stefansson-wrangel-09-32-091v

382 THE ADVENTURE OF WRANGEL ISLAND

edy. He evidently wants his readers to infer that here we have
the causes for a treasured anger which resulted more than a year
later in Ada's refusing “to aid E. Lorne Knight, actual leader of
the party, as he lay dying on the island."

Fortunately Lorne Knight made a special effort to be explicit
in his diary on the subject of Ada Blackjack and we are, therefore,
able to tell the whole story in his own words, except for a few gaps
of a line here and a paragraph there in places where the diary has
been mutilated by Mr. Noice. We do not know, of course, whether
all the paragraphs which Mr. Noice erased dealt with Ada Black-
jack, but the context indicates that some of them did.

As a preliminary to Knight's account of what happened we must
review briefly the circumstances of Ada Blackjack's connection
with the expedition. When we were making the Wrangel Island
plans in Seattle, we had agreed that while Eskimo hunters were
not essential for safety and success, Eskimo seamstresses were,
and that in order to secure seamstresses you had to take with you
entire families. The object, then, would be to get the best possible
combination, the man a good hunter, the wife a good seam-
stress, both healthy and with children the fewer the better. At
Nome the party made tentative arrangements with Eskimo fam-
ilies which these families later broke. It had been intended that
Ada Blackjack should go along with the families. When they
withdrew from their bargains she was induced to go alone on the
promise that natives for her company would be picked up on the
voyage either somewhere in Alaska or at East Cape, Siberia.
When the party later went in to East Cape they had two purposes,
to get natives and to get a large skin hunting boat—umiak. The
umiak they did not buy because the price seemed to them ex-
orbitant, and the natives they were unable to secure.

It was under these circumstances that Ada Blackjack found her-
self the only woman with four men on Wrangel. Knight's account
will show what she said and did on the island that can have a
bearing upon Mr. Noice's charges, and will show also the actions
and opinions of all of the men. When the story has been carefully
examined the reader will have the feeling that the ideas and con-
duct of the party, instead of being any of the other many things
that have been suggested, were in reality those of men having
a clear and stem moral code.