Born: 1898, United States
Died: 1983
Country most active: Russia
Also known as: NA
The lone survivor of an ill-fated scientific expedition, this Iñupiat woman survived for two years on Wrangel Island, remote arctic island north of Siberia. She had joined the five-person expedition as a cook and seamstress soon after a divorce left her destitute in order to get money to take care of her son. On 15 September 1921, the team was left on the island it for Canada or Great Britain. Ada had been misled to believe she would be only one of many Alaska Native people to join the crew; instead, she was left with four white men. When conditions worsened, three of the men left to find help and were never heard from again; the fourth man died of scurvy, leaving Ada with the only other surviving member of the team – a cat named Vic. Ada used traditional Iñupiat skills to survive in the extreme conditions until she was rescued on 19 August 1923. Ada used the money she earned to take her son to Seattle to cure his tuberculosis. She later remarried and had another son, eventually, returning to the Arctic where she lived until age 85. A private person, hated the media attention and the attempts by her rescuer and the man who had funded the expedition to exploit her story. Except for the salary that she made on the trip and a few hundred dollars for furs she had trapped while on Wrangel, Ada did not benefit from her ordeal, and received nothing from the books that were written about it.