discover that he actually liked it, and Ada began saving most of the fox meat for him. So while Ada was busy trying to keep them alive, she was also learning survival skills in real time. She had never been trained to hunt or trap, but she was learning because she had no other choice. Watching the tracks, recognizing her mistakes, changing what she was doing and trying again. But by April, the foxes became scarce again, and night was getting worse. By May, Ada was no longer relying only on the traps. She had begun carrying Knight's shotgun and teaching herself how to use it. At first, she practiced by shooting at an empty tea tin, and in her diary, she proudly recorded that she hit it on her first attempt. Soon after that, she shot her first bird with the shotgun. It was a seagull, and she brought it back to camp to make broth for Knight, who by then was having difficulty eating solid food. And Ada didn't stop with that first shot. A few days later, she took Knight's rifle and fired five rounds at a target. She hit it twice and wrote that she had done better than she had thought she would. The next day she practiced again. Her first three shots with the rifle missed. And on the fourth shot, Ada changed her position and laid down on her stomach. This time she hit the target. Then she stood up, tried the shotgun again, and hit her target with that too. Afterwards, she made a case for the shotgun and another for her knife. Then one day, around May 10th, Ada woke to the sound of something dripping. At first she thought it was water leaking inside the tent, but it wasn't. Knight's nose was bleeding. And by the time Ada realized what was happening, a one-pound tea tin beside him was already half full of blood. His face had turned blue, and for a moment Ada thought he was dead. Knight eventually responded to her, but his scurvy continued to worsen. His teeth were falling out, and his throat had become so sore that he could barely eat meat. So Ada kept searching for anything he might be able to swallow. She cooked what they still had, including hard bread soaked in oil and fried, and made broth from seagulls she'd shot. By early June, the birds had begun returning to the island, giving Ada another desperately needed source of food. On one trip about three miles west of camp, she went out with a shotgun and managed to find a single seagull egg. She tried to shoot the gulls themselves, but she couldn't hit them. So she started back towards camp with that one egg, telling herself that at least she had found something for Knight. And then on the way home, geese flew overhead. Ada fired, and this time one fell. She was so happy about this, not because she had proven she could shoot, but because she finally had something more substantial to bring back for Knight to eat. And over the next several days, she had even more success. When she returned to the nesting area, she found nine more eggs. By then, finding food was only one part of keeping Knight alive. His condition had deteriorated to the point that Ada sometimes had to hold up his head just to give him water. Twice a day, she would heat up sand, pour it into a canvas bag she had sewn, and placed it against his feet to keep him warm. When his back became badly sore from spending so much time laying down, she made another padded bag from oatmeal sacks and cotton to cushion him. Day after day, every part of their survival had fallen to Ada. She searched for food, hauled wood, kept the fire going, cooked, sewed, maintained the camp, and cared for Knight as he became increasingly helpless. This woman who had once been so afraid to venture beyond camp without one of the men was now doing the work that had once been divided among all five members of the expedition, and she was doing it all on her own. Earlier that spring, Knight had given Ada his grandfather's Bible and she would read it to him while she cared for him. About three or four weeks before his death, Knight began giving Ada instructions about what to do if he didn't survive. He told her that if he died, she should put his diary and papers inside his trunk, and then he told her that the key was in his pants pocket. And over and over again, he reminded her to protect his camera and rifle and make sure they stayed dry. By late June, Ada knew that Knight was dying. The day before his death, he was unconscious, and Ada was standing beside him crying when he opened his eyes and asked her what was wrong. She told him that she thought he was going to leave her, and at that point, Ada wasn't only grieving Knight. She knew exactly what his death would mean. She would be completely alone on Wrangell Island. Knight told her to try to hold on somehow until the ship arrived. Sadly, Knight died sometime during the night of June 22nd, 1923, and Ada found him the following morning. What she did immediately afterwards tells us a lot about her state of mind. She used Milton Gale's typewriter to record Knight's death, noting that she didn't know the exact time he had died, but she wanted Stephenson to know the date. She also wrote a separate letter to Stephenson explaining what had happened, and another to Milton Gale, because she still believed Gale had made it safely back to Nome. Ada left the letters in the typewriter where they would be easily found if someone eventually reached the camp. Her reasoning was chilling and practical. Ada believed that a wild animal might kill her before the ship arrived, and if that happened, she wanted whoever eventually came to Wrangle Island to know what had happened to both of them. She couldn't bury Knight's body because the ground was so frozen, so she left him in his sleeping bag and built a barricade of wooden boxes around him to protect him from the animals. Then she gathered her belongings and took Vic the cat and moved into the tent that they had been using for storage. And by the morning of June 23rd, 1923, Ada