She Was Hired to Sew. She Was the Only One Who Survived.
In September 1921, Ada Blackjack, a 23-year-old Iñupiaq woman from Nome, Alaska, signed on as seamstress and cook for a five-person expedition to Wrangel Island, a remote strip of frozen land in the Chukchi Sea north of Siberia. The pay was $50 a month. She needed it to retrieve her son from an orphanage and pay for his tuberculosis treatment.
The expedition's organizer, celebrated Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, stayed behind to fundraise while the team was left on an uninhabited island for what was supposed to be two years. A resupply ship couldn't reach them through the sea ice in 1922.
By January 1923, three of the four men attempted a desperate 90-mile crossing of the frozen Chukchi Sea to get help. They were never seen again. The fourth man, Lorne Knight, was dying of scurvy. Ada, who had never fired a rifle, never trapped an animal, nursed him alone until he died on June 23, 1923.
She then spent two months as the only human being on Wrangel Island, accompanied by the expedition's cat. She taught herself to shoot, built skin boats to hunt seals, trapped foxes, and constructed a raised platform to watch for polar bears. She kept a diary. On August 20, a rescue ship broke through the fog. When asked where the others were, she said: "There is nobody here but me. I am all alone."
Newspapers called her the "female Robinson Crusoe", briefly. She never received the wages she was owed. She didn't profit from the books and articles that covered her ordeal. She went home, retrieved her son from the orphanage, paid for his treatment, and lived quietly until 1983.
The men planned the expedition. She survived it.