Ada Blackjackthe WorkbenchISTP

On 25 May 1923, on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean, Ada Blackjack fired a rifle for the first time in her life. She was 25. She hit her target twice, and that evening she wrote it down in her own English and her own spelling: “I thought thats good enought for me for first time shooting with rifle.”

She was teaching herself because nobody was left to teach her.

She was Iñupiaq, born in Alaska in 1898. Deserted by her husband, with her son Bennett in an orphanage in Nome, she signed on in 1921 as seamstress to an expedition organized by the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. That September she landed on Wrangel Island, off Siberia, with four young men.

The first year went badly. She wept and withdrew, and one of the men, Lorne Knight, wrote in his diary that he had tied her to the flagpole until she agreed to patch his boots. The calm survivor did not arrive fully formed.

In January 1923, three of the men set off across the sea ice toward Siberia to fetch help. They were never seen again. Knight was too sick with scurvy to go, so Ada stayed and kept him alive. She worked the traps, hauled the wood and nursed him. He repaid her with cruelty, and she noted that he “never stop and think how much it's hard for women to take four mans place.”

On 29 April he threw a book at her, for the second time, because she had nothing to say. She wrote that down too, and then: “before I went in my sleeping bag I feill his water cup and went to bed.”

Her decency did not depend on his. The cup needed filling, so she filled it.

Then she learned to hunt, the way Workbenches learn anything: by doing it, carefully, with whatever is to hand. She practiced standing, sitting and lying on her belly. On 7 June she built herself a rifle resting board.

Knight died on 23 June. Typing a note for Stefansson on the camp typewriter, she gave the date and added, “I dont know what time he die though.” She was exact about what she knew and honest about what she didn't.

Now she was alone with the expedition's cat, Vic. Four days later she shot the first seal of her life. She built lookout poles with seats so she could watch the sea. On 16 July she made a canvas boat. On 2 August she forgot to tie it up and it drifted away.

On 20 August she finished a pair of knitted gloves and opened her last box of biscuits. That same day a ship, the Donaldson, reached the island and found her: one woman, one cat, and a camp she had kept running alone for two months.

At home, false rumors spread that she had caused Knight's death, and she was paid less than she had been promised. She died in Alaska in 1983, at 85. Three men had walked off across the ice to save everyone. The seamstress who stayed and did the next small job, every day, was the one who came home.