Ada Blackjack

Ada Blackjack might not have seemed like someone who would survive an ill-fated expedition to a remote Arctic island. She stood less than five feet tall, weighed little more than 100 pounds, and had no wilderness skills. Though she was Inupiat, born in Spruce Creek, a tiny settlement about forty miles east of Nome, Alaska in 1898, she had spent precious little time on the land.

The few wilderness experiences in the first twenty-three years of her life had been forced on her. When she was just eight, her father ate bad meat and fell deathly ill. Her mother was away, so Blackjack and her younger sister bundled the dying man onto a sled and began mushing toward Nome. Somewhere along the way, they realized their father had died, so Blackjack turned the sled around and brought him home, according to Jennifer Niven’s 2004 biography Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic. Her mother, now destitute, sent Blackjack to live with a Methodist family