ADA
BLACKJACK

A TRUE STORY OF SURVIVAL IN THE ARCTIC

Jennifer Niven

Dedication

FOR JACK FAIN MCJUNKIN JR.,

my father—
this one and all the ones to follow

AND FOR BILLY BLACKJACK JOHNSON,

who did so much to make sure his mother was not forgotten

Epigraph

As she looked back, the trail behind her faded away and she was way up in the air, with no man behind her and only the smooth trail leading into the sky.

—ADA BLACKJACK

“The Lady in the Moon”

Preface

IN SEPTEMBER 1923, a diminutive twenty-five-year-old Eskimo woman named Ada Blackjack emerged as the heroic survivor of an ambitious polar expedition. In the annals of Arctic exploration, many men have been hailed as heroes, but a hero like Ada was unheard of at the time. She was a young and unskilled woman who headed into the Arctic in search of money and a husband. What she found instead was a nightmare rivaling even the most horrific folktales she had grown up hearing from the storytellers in her village.

After Ada’s triumphant return to civilization, the international press called her the female Robinson Crusoe. But all reports came from the imaginations of reporters. Ada Blackjack refused to talk to anyone about her two years in the Arctic. Only on one occasion did she speak up for herself.

Ada Blackjack never considered herself a hero. As far as she was concerned, she did what she had to do when she found herself in a life and death situation. Faced with responsibilities and challenges she had never known existed, she survived.

In later years, when people called her brave, she would tilt her head to one side and gaze at them, unblinking, with dark brown eyes. After some time, she would answer simply: “Brave? I don’t know about that. But I would never give up hope while I’m still alive.”

I first heard of Ada when I was researching my first book, The Ice Master. I discovered that one of the men I was writing about, Fred Maurer, had miraculously survived the ill-fated Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913–1914 only to return to Wrangel Island years later with three other men and one woman—Ada Blackjack. I was mystified as to why Maurer would go back to the island, after all he had suffered there. But even more than that, I was intrigued by the woman’s story. Who was Ada Blackjack?

Searching for answers, I discovered numerous materials housed in archives in Canada, Alaska, New Hampshire, and North Carolina. First and foremost, there was Ada’s own diary, one of the most important resources of all. The rest of the story is filled in by her collection of papers; other records and firsthand accounts, including the detailed, two-volume diary of her comrade Lorne Knight, in which Ada figures prominently; and the memories and knowledge of Billy Blackjack Johnson, Ada’s surviving son, who was enthusiastic about my telling the story of his mother’s experience in the Arctic and who gave me full access to his own materials and information. Tragically, Billy died on June 22, 2003, at age seventy-eight—and thus did not live to see this book published.

In addition, I received from the nephew of Milton Galle—the youngest member of the expedition—a treasure box filled with papers, letters, telegrams, photographs, and a partial journal. Until Milton Galle’s nephew, Bill Lawless, generously entrusted them to my care, these papers had never been read or seen by anyone outside of the Galle family—even though expedition organizer Vilhjalmur Stefansson had been anxious to obtain them.

As Mrs. Rudolph Martin Anderson once wrote to the mother of Allan Crawford, the young Canadian placed in charge of the party, “Real history is made up from the documents that were not meant to be published.” Perhaps my most valuable resources have been the letters written between the families of the four young men on the expedition—to each other and also to Vilhjalmur Stefansson. All impressions expressed by the characters herein come from these letters, journals, and other firsthand materials, as does any quoted dialogue. Also in keeping with the language of the time, I use the term “Eskimo” instead of the present-day preferred “Inuit.” Because the four men called each other by their last names, I refer to them as Crawford, Knight, Maurer, and Galle. The only exceptions come in regard to their families and loved ones, who knew them as Allan, Lorne, Fred, and Milton. Ada Blackjack, however, was only known to the men and to Stefansson as Ada, and that is what she is called herein.

Loss and survival quickly emerged as the two main themes in this book, made all the more resonant and ironic by my own unexpected journey of loss and survival throughout the writing of it. Four days after I finished the first draft of the manuscript, my father passed away after a gallant battle with cancer. As I wrote about Lorne Knight’s own deterioration from scurvy and Ada’s struggle to live in spite of all that she endured, the parallels to my father’s last days became all too real.

This book is the story of Ada Blackjack—during her ordeal and after. It is also the story of four young men—Lorne Knight, Fred Maurer, Allan Crawford, and Milton Galle—and their families.

Finally, it is very much the story of an enormous spirit that could outlast anything. As one of Ada’s great-nephews remembers, “I recall her as a small, sweet woman whose faith was as big as the sky.”

