Lillian Alling: The Real Lillian (part 6)

Excerpted with permission from:

Wild West Women: Travellers, Adventurers and Rebels
Written by Rosemary Neering
Published by Whitecap Books Ltd.

THE MOST DETERMINED PERSON I'D EVER MET: Women Not to Be Deterred
Part 6 (final)

What happened to her after that is a matter of conjecture, based on flimsy pieces of conflicting hearsay evidence. Lillian Alling's story quickly became a northern legend, with different versions of the end of her story sworn to by those who said they had met her along the way, or had met someone who had met her, or seen her, or heard of her fate.

One version suggested that she had not gone north at all. A policeman who had met her on her journey said he had received a letter from her, saying she had gone to Telegraph Creek to find her Russian sweetheart. On finding he had departed, she married another man. But there is too much evidence that she did indeed go north; the policeman must have confused her with someone else. Some versions report that she had the stuffed hide of the dog that had been poisoned with her all the way, perhaps at the top of her backpack, perhaps in the cart she was said at one point to have trundled behind her. But her ability to preserve a decaying hide while persisting on her way north must be doubted. Some say that an Inuit man saw her footprints at the edge of a river near the Bering Sea and that she must undoubtedly have drowned there. Others say she found someone to take her across the Bering Sea by boat, then disappeared into Siberia.

We want a happy ending for Lillian Alling. A California man, who visited Siberia in 1965, wrote to a magazine to say he thought he had found one. While in Siberia, he had spoken with a friend there. The friend said that, as a boy of fourteen or fifteen, he lived on the Siberian shore of the Bering Strait. He saw a woman and three Inuit men whom he recognized as being from the Diomede Islands in the strait arrive on the waterfront. The woman said she had come from America, where she had been unable to find friends or make a living. She had decided to walk home to Russia and had done so. On her route, she said, no one had lifted as much as a finger to help her in any way. If this was indeed Lillian Alling, her comments would surely have come as a great disappointment to the many people who had helped her on her journey.

The letter writer said his friend told him all this had happened in the fall of 1930. But neither he nor anyone else living knows for certain how Lillian Alling's odyssey ended.

Lillian Alling: The Real Lillian (part 5)

Excerpted with permission from:

Wild West Women: Travellers, Adventurers and Rebels
Written by Rosemary Neering
Published by Whitecap Books Ltd.

THE MOST DETERMINED PERSON I'D EVER MET: Women Not to Be Deterred
Part 5

The knowledge that death came easily in the north had no more impact on Alling than all the warnings of those who had tried to dissuade her. She was walking to Russia. She would continue unless her own death intervened. Her determination – and her refusal to understand the possible problems – so impressed one of the linesmen that he gave her his black and white husky dog, Bruno, to provide company and to carry her pack. But, insisted the linesman, she must not let Bruno run free near the Iskut River, where poison traps were set for wolverine. It is thought that the dog must have eluded her, for another linesman saw it die near the river.

Alling continued on from Iskut, arriving in Atlin in August, where she bought a pair of shoes so she could walk ever farther northward. At Tagish, in the Yukon, a local resident took her across the river in a boat. At Carcross, she had a meal in a hotel. North of Carcross, a local couple overtook her on the road, and offered her a ride in their car. She rode with them as far as they were going, then resumed her lonely travels. On the last day of August, the Whitehorse Star announced that "a woman giving the name of Lillian Alling walked into town Monday evening and registered at the Regina Hotel. Lillian was not given much to speaking but as near as can be gathered from information she gave at different places she had walked from Hazelton to Whitehorse."

The newspaper named her the Mystery Woman, and tracked her further progress. She had, said one of the stories, left Whitehorse carrying a loaf of bread as her only food. As she journeyed on, various locals ferried her across the rivers that barred her way. On one occasion, she stayed through a bad storm with a survey party, then continued on down the Yukon River in a small boat. On October 5, she reached Dawson City, some 5,000 miles (8000 kilometres) from her starting point a year and a half earlier in New York. She stayed there for the winter, working as a waitress and repairing the boat she had bought for her continued journey down the Yukon. When the ice broke up in the spring, she followed the river towards the Bering Sea, steering her small craft through the last remaining floating ice.


Photo: Lillian Alling with Bruno, 1928. Courtesy of the Atlin Historical Society

Lillian Alling: The Real Lillian (part 4)

Excerpted with permission from:

Wild West Women: Travellers, Adventurers and Rebels
Written by Rosemary Neering
Published by Whitecap Books Ltd.

THE MOST DETERMINED PERSON I'D EVER MET: Women Not to Be Deterred
Part 4

Service decided that he would arrest Alling for her own protection. She was searched; she carried two ten-dollar bills, a reasonably sure defence against any charge of vagrancy. Arraigned before a justice of the peace on September 21, she was convicted instead of carrying an offensive weapon, the eighteen-inch (half-metre) metal bar she had with her to protect herself, not against wild animals, but against men. One account suggests that she was asked four times if she had anything to say. At the fourth, she let fly four obