The poverty and difficulty that characterized her circumstances in Nome before the expedition do not appear to have been substantially resolved by the expedition’s outcome. She received her wages. She received a small payment for the furs she had trapped. She received nothing from the books and articles that used her story. The financial circumstances of her later decades are not comprehensively documented, but the Alaska Legislature’s 1983 citation describes her heroism as having “gone unnoticed,” which is at least a partial indication of how she was regarded — not as a celebrated figure whose contributions had been honored, but as someone whose story had been largely forgotten.
She lived until she was eighty-five, in the reckoning of the available sources. She died at the Pioneer Home in Palmer, Alaska, on May 29, 1983. The Pioneer Home is a state-run assisted living facility for Alaskans — a practical and appropriate place for an elderly Alaskan with limited resources to live out her final years.
She was buried at Anchorage Memorial Park Cemetery. Billy placed the plaque.
The sixty years between the rescue and the death are not nothing — they are a person’s life, full of whatever a person’s life is full of — but they are largely invisible to the historical record that has focused on the two years on Wrangel Island. The story that brought Ada Blackjack to public attention was the story of 1921-1923, and it is that story that the available accounts tell in detail.
What she was in the sixty years after — what she thought about the expedition, whether she spoke of it, what she made of the long aftermath of that period — is mostly private and mostly undocumented. She had said what she wanted to say in February 1924, in the Los Angeles Times interviews. After that, she appears to have been, as she wanted to be, a private person.