Members of the 1921 Wrangel Island Expedition

Allan Crawford—commander; Toronto, Canada (age 20)

Lorne Knight—second in command; McMinnville, Oregon (age 28)

Fred Maurer—third in command; New Philadelphia, Ohio (age 28)

Milton Galle—assistant; New Braunfels, Texas (age 19)

Ada Blackjack—seamstress; Nome, Alaska (age 23)

Victoria (“Vic”)—expedition cat

PART I
THE FIVE

There, with only a dead man as companion, surrounded by seas of ice, Ada Blackjack wrote the real epic of the North.

—THE WORLD MAGAZINE

October 30, 1927

Chapter One

HER FATHER WAS DYING. He had eaten meat that was too old and afterward he had eaten fresh meat, which turned his stomach, and now he was sick from poison. Eight-year-old Ada Delutuk and one of her younger sisters dressed him in pants and skin boots and his “parkie,” as Ada called it, and then they wrapped him up in skins to keep him warm.

Together, they somehow managed to tie their father to a sled, hitch the dogs up, and set out to drive to Nome. The town was thirty miles east of their remote village of Spruce Creek, Alaska, but the little girls had no choice. They needed to get help and, with their mother away, Ada was the oldest and the one left in charge.

It was difficult to say how many miles they had traveled before Ada and her sister realized that their father was dead. And so, defeated and brokenhearted, they simply turned back and took him home.

Their home was the Eskimo settlement of Spruce Creek, Alaska, eight miles east of the tiny, rustic village of Solomon. Ada Delutuk was born in 1898, the year of the Alaskan Gold Rush. In 1899 and 1900, thousands of people converged upon Solomon in search of gold. By 1904, the Gold Rush had brought seven saloons and a post office to the town, and soon after there was phone and mail service and a daily boat to Nome. But in 1913, tidal storms with 60-mile-per-hour winds and 40-foot breakers washed away the railroad tracks and most of the town, and the once thriving village of one thousand people became a quiet Eskimo community of three hundred. In 1918 the flu epidemic swept through the area, extinguishing almost the entire population of Spruce Creek.

Ada Delutuk was spared, however. Shortly after her father’s death she had been sent by her mother to Nome, where she was taken in by Methodist missionaries, who taught her to read and write English at a third-grade level. At the mission school she learned mathematics, composition, and handwriting. She also learned to cook “white people’s food” and to wash, iron, clean, and sew. Sewing was especially vital in the education of an Eskimo girl because the skill was so crucial to surviving in the cold, frozen North. In addition, the missionaries taught her many things at the school that she would never have known otherwise—how to sing hymns, to bathe, to comb her hair, to brush her teeth, to avoid tobacco and alcohol, to handle money, and to honor the American flag.

While there, she also discovered the Bible. She was educated about God and she learned to pray. The school was a welcome relief from the dinginess and depression of the Solomon region. Even though Solomon was barely large enough to be considered a village, and Spruce Creek was even more rural, Ada had essentially been raised as a city Eskimo. She wasn’t required to hunt or trap or build shelters, and therefore did not have the experience of tribal living. She knew how to sew furs and she could do this pretty well, eventually earning a part-time living in Nome making clothing for the miners there.

Ada was a full-blooded Eskimo, with delicate features and a guarded smile. She was small—not even five feet tall—poker-faced, pretty, and unassuming. Her olive complexion was clear with a flush of underlying red; her hair a straight blue-black. Ada liked nice clothes and hats, and dressed as smartly as she was able on her skimpy earnings as a seamstress and housekeeper. She displayed a particular fondness for dark blue suits, which she often bought in the children’s sections of the Nome stores.

She had a dignified, graceful air about her and she could be charming. She said little, though, because she was extremely shy and private. One of her friends described her dark brown eyes as being “habitually enigmatic—closed windows.” Her voice was low and soft, and she had a habit of sitting still as a statue, listening to someone talk with her head cocked to one side. She was accustomed to long silences and was distrustful of strangers. Yet her natural instinct was to be cheerful and there was often a lightheartedness about her that she didn’t allow many people to see.

She had been nourished on the legends passed down by the storytellers—among them her grandmother—who would weave their tales around the cramped light of the oil lamps. The stories were sometimes poetic, sometimes wise, sometimes blood-curdling. As a young girl, Ada learned to read the sky through stories. She knew that the Milky Way was a trail of old women wandering across the heavens. She knew that the Big Dipper was a caribou because her mother always said, “Ada, look at it a long time and see if you can’t see a caribou.” She knew that when the handle of the Big Dipper was clear and straight there would be good hunting and reindeer would be plentiful.

She also knew that the polar bear, the greatest mythical figure of her people, was to be feared more than death. Eskimo legends were filled with images of “the great lonely roamer,” as they called the fiercest of bears. Nanook, the polar bear, was a wise and powerful creature which possessed eerily humanlike qualities. Many of the legends merged bears with men into a kind of polar-man hybrid who walked upright and lived in igloos. Eskimos believed readily in animism, in which each living thing and object possesses a malevolent or benevolent spirit. The Eskimo’s life was often governed by a need to appease these spirits and keep them happy. They believed that Nanook shed his skin in private, that he was able to talk, and that he allowed himself to be killed to capture the souls of the tools that did the killing so that he might take them with him into the afterlife. Bred on these convictions, Ada was haunted by the idea of being eaten alive by a polar bear and trapped in its stomach.

