Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic

Looking at the book jacket of Ada Blackjack, I thought that I would be reading a story of a Sacajawea of the Arctic.  The picture is of a petite pretty young woman with a Mona Lisa smile and she is all dressed in furs.  The book jacket blurb led me to believe that her knowledge led to her survival in the Arctic.  Au contraire!  Even though she was an Inuit she was a city girl, well as much as Nome, Alaska was a city in the early 1900's.  She had no training or understanding of living off the land, let alone an Arctic island.  She was hired to be a seamstress and a cook.  She signed on with misgivings, but she needed the money to take care of her son who was ill with tuberculosis.  What did she sign on to?  One of the worst planned expeditions ever!  Vilhjalmur Stefansson believed that anyone could live in the "friendly Arctic" as he called it. He conned four young men to go to Wrangel Island to live and claim the island for England (it was and still is a part of Russia).  Wrangel Island is noted for its severe polar weather and it is a breeding ground for polar bears. However, Stefansson was so believable that one man, Fred Maurer signed up right away and he had been on an earlier ill-fated expedition to the same place.  Allan Crawford and Lorne Knight had Arctic experience, but Milton Galle and Ada had no experience at all.  Stefansson did not go with them.  He went around the United States and Canada whipping up enthusiasm and money, which did not get to Wrangel.  The expedition soon ran out of food and 3 of the men left to get help--in the winter--Ada was left to take care of a dying man.  She was ill herself, but she taught herself to shoot and trap and she managed to stay alive.  After her rescue she was proclaimed a heroine and then vilified as a prostitute and murderess.

It was good thing I read Ada Blackjack on the hottest day of the year.  The author, Jennifer Niven was quite graphic in describing the bitter Arctic cold.  So I was quite comfortable reading in the 90 degree heat.  Niven captured the personalities of everyone in the story--the young men's sense of adventure, their over-romanticizing of life in the Arctic, and their belief that they could do it all.  Ada was shown to be a very naïve young woman who placed her trust in the wrong people.  Stefansson was the villain who believed in his own stories about the Arctic and believed that he himself was a great hero and explorer.

I read Ada Blackjack as part of The Big Read and I believe it ties very tightly in with The Call of the Wild; they are both stories of survival under extreme conditions and that the survivor isn't always

the one you'd expect to make it.