Blackjack was the only human being left on Wrangle Island. Crawford, Moore, and Gail had been gone for nearly five months. Ada still didn't know if they were ever coming back, and she had no way of knowing whether another ship would ever reach the island. Now, on her own, everything about the camp became solely her responsibility. The storage tent she'd moved into had never been intended to serve as a permanent home, so she began to modify it herself. Still terrified of polar bears, she even constructed an elevated lookout above the shelter so she could watch for them approaching the camp. She continued to experiment with ways to hunt. Ada had already begun making sealskin boats while Knight was alive, but after his death, she built herself another small boat out of canvas. Her diary entry for July 16th is wonderfully matter-of-fact. She made the boat, tested it, and decided it works alright, and that same afternoon went hunting in it. A couple of days later, she was shooting birds, drying seal meat, working seal skins, and making a paddle for the boat. These were things that Ada had never known how to do when she arrived on Wrangell Island. Hunting had simply become part of her daily life. She shot birds, collected eggs, trapped foxes, and hunted seals, and she preserved what she could for later. She was doing all this while apparently experiencing symptoms of scurvy herself. Arrived on the island with no survival skills, was now going out alone with a gun and a boat she'd made all by her own hands. And this is really the answer to the question of how Ada Blackjack survived. There was no single moment when she suddenly became an Arctic survival expert. She learned one problem at a time. She failed at trapping until she figured out why the traps weren't working. She practiced with a gun until she could hit what she was aiming at, and she learned to hunt birds and preserve meat. She built the things that she needed, tested them and changed them when they didn't work. And each time Ada solved one problem, she became a little less dependent on someone else solving the next one for her. Ada was no longer the woman who had arrived there nearly two years earlier. And in all of this time that she was honing her survival skills, she never stopped sewing. Her diary records indicate that she continued working on clothing and decorative skin work throughout July, sometimes spending entire afternoons on it between hunting trips. And she made something else while she was alone, a tiny pair of moccasins for Bennett, intending to give them to him when she finally got home. Nearly everything Ada was doing was about surviving another day, but she was still making something for the son that she had come to Wringle Island to save in the first place. No matter how far away Bennett was, he was never far from Ada's mind. Getting back to her son was one of the strongest forces driving her to survive. On August 20th, 1923, Ada heard a sound in the distance that she initially thought might be walruses. As she listened closer, she realized what she was hearing, it was a ship's engine. Ada immediately climbed to the lookout she'd built above her shelter, and through the fog, she saw the masts of a ship anchored offshore. It was the Donaldson, carrying a relief expedition led by Harold Noyce. In a flurry of excitement, Ada ran down to the beach where Noyce came ashore to meet her. But almost immediately, Ada was confused. She was expecting Alan Crawford to be with him, because she still believed Crawford, Moore, and Gail had reached Siberia months earlier. Noyce, meanwhile, had arrived expecting to find the expedition's four men on Wrangell Island. Instead, Ada told him that Knight had died months earlier and that Crawford, Moore, and Gail had left the island in January to seek help. At first, there was reason to hope that the three men had made it to the mainland, but as Ada and her rescuers began comparing what they knew, a much darker reality emerged. Crawford, Moore, and Gail had never reached civilization. No one knew what had happened to them. Of the five people who landed on Wrangell Island nearly two years earlier, Ada was the only living person. But remarkably, Noyce hadn't come only to rescue Ada. The Donaldson was carrying another group of colonists and enough supplies for them to remain on Wrangell Island for two more years. So while Ada and Vic boarded the ship to finally leave, another group was being put ashore to continue the occupation that had already cost four people their lives. After nearly two years on Wrangell Island, Ada was finally going home. When Ada arrived to Nome, she didn't exactly return quietly. Newspapers descended on the story, and the lone woman who had survived Wrangle Island, calling her things like the female Robinson Caruso and even the first Eskimo heroine in history. But she wanted very little to do with any of it. She hadn't gone to the island to become famous. She had gone there to earn enough money to take care of Bennett. And even as Ada was trying to return to her life, another fight was beginning over what had happened on Wrangell Island and over who would get to tell that story. When Harold Noyce arrived to rescue Ada in August of 1923, the camp contained something incredibly valuable, the written record of the expedition. There were journals and papers left by the men, along with Ada's own diary. More importantly, there was Lorne Knight's diary, which documented the months that he had spent sick in camp with Ada and his primary caretaker. Ada had protected Knight's diary after his death, just like he'd asked her to. When Noyce arrived on Wrangle Island, Ada handed it over to him, but Noyce didn't Immediately returned Knight's diary to his parents. He held on to it, and within months, material from Knight's diary was being used in Noyce's published accounts of the expedition. Knight's father, John Knight, was furious. In