When Ada was sixteen, she married a notorious hunter and musher named Jack Blackjack, but in 1921, by the time she was twenty-two, she was already divorced. Early in her marriage to Blackjack she knew it was no good. She had three children by him, two of whom died. He treated her brutally—beating her and starving her, and eventually deserting her on the Seward Peninsula, where they were living.

In Eskimo tradition most men and women chose each other as husband and wife without a legal marriage ceremony. There was no minister or official document; the couple would simply move in together. The practice made getting divorced much easier. If you tired of someone or liked another man’s wife, you would just leave or trade spouses and that meant you were divorced.

After her marriage ended, Ada found herself abandoned by her husband, “bone poor, almost naked for lack of clothes and with no money.” There was nothing to do but go home to her mother, who now lived in Nome, some forty miles away. Ada and five-year-old Bennett, her only surviving child, had to walk the entire distance from the Seward Peninsula to Nome, and when Bennett grew too tired, she carried him.

There was an orphanage in Nome which looked after children who had no parents or whose parents couldn’t take care of them, and this was where Ada took Bennett. He was tubercular and fragile, and because she could not afford to keep him any longer on her meager and sporadic earnings from sewing clothes and cleaning houses, and because he needed the full-time attention of doctors and nurses, she brought him to a home where others could care for him and try to make him well.

Nome in 1921 was violent, turbulent, and grim. There were no sewers, no ditches, no safe drinking water, and crime was rampant. Inhabitants feared for their lives as people were frequently shot to death or stabbed in the middle of town. The miners had built the city around themselves and their greed in 1899, just a year after Ada was born in Spruce Creek. Since then, the population of Nome had ebbed and flowed, according to the climate of gold. In 1900, there had been an influx of 12,488 inhabitants arriving by steamship from Seattle and San Francisco ports, while thousands more converged upon the town from other points in Alaska. Nome was barren and treeless and ran smack against the water. The beaches were covered with prospectors and their tents, while the town took shape hastily in slapdash wooden buildings and shanties.

Still, even with its crime and streets of mud, it was the fanciest, most sophisticated place Ada had ever seen. And there were white men everywhere, making money from their discoveries on the beach. They seemed to Ada more cultured than the Eskimo men she was used to—better educated and smarter, as if they knew how to take care of themselves and their money.

With Bennett safely housed in the orphanage, Ada tried to find work as a seamstress. She had never heard the word igloo, and did not know the first thing about hunting, fishing, trapping, or living on the land. She eventually was able to find work sewing for the miners in town. But it was sporadic work with little pay, and she needed the money for herself and for Bennett.

If she was ever going to be able to bring Bennett home again, she would have to save as much money as she could. It was not easy for a mother to be away from her only child, to know that she wasn’t able to care for him or heal him or give him what he needed. Ada hoped that it would only be a matter of time before she and Bennett were reunited and living together again, under the same roof.

Here was a chance to gratify a longing of my heart that was with me at all times— it was the wanderlust calling from the lands of the aurora, the midnight sun, and wastes of ice and snow.

—FRED MAURER

Chapter Two

ON FEBRUARY 18, 1921, Americans heard the voice of their president—Warren G. Harding—booming across the radio airwaves for the first time. That same day, French aviator Etienne Oehmichen successfully made the world’s first helicopter flight. On February 22, the first day-night transcontinental flight delivered mail from New York to San Francisco, and several days later the first Thompson submachine gun was manufactured.

In spite of the postwar boom, 3.5 million people were unemployed. There were over nine million automobiles on America’s roads. Charlie Chaplin brought moving picture audiences to tears with The Kid, and Rudolph Valentino made women swoon in the World War I epic The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In Pennsylvania, police, alarmed by the shrinking hems of women’s skirts, issued a decree that required all skirts to fall at least four inches below the knee.

And in towns across America, Chautauqua week became the most important week of the whole year. Flyers were pasted to store fronts, shop windows, and lampposts. Banners waved proudly from automobiles and buggies.

Called “the most American thing in America” by Teddy Roosevelt, the Chautauqua circuit was a touring college of sorts, bringing art, education, and issues to people who might never have been exposed to them otherwise. Seven days in one place, five days in another, it always took place in small towns in the heartland, where people were, for the most part, cut off from the outside world. Four-tent circuits traveled one route, and seven-tent circuits traveled another. Lively programs offered variety in morning, afternoon, and evening shows for each day of the tour; then the entertainers packed up and moved on to the next place and started over again. To the performers, the routine often became tedious, but to the audiences of each town they visited, Chautauqua was magic every time.

