## The Remainder of Her Life: Return to the Arctic
Ada Blackjack remarried after the expedition — a man named Johnson, with whom she had a second son, Billy. The marriage was not a happy one by the accounts that have survived, and it ended in divorce. She returned to Alaska, to the life she had maintained before the expedition: living in the North, raising her son, working as she could.
She lived in the Arctic and the sub-Arctic for most of the rest of her life, eventually living until she was eighty-five years old. She died on May 29, 1983, at the Pioneer Home in Palmer, Alaska.
The scope of her subsequent public life — from 1923 to 1983, sixty years — is largely undocumented in the public record at the level of detail that the expedition years are documented. She was not a public figure after the immediate aftermath of the rescue and the controversy that followed it. She went back to being a private person, which appears to have been what she wanted. The attention the Wrangel Island story brought had not been welcome, and she did not seek to maintain it.
Billy, her second son, later placed a plaque on her grave at Anchorage Memorial Park Cemetery. It reads: “Heroine — Wrangel Island Expedition 1921-1923.” The inscription is brief but specific. It does not say explorer, or survivor, or Female Robinson Crusoe. It says heroine, and it names the expedition, and it gives the dates. It is the record that her son chose to put on her grave.