She went to the Nome orphanage and retrieved her son Bennett.

She used her wages to take him to a hospital in Seattle for tuberculosis treatment.

Bennett survived.

He was reunited with his mother.

Ada Blackjack’s public story then faded.

She returned to Alaska, had another son named Billy, and lived a quiet life — herding reindeer at various points, hunting, trapping, picking berries — the subsistence life of an Alaska Native woman in the mid-twentieth century.

She nearly died from tuberculosis herself at various points.