Photography was still a novelty in many small towns; movies and radio were in the infant stage; and there was no television. For those who never left home, Chautauqua exposed them to art, literature, political thought and theory, social issues, and geographical wonders. For the very first time, they might see a photograph or lantern slide of the North Pole, the African desert, or the pyramids of Egypt.

It was the seven-tent Chautauqua that pulled into New Braunfels, Texas, in April 1921. Seven days filled with splendid attractions! Twelve concerts! Ten lectures! A big play production! The air was filled with the noise of people and automobiles and equipment as the smart, perfumed women and handsome, mustached men stepped off the train or out of sleekly lined motor cars and had the look of Somewhere Else.

The residents of New Braunfels greeted the visitors with a parade, which was how they had celebrated the start of each Chautauqua since April of 1917, the first year the tour had come to town. People from neighboring cities which weren’t lucky enough to have been chosen as stopping points traveled in for the show.

Local boys lined up for a chance to set out folding chairs or pound nails into platforms or raise the gigantic brown tents that were Chautauqua’s trademark. Under those tents—each of which could hold two thousand people—presidents and politicians, opera singers and musicians, actors, humorists, contortionists, adventurers, authors, and orators would perform or speak to the people who had worked hard to set aside extra money to purchase a ticket—75 cents for a day or $2.50 for the whole week.

On opening night, audiences were treated to music, dancing, and speeches. The following afternoon they might see barbershop quartets, magicians, gymnasts, acrobats, and bands. Children rushed out of school at three o’clock and ran to catch the matinees. In the evening, after most of the young people had been put to bed, there was a melodrama, with a cast of six or so, and music again. Then there was the backbone of the Chautauqua circuit—the inspirational and informational lecture, a different one every evening, on topics ranging from women’s suffrage to the environment. On the third night the keynote speaker—the star of the tour—would appear.

That spring of 1921, when the highly anticipated third night arrived, the audience in New Braunfels, Texas, enjoyed a musical prelude. Then it was Fred Maurer’s difficult mission to warm up the crowd. The twenty-eight-year-old had given up his job filling orders and overseeing inventory at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio, to take on the thankless position of being the opening act for noted explorer and anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who, as a headliner, commanded $1,000 each week for his speeches.

Maurer had not always been an office worker sitting behind a desk. Seven years earlier he had returned from the Arctic a hero. In spite of his piercing blue eyes and chiseled jaw, his thick blond hair, broad shoulders, and stocky, football player physique, Maurer didn’t look like an adventurer. The beloved and pampered youngest of ten, he was introverted, soft-spoken, stoic, reserved, and cool. He was a kind man who hated conflict and raised voices, and he didn’t frequent beer halls or chase women. He was an upstanding member of his small Ohio community. He belonged to the Masonic Lodge of New Philadelphia, the Delta Upsilon Fraternity of Marietta College, and the Geographical Society, and was a devout congregant of the First Church of the Reformed.

He had left home at age eighteen to pursue his dreams of adventure. In San Francisco he signed up as deckhand on a whaling ship named the Belvedere. In March of 1906 at Herschel Island, just off the northern coast of Canada, Maurer met Vilhjalmur Stefansson for the first time when the explorer came aboard as the honored guest of the ship’s captain. A noted explorer, ethnologist, anthropologist, author, and orator, Stefansson was a man who inspired awe in young boys who dreamed of the North. Maurer was no exception, having read about him in the papers and heard his name for years.

It was not until 1912, when Stefansson was planning his highly ambitious 1913 Canadian Arctic Expedition, that Maurer was to meet up with him again. In addition to scientific and geographic work, the primary goal of the expedition was to discover new lands. Stefansson staunchly believed there was an uncharted, undiscovered continent at the top of the world, and he intended to find it. The Belvedere’s skipper recommended Maurer to Stefansson for work on the expedition’s crew. Impressed by Maurer’s poise and intelligence, Vilhjalmur Stefansson hired him as fireman.

But the 1913 expedition proved a disaster. After the expedition ship Karluk became trapped in an ice floe just a month after setting sail, Stefansson abandoned most of his company to continue his journey on foot, crossing over the ice to the Alaskan mainland. For months, the ship drifted to the northwest until, five months later, the Karluk sank, stranding scientists and seamen far out in the polar ice. Maurer joined his fellow crewmen in cursing their absent leader. After the ship’s captain led the abandoned group one hundred miles across treacherous ice to formidable, desolate Wrangel Island, Maurer and the others again cursed Stefansson while they struggled to eke out an existence. Many of the men died—eleven of the original twenty-five— but Maurer survived somehow and spent six months on Wrangel Island, two hundred miles northeast of Siberia and four hundred miles northwest of Alaska, before he was rescued.

