Copy of an agreement between Loring Pickering and Alfred Taylor, 30 July 1923

Town that the Wrangel Island expedition and relief expedition sailed from.

An island off the coast of Siberia, Russia.

A large Russian region in northern Asia, known for being vast and sparsely populated, with harsh weather conditions.

Vice President of the Stefansson Artic Exploration and Development Company. Managing Director of the Taylor Engineering Company. Prominent engineering contractor and entrepreneur in British Columbia, Canada. Most famous for the Lion's Gate Bridge.

Lead the relief expedition to Wrangel Island in 1923.

Born Allan Rudyard Crawford in Toronto, Crawford was aged 20 at the start of the 1921 Wrangel Island expedition. He was in official command of the expedition, partly because of his status as a Canadian citizen and British subject. At the time he was hired for the expedition, he was studying geology, paleontology, chemistry, and mineralogy at the University of Toronto. One of Crawford’s professors had given him a letter from Stefansson, who had written to the university present searching for another member for the expedition. Crawford wrote to Stefansson introducing himself in April 1921, and Stefansson eventually hired him for his strong background in the sciences. The team arrived on Wrangel Island on September 15, 1921, and over the following years suffered immensely, facing harsh Arctic conditions as resources ran dangerously low. On January 28, 1923, Crawford, along with Milton and Galle, tried to cross the frozen Chukchi Sea to Siberia and travel some 90 miles to get help. They were never seen again. Because he was a Canadian Citizen, Crawford was the only member of the expedition to be officially honored by the Canadian government.

Born William Stephenson in 1879 in Manitoba, Canada, Stefansson was an explorer, anthropologist, public intellectual, and policy adviser whose life work included several important expeditions to the Arctic. He began planning an expedition to Wrangel Island somewhat secretly beginning in the fall of 1920, hoping to definitively claim Wrangel Island for Canada or Britain. As his active exploring career had already ended, he stayed in Canada while the team went to Wrangel Island. Ill-equipped and inexperienced, all four men hired by Stefansson died in 1923; Ada Blackjack was the sole survivor of the trip. Stefansson had a significant association with Dartmouth College, beginning in the 1920s and 30s when he was an occasional lecturer. In 1947, he moved to Vermont with his wife, working on the Encyclopedia Arctica and becoming an Arctic Consultant to the College. Though the Encyclopedia Arctica project was canceled in 1951, its unpublished chapters and associated materials are now housed in the Rauner Library as part of the Stefansson Collection on Polar Exploration. Stefansson continued teaching and writing at Dartmouth until his death in 1962 in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he is now buried.

General Manager of the North American Newspaper Alliance, 1923.