November of 1923, he wrote directly to Noyce demanding to know why his son's diary had not been turned over. By then, Knight and his wife had assigned the rights of Lorne's diary over to Wilhelmer Stephenson and instructed Noyce to surrender the material to him. Eventually, the dispute became serious enough that legal action was initiated. Knight's diary and photographs had made their way into the possession of the North American Newspaper Alliance, which had received them from Noyce. In December, the material was finally turned over to Stephenson's side. And that was when another problem emerged. The diary was no longer intact. Pages had been removed, and portions of the surviving text had been obscured. Ada maintained that the diary had been completely intact when she gave it to Noyce, but Noyce disputed that. Some of the missing material eventually resurfaced in February of 1924. Noyce sent a large number of removed pages to Knight's father, but 10 pages from the volume remained missing. Exactly what happened to those pages and who was responsible for removing them became another point of bitter dispute, and all of this mattered for another reason. Noyce had initially portrayed Ada as the heroine of Wrangle Island, but months after rescuing her, he began making very different accusations. He claimed that Ada had failed to properly care for Knight, and he suggested that Knight might have survived if she had done more for him. Now the argument wasn't simply about two men offering different opinions of Ada. They were fighting over the documentary record of what had actually happened inside that camp. And strangely enough, the person who became one of Ada's strongest defenders was Stephenson. When Stephenson finally had possession of Knight's surviving diary entries, he saw a very different story from the one that Noyce was presenting. They documented Ada finding food, cooking, sewing, maintaining the camp, and caring for Knight as his condition deteriorated. Stephenson eventually devoted an entire section of the adventure of Wrangell Island to dismantling Noyce's accusations, using Knight's own words to argue that Ada had done everything she reasonably could to keep him alive. That doesn't erase Stephenson's responsibility for organizing the expedition or the decisions that helped put Ada and the four men in danger in the first place, but in this particular fight, he was firmly on Ada's side. After Stephenson recovered Knight's diary, he had copies made and sent the original to Lauren's parents, John and Harriet Knight. For the first time, they were able to read their son's account of those final months for themselves, including what he had written about Ada and the care that she had provided as his health deteriorated. Then in December 1923, Ada traveled to McMinnville, Oregon and spent time with the Knight family. They continued corresponding with her afterwards, and Knight's father publicly defended her when the accusations began circulating that she had neglected his son. He called Ada the heroine of the whole expedition and said that there was nothing that gave him even the slightest reason to believe that she hadn't done everything that she was capable of doing for Lorne. He also made it very clear why he was speaking publicly. Ada was being wronged, and he believed that she had little ability to defend herself against the people that were making those accusations. And there's something especially meaningful about that, considering everything that had happened between Ada and Knight on Wrangell Island. Their relationship had been difficult, and at times Knight had treated her terribly, but when he became sick, Ada was able to put all of that aside and care for him until his passing. Unfortunately, everything that Ada had endured on Wrangell Island, the people who had sent her there, and others that had involvement in the expedition found multiple ways to profit from her story while failing to pay her what they owed her. The money was the primary reason that she had agreed to go in the first place, so that she could come back and care for her son. But Ada was not paid the full wages that she had been promised. And this wasn't just a disagreement over what she had owed. While Ada was on Wrangell Island, the expedition company had been setting aside her $50 a month wages, and by the end of the first 10 months, $500 had been credited to her. But after that, the company stopped adding to it, even though Ada was still stranded on the island and still working. By the end of December 1922, another four months had passed, meaning the company now owed her an additional $200. In March of 1923, its own secretary acknowledged that amount in writing. So when Ada was finally rescued, she was offered less than the amount that she had originally been promised, but she accepted the reduced payment because she just wanted to get back to her son. And the wages that were owed to Ada were not the only concern. The story of Wrangle Island had become very valuable. Noyce had negotiated newspaper deals using expedition materials that included Knight's diary, Ada's diary, and photographs that were brought back from the island. Stephenson then published The Adventure of Wrangell Island, drawing heavily on the records and firsthand accounts produced by the people that had actually lived through the expedition. Stephenson promised Ada a share of the royalties from his book, but it was an empty promise because she never saw a dime of the proceeds. So while other people were selling newspaper stories, publishing books, giving lectures about Wrangell Island, Ada had been underpaid for the work that took her there in the first place and then denied royalties she had been promised from a book about the ordeal that she survived. There was one part of the financial story, however, that appears to have worked out in Ada's favor. By the time she had left Wrangle