“It seemed like entering into another world,” Maurer wrote when he returned home to Ohio afterward. “The daily mail, the roar and rumble of traffic... seemed so new. The great silent north was far behind.” After he set foot once more on American soil, he found that everything seemed novel and interesting. He became fascinated with billboards and signs, and had a strange desire to purchase everything he saw. For two years, he had lived like a prisoner of the ice, the cold, and a barren and unfriendly island, and once home he reveled in his newfound freedom. He let himself buy what he wanted and eat what he wanted and he slowly began to feel like himself again. But not completely.

After returning from Wrangel Island, Maurer felt partially lost, partially empty, and increasingly restless. There was a void inside him which he tried to fill by joining the army during World War I and through speaking and writing about the Karluk expedition. None of it helped to heal the old wounds or ease the restlessness Maurer felt deep down, in a place so private he rarely revealed it to anyone.

Gradually, he began to forget his resentment toward Stefansson and his gratitude at being home and safe, warm, and well fed. He began to yearn for adventure again, just as he had when he was a teenager and longing to go to sea, and he became obsessed with study, spending his spare hours schooling himself on the Arctic. It was Stefansson who suggested he join the Chautauqua tour.

“Can you give me definite information as to prospects of going north, anxious to...but should know soon before close of Chautauqua season so can make plans accordingly,” Maurer had telegraphed Stefansson before joining him in Texas.

“Sorry no chance to go north this year but think there will be next year if you still want to go,” Stefansson had replied.

Actually, it was a privilege and an honor to be a part of Chautauqua and to speak to people about his polar adventures, and Maurer also liked to help out in any other ways he could, whether running the projector or setting up and taking down tents. He had signed with Chautauqua to spend the summer lecturing on the Fours, as they called the four-day circuit, which was something to be proud of. No warm-up act—just Maurer himself as a main attraction.

But here on the spring tour, as the opening act to Stefansson, it was disheartening to see the restless looks on the faces in the audience, the glances at wristwatches to check the time, the yawns behind the paper fans that fluttered constantly under the oppressive heat of the tent. Maurer always drew a quarter of the crowd that Stefansson attracted with his famous name and reputation, and although a good many of that number were admiring young ladies, eager for a glimpse of Maurer’s intense blue eyes, golden hair, dimpled chin, and matinee idol looks, it only served as a frustrating reminder to the want-to-be explorer of just how far he needed to go to grow into his hero’s shoes.

Why should any one want to explore the Arctic?

Vilhjalmur Stefansson knew how to work an audience, and no audience was more willing to listen to his promise of the Great White North than the ones he found in the small, dusty, uncultured towns on the Chautauqua tour.

The land up there is all covered with eternal ice; there is everlasting winter with intense cold. The country, whether land or sea, is a lifeless waste of eternal silence. The stars look down with a cruel glitter, and the depressing effect of the winter darkness upon the spirit of man is heavy beyond words. This...is the current picture of the Arctic, and this is... what we have to unlearn before we can read in a true light any story of Arctic exploration.

His words packed a punch. It was as if he knew what people wanted to believe, at their deepest level, and he gave it to them forcefully, assuredly, conclusively. He created dreams and ideas, and, some would argue, had even created himself. Born William Stephenson in 1879 in Manitoba, Canada, he had changed his name to Vilhjalmur Stefansson in college because he thought it sounded more in keeping with his Icelandic heritage and because it seemed a more fitting name for a future explorer.

In order to understand the Arctic explorer and his work we must understand the Arctic as it really is.

At forty-one, Stefansson was effortlessly elegant, polished, articulate, and brilliant. With his fair, wavy hair, delicate features, and slight build, he did not look the part of explorer. But he possessed great charisma born out of enormous confidence, and it took little for him to capture an audience as he spoke of his years in the distant, exotic North. Stefansson believed in a concept he called the Friendly Arctic and it served as the message of his speeches and the foundation of his career. He portrayed the North as an hospitable, habitable place for anyone with good sense. “Given a healthy body and a cheerful disposition,” he was fond of declaring, “a family can now live at the North Pole as comfortably as it can in Hawaii.” And, “I think that anyone with good eyesight and a rifle can live anywhere in the Polar regions indefinitely.”

When he spoke about the Arctic and when he showed his lantern slides from various expeditions, the audience was enraptured. There was a great, convincing power in his words because Stefansson himself believed in them so completely and resolutely. He was a man concerned with glory and power, a man of deep, steadfast conviction, and a man whose passion could be infectious to those who admired him. “In one way or another,” he once said, “the idea of greatness formed part of all my visions.”

The Arctic as pictured in...the minds of our contemporaries, does not exist. It may be a pity to destroy the illusion, for the world is getting daily poorer in romance. Elves and fairies no longer dance in the woods, and it appears a sort of vandalism to destroy the glamorous and heroic North by too intimate knowledge.

Each time Stefansson took to the podium, his Chautauqua traveling companions hung on his words, just like the rugged pioneers from the American heartland, or the unschooled farmers from down south. He gave them all something grand to believe in and they grasped at it willingly. After all, here was a man who had commanded the longest expedition in polar history and who had discovered the last unmapped islands in the world, claiming them for Canada.

