She did not want the attention.
What she said, consistently and in various accounts, was that she was a mother who had needed to earn money to take care of her son, and that she had done what she had to do to get home. The narrative of heroism was not something she rejected outright — there is no record of her specifically arguing against being called a survivor — but the media circus around her was something she withdrew from when she could.
She used the money she had — her expedition wages and the small amount she had made from the fox furs she had trapped and brought back — to take Bennett out of the orphanage and bring him to Seattle for tuberculosis treatment. The treatment worked. Bennett’s health improved.
That was the objective. That was what the two years had been for, in her accounting. She had gone to earn money to bring home a sick child, and she had earned it, and she was now using it for that purpose. The rest — the newspapers, the public attention, the designation as a heroine — was secondary to the practical outcome.
## Harold Noice’s Accusations: The Smear Campaign
Harold Noice was, by the available accounts, a complicated figure in the aftermath of the expedition. He had led the rescue party and had arrived to find the wreckage of Stefansson’s plan — four men dead, one woman alive, a colonial enterprise that had cost lives without securing any territorial gain. He had his own professional interests to protect and his own version of the story to tell.