Island, she had accumulated 15 white fox pelts from the animals that she had trapped herself. Those pelts sold for about $38 each, bringing her roughly $570. And unlike her wages and the royalties she had been promised, there doesn't appear to have been any dispute over that money. Ada was able to keep the proceeds that were hard-earned from a skill that she was forced to develop in order to survive on that island. When Ada finally returned from Wrangell Island, she went to the orphanage to collect her son and bring him to Seattle to seek the treatment that he desperately needed for his tuberculosis. She had kept her promise to herself and to Bennett. She survived Wrangell Island and made it home to him. A few years after the fateful expedition, Ada remarried, and on September 14, 1924, she gave birth to another son named Billy Blackjack Johnson. But only a few years later, Ada herself contracted tuberculosis, and by 1927, she was sick and once again unable to support and care for her children. And unbelievably, Ada found herself back in almost the exact same position that she had been in before Wrangle Island. Only this time, it was her own tuberculosis that forced her to give up both of her sons. Sadly, Bennett and Billy remained in institutional care for roughly nine years while Ada recovered and tried to rebuild her life. By 1937, she was finally reunited with them again and returned to Nome with her sons. By then, Ada's second marriage had also ended, and she was once again on her own. To support herself and her sons, Ada put some of the survival skills that she had learned on Wrangle Island to practical use. Ada found work trapping animals for furs, hunting to help put food on the table, picking berries, and also found work herding reindeer. It was not an easy living, and Ada never became wealthy, but she was able to provide for her sons and keep her family together. Ada eventually returned permanently to Alaska and lived most of the rest of her life outside the public attention that had surrounded her after Wrangell Island. Bennett continued to suffer from tuberculosis and other serious health problems throughout his life. And in 1972, at the age of 58, he died from a stroke. Ada lived on another 11 years after that, and on May 29, 1983, she died at a nursing home in Palmer, Alaska. She was 85 years old, and she was buried beside Bennett at Anchorage Memorial Park Cemetery. Her headstone is remarkably simple. It reads, Ada Blackjack Johnson, heroine, Wrangle Island Expedition. In my opinion, Ada Blackjack's legacy is a masterclass in human resilience, defined by a fierce maternal devotion that allowed her to survive the unimaginable, only to be deeply betrayed by the very system and people that put her there. Ada was not a seasoned explorer. She was a young, terrified and dupiate mother with an intense fear of polar bears and no experience or training in hunting and survival skills. Her strength did not stem from physical dominance, but from an unbreakable psychological pivot. When the world around her collapsed into hunger, illness, and isolation, Ada chose to suppress her own terror for the sake of her dying son. She taught herself to shoot a rifle, engineered stoves out of tin cans, built an elevated bear watch platform, and successfully trapped game entirely alone with no one to teach her. She didn't just survive, she became extraordinarily capable in an environment that killed or claimed every other member of the original expedition. Ada Blackjack was a hero in the truest, most visceral sense. For nearly two years, she was the literal thin line between life and death on Wrangell Island. Her mastery of sewing and working with skins provided the expedition with essential Arctic clothing during their time on the island. And when Lauren Knight lay dying of a gruesome, agonizing illness, Ada did not abandon him. Despite the fact that she had previously been abused by him and humiliated by him, she spent months nursing him, cooking for him, and chopping his wood, sacrificing her own dwindling energy to extend his life. Her heroism is defined by a quiet, unwavering dignity and unmatched capacity for empathy in a place devoid of warmth. The way Ada was treated upon her rescue remains one of the most jarring injustices in her story. She was financially stiffed, psychologically slandered, and culturally exploited. While Wilhelmer Stephenson published a book built in part from her diary and the records of the expedition and continued profiting from the story of Wrangle Island, Ada herself struggled with poverty for much of her life. She was forced to fight for the money that she had been promised, money that she desperately needed. The society of her time looked at an indigenous woman who had achieved the impossible and too often treated her story as something to be exploited for other people's financial gain. Ultimately, the powerful people who wronged Ada Blackjack achieved a temporary fragile victory of pocketed cash and Hall of Fame. But history has a way of correcting the scales. Today, Stephenson's name is inextricably linked to the reckless decisions and extraordinary failure of the Wrangle Island expedition. Meanwhile, Ada's name has been restored to its rightful place. She stands immortalized not as a victim and not merely as a survivor, but as an absolute giant of Arctic history. A monument to what a mother's love can endure and overcome when the rest of the world has entirely abandoned her. And that, my friends, is the story of Ada Blackjack. Thank you so much for joining me. New full episodes of The Real Unreal come out every other Monday, so make sure you're following or subscribed wherever you're watching or listening. You can also follow The Real Unreal on Instagram and TikTok for updates, clips from the show, and everything that's coming next. Until then, thank you for being here, and I'll see you next time on The Real Unreal.