The mission education was the education available to her, and it shaped her. She became fluent in English, which would make her useful on the expedition. She became an expert seamstress, particularly of fur garments — parkas, mittens, boots — the clothing that kept people alive in the Arctic. These were skills with real value in the environment she would later have to survive.
At sixteen she married Jack Blackjack, a dog musher who took her to the Seward Peninsula. They had three children, and only one survived infancy: Bennett. Jack Blackjack was abusive, and eventually he deserted her. Ada walked back to Nome with Bennett — roughly forty miles, carrying the boy when his legs gave out. She was in her early twenties. She was broke. She cleaned houses. She sewed clothing for miners. She could not afford Bennett’s tuberculosis treatment.
Bennett went into the Jesse Lee Home for Children, a Methodist orphanage in Nome. Ada placed him there not out of indifference but out of a calculation: she could not afford his care, and the orphanage could provide it. Her goal was to earn enough money to retrieve him and pay for his medical treatment. The orphanage was a temporary solution to a financial problem.
The financial problem was severe, which is why the expedition offer, when it came, was something she could not easily decline.
## Vilhjalmur Stefansson and the Idea That Wrangel Island Could Be Claimed
Vilhjalmur Stefansson was a Canadian explorer of Icelandic descent who had spent years in the Arctic and had developed a theory about it that made him a controversial public figure. He believed the Arctic was, in his phrase, a “friendly Arctic” — a habitable region where resourceful people could live off the land and sea. The theory was not entirely wrong, but the degree of optimism with which he applied it, and the degree to which he applied it to people other than himself, caused problems.