In addition to Fred Maurer, Stefansson’s travel companions of that 1921 spring Chautauqua circuit included the outspoken Lorne Knight. After his lectures, Stefansson would answer questions from the platform where he stood, and the taciturn Maurer and the forthright Knight sometimes sat up there with him, working the lantern slides or film projector, and adding their viewpoints as former Arctic travelers who had served with Stefansson. The two Stefansson alumni, despite their divergent personalities, had become fast friends on the Chautauqua circuit. But because they were so different in character and taste, Maurer and Knight often disagreed with each other, which meant Stefansson himself stepped in as mediator.

Twenty-seven-year-old Errol Lorne Knight had lucked into becoming the chief feature of the Ellison-White Chautauqua four-tent circuit of 1920 when Stefansson was unable to free himself from a messy contractual situation. Chautauqua used the explorer’s famous name to advertise Knight as well as the motion pictures Stefansson had taken while in the Arctic: “Famous Stefansson films with lecture by E. Lorne Knight. It is the first presentation on any Chautauqua program of the famous Stefansson films. E. Lorne Knight, one of the members of the memorable five-years expedition, will tell the thrilling story.”

Adventure, Knight enjoyed telling people,“must have been born in me.” As outgoing and carefree as Maurer was reserved and serious, Knight was loud, cheerful, and direct, his racy conversation spiced with slang and American idioms. He was coarse and unrefined, but he had a good heart and decent values and came from solid, humble parents. He loved his family—above all, his mother—more than anything on earth. His wide, smiling face was more pleasant than hand-some, and his cheeks were round and red as a cherub’s. He wore his light brown hair parted carelessly over his broad forehead and his blue eyes usually shone with a satisfied twinkle, as if he were enjoying a good joke. At over six feet tall and 230 pounds, Knight was a robust, boisterous bear, with big paws and trunklike legs and arms. His bulk, he boasted, protected him from the cold.

He had the chance to test this theory at age twenty-one when a neighbor, Captain Louis Lane, invited Knight to leave his Seattle home and join an expedition into the Arctic. In late 1915, Lane’s ship, the Polar Bear, was anchored just a few miles off the shore of Canada’s Cape Kellett when a man was spotted on the icy beach. Knight and the others assumed he was an Eskimo since that particular part of the globe was supposed to be uninhabited, but he was clearly trying to get their attention. Lane gave the orders to land, and Knight was chosen for the shore-going party. As they approached the beach, Knight could see the man wasn’t an Eskimo at all, but a white man with a shaggy mane of blond hair—Vilhjalmur Stefansson.

After leaving the members of his Canadian Arctic Expedition aboard the ice-ensnared ship Karluk in 1913, Stefansson had continued his quest for undiscovered land, crossing by foot to Alaska’s mainland where he hired additional ships and men. He then disappeared into the high Canadian Arctic for two years; government officials, colleagues, and newspapermen had long given him up for dead.

Knight would never forget his first sight of the man. Stefansson didn’t look like anyone who had just spent two years in the Arctic living off the land. He was not a masculine man in appearance— indeed, he leaned toward the effeminate. But it struck Knight that there was something about the man that seemed to be made of steel. Due to his knowledge of the polar regions, Stefansson had survived years in the Arctic wilderness. “It’s just as easy to live up here as it is down home if you know how,” he had said firmly and Knight was heartily impressed. He made up his mind at that moment to learn how to conquer the North.

For the next four years, Knight received a crash course in Arctic survival under Stefansson’s leadership. The plan was to journey two hundred miles north of Alaska’s northern coast where they would then set themselves adrift on an ice floe for a year’s time and sustain themselves by hunting. Stefansson hoped eventually to float up near Wrangel Island or the Siberian coast and then travel south from there.

Knight learned to build a snow house; to drive the dogs; to cut a trail through ice ridges; to trap and to shoot; to travel in a blizzard; and to measure the depth of the sea. He also learned firsthand about scurvy. He first noticed the stiffening of his joints and the tenderness in his gums after accidentally freezing his ankle on a midwinter hike. He would never forget the helplessness; the pain; the thick, black gloom; the eventual relief of fresh, raw meat, which cured him; and the gratitude he felt to God when he was at last on the mend.

At the close of his journey, Knight felt the greatest sense of accomplishment of his young life. He was barely twenty-six years old and he believed that the North had made a man out of him. “Would you do it again, Knight?” Stefansson asked him before their parting on August 26,1919, four years to the day after he had joined the explorer’s expedition.

“Just try me,” was Knight’s answer. “But wait a couple of years if you don’t mind. I want to get thoroughly warm and thoroughly clean again before I start out.”

In the spring of 1921 Knight entered into a contract for Chautauqua’s four-day circuit, where he would lecture and show the Stefansson films. He had been working as chief of police, traffic officer, and motorcycle policeman in tiny McMinnville, Oregon, when Stefansson invited him to join the tour. He was also engaged, and his young and earnest fiancée, Miss Doris Jones, traveled to visit him from Oregon whenever she could.

Enough time had passed to make Knight take the comfort of good health and food for granted, and he was itchy once more for the North, anxious now to use his years in the Arctic to lead others and teach them that it was indeed, as Stefansson claimed, a friendly place. A trip to the Arctic would be a homecoming for Knight. It was the one place he never tired of, and the place that he always came back to in his mind. What’s more, he believed in Stefansson and was just as willing to put his faith in him now as he had been all those years ago when he was young and green and just starting out.

The explorer, said Stefansson, is the scientist urged by a thirst for knowledge who struggles on through the Arctic night with the same spirit that keeps the astronomer at his telescope, neither of them thinking of material profit or necessarily of glory.

During Chautauqua’s visit to New Braunfels the year before, enterprising and rebellious young Milton Harvey Robert Galle had earned the envy of all his friends when he landed a job running the projector for Stefansson. Afterward, he joined the tour and traveled from April until August on the circuit, making sure to send his mother flowers for Mother’s Day from Pomona, California, an event that was reported excitedly in the New Braunfels paper. The tour took Galle through all the western states, and he tapped out vivid and observant notes on his prized Corona typewriter.

Now, after a brief, unsatisfying stint as a traveling salesman for the Brown Rawhide Whip Company—which, at the very least, had kept him from having to attend college—nineteen-year-old Galle was resuming his career with Chautauqua. At the start of the 1921 spring Chautauqua tour, he had been on the road only a week, operating the projector as he had before, when he received orders to return to New Braunfels and take the position of Stefansson’s secretary. It was an exciting step forward for him. “Purpose—plus punch—plus persistence equals most anything your heart desires,” read the thought for the week of March 18 in the Chautauqua weekly newsletter. Galle had plenty of persistence and now he had a purpose. To him, Chautauqua and Stefansson meant a chance to fulfill his dreams of exploration and adventure.

With his father’s tall, high-cheekboned leanness and his mother’s infectious, quickfire grin, Milton Galle was irresistible to everyone— parents adored him, boys admired him, girls developed wild, fervent crushes on him, swooning over the angular lines of his face, his straight nose, his firm chin, his strong hands, and his tousled brown hair. He won people over instantly with his raw and reckless good looks, his wicked sense of humor, his easy charm, his quick and active mind, and his confidence. The oldest of three, Galle was nicknamed Sohnie—“little boy” in German—by his mother, and had been encouraged by his parents to think freely, to learn, to explore, and to appreciate life. Because of that, he grew up filled with faith in himself and others and believing he could do anything he set his mind to.

So at age nineteen he was set on going north. Maurer and Knight welcomed him into their elite circle; in his eyes, they had been privileged to have gone north with Stefansson and he meant to have his chance, too. The front page of the newspaper ran a list every week of the local young men who had been lucky enough to be called to fight in World War I and the places they served: Britain, France, Germany, Austria. Although he and his family had lived for a few years in nearby Mexico, the only other place Galle had been—until meeting up with Chautauqua—was Texas. Yet he had grown up in a house where Spanish and German were spoken along with English, and he was fluent in all three.

His ancestors had founded New Braunfels, the poor and dusty German-settled Texas town where he was raised. Founding fathers were on both sides—his mother’s and his father’s people had established the town, which lay in the heart of cow country, thirty miles northeast of San Antonio and forty-five miles southwest of Austin. One hundred years of Galles had lived and died on Academy Street. But Galle was determined that he wasn’t going to live in New Braunfels forever.

Maurer and Knight took an immediate liking to Milton Galle when they met him on the 1921 tour. They told Stefansson that if they did have the chance to go north again, they wanted him to come along. The three young men talked backstage at the Chautauqua events and were unable to stop conversing about the hoped-for journey. It wouldn’t cost much to go, they reasoned, because it didn’t take a lot of money to live up north. They could dress in the skins of the animals they hunted and eat off the land.

There was something about the Arctic once you had experienced it, Maurer and Knight told young Galle, something indescribable that nagged at you, even if you had seen and nearly tasted death and vowed never to return. Something about having gone there once—just once— that made you unfit for anything, or anywhere, else on earth.

For Maurer, it would mean not staying in Ohio and working at the Goodyear Tire Company or at his father’s tailoring shop. For Knight, it meant not keeping on as chief of police of McMinnville, Oregon. And for Milton Galle, it would mean not selling rawhide whips or hanging about in the drawing rooms of New Braunfels, flirting with the local girls. But it was more than not wanting to do those things temporarily, and more than not wanting to do them forever.

Wrangel Island had claimed a part of Fred Maurer while he was there. Eight years ago he had scraped seal oil off the tops of his boots to nourish himself when there was no other food. Eight years ago he helped to bury three of his friends there. Eight years ago he prayed on his mother’s Bible for salvation, and hoped never to see his comrades—or that island—again. Now, going back was all he could think of. He wanted to make sense of what had happened, to try to justify the deaths of his friends and companions, and to prove, once and for all, that he could master that place.

Maurer’s life was good now—he had a supportive family, a decent job, and a sweet-smelling, smartly dressed girlfriend named Delphine Jones, who seemed to love him fiercely. But he believed that he would never be able to live happily until he returned to the Arctic. There was only one man who could offer Maurer that opportunity— Stefansson.

Knight also made it clear to Stefansson that he needed to go north again. As always, he was more forthcoming about it than the more reticent Maurer, telling Stefansson repeatedly that he wanted the chance to go and trying to persuade him to send out an expedition.

Young and clever Galle was quiet because he had no right to assume that he, of all the wide-eyed boys who worked at Chautauqua and who hung about after Stefansson’s lectures to ask questions and steal an autograph, would be chosen to go on such a journey.

When the world was once known to be round, there was no difficulty in finding many navigators to sail around it, Stefansson told his audience. When the polar regions are once understood to be friendly and fruitful, men will quickly and easily penetrate their deepest recesses.

They continually approached Stefansson about the possibility of a new expedition north. He seemed interested but noncommittal. Consumed with his writing and his lectures on the Chautauqua circuit, he told them he had no plans to return to the Arctic in 1921. The time wasn’t right, he said. It was too late in the year to get up an expedition, and, as always, there was the issue of funding.

But in private, Stefansson was actually planning and had been planning in earnest since the fall of 1920 when he had approached Canada’s Prime Minister, Arthur Meighen, and various members of the government about his desire to send out another expedition to Wrangel Island. As far as Stefansson could see, the ownership of the island was debatable. Some believed the Russians had rights to Wrangel because Baron Ferdinand Petrovich von Wrangell had been the first to search for it—albeit unsuccessfully—between 1822 and 1824; the island was named for him by the American captain Thomas Long in 1867. More substantially, the Soviets occupied the island for a brief period of time in 1834, and in 1911 erected a navigation beacon there. But others believed that Americans had held it ever since Captain Calvin L. Hooper made the first official landing on the island in 1881 and took formal possession for the United States.

Stefansson felt otherwise, however. In his view, any claim that might have belonged to the Russians or the Americans had lapsed. Captain Henry Kellett had discovered the island in 1849 for England far before Captain Long claimed it for America and renamed it after Baron Wrangell. When Maurer and other members of Stefansson’s own ill-fated 1913–1914 Canadian Arctic Expedition landed there after their ship Karluk had been crushed in ice, and lived there six months before the survivors were rescued, it was the longest occupation of the island by anyone. Thus Stefansson felt Great Britain—through its dominion Canada—had just as much right to the island as the Russians or Americans.

Stefansson had never set foot on Wrangel himself, but its primary attraction for him was its far northern location, which promised a future air base. No flights yet ventured across the Arctic, but Stefansson, who considered himself a visionary, believed it was only a matter of time before the world would be flying by that route from America or Eastern Asia to Europe. When they did, his Wrangel Island could be one of the primary embarkation points.

“During your stay on Wrangel Island did you ever go any considerable distance inland?” Just the previous year Stefansson had questioned Maurer about the game conditions, livability of the island, vegetation, and topography. “Did you see lichens, mosses or grasses? Were flowers common? On what parts of the island did you find the most driftwood and what kind of wood was it?”

Stefansson was particularly interested in the British-Canadian flag hoisted on Wrangel’s soil, July 1, 1914. Maurer and two of the other Karluk men had raised it in honor of Dominion Day without any other motive. But Stefansson thought it could mean something more, possibly even that they had, by doing so, claimed official possession of the island. He had interrogated Maurer about it, asking him about the particulars of the flag-raising ceremony with such intensity and frequency that Maurer told Knight he had a strong feeling Stefansson was interested in Wrangel. If this was true and their hero was really planning some sort of expedition to the island, both Maurer and Knight—and now Galle—wanted a part of it.

Stefansson had not yet been able to convince the Canadian government to back such a politically tenuous and ambitious venture, but he hoped, with enough substantiation that the island was indeed an invaluable asset, that they would forget the disastrous results of his previous expedition. There was the fact of the eleven lost lives, the matter that he may have abandoned his ship, and the condemnation by his peers in the government and elsewhere.

He knew they would need a British or Canadian citizen on the expedition in order officially to claim the island—someone who, if not the actual leader, could at least act as one in name. He hadn’t yet told Maurer, Knight, and Galle that he was actually planning on sending them on the expedition they so desired. And so it was entirely unknown to them that he had already sent out a letter, dated March 13,1921, to the University of Toronto, advertising for a recent graduate who might be interested in lending his nationality to the cause.