stefansson-wrangel-09-38-004-001

THE ADEVNTURE OF WRANGEL ISLAND

Late in the summer of 1921 four young men arrived
at Nome, A1aska. During the few days that followed they
were to be seen in earnest discussion first with one and
then another of the hardy captains whose little vessels
run well up into the floes of the Arctic Ocean.

Nome is a frontier town and frontier towns are
notoriously inquisitive. But when the good people of
Nome sought information as to the destination or inten-
tions of these evident adventurers they met walls of
silence.

Finally word spread that the mysterious young men
were on their way to Wrangel Island, little known bit
of the Arctic estimated to be 75 miles in length by from
28 to 40 miles in width and lying 400 miles northwest
of the Alaskan coast and about 110 miles north of the
eastern tip of Siberia. It is ice bound for the greater
part of the year.

The people of Nome winked at one another and tried
all the harder to run down the mystery. Alaska had been
the scone of many gold stampedes, and naturally the first
thing that occurred to the Nomeites was that these young
men had discovered gold somewhere along the Alaskan coast
and that their talk of Wrangel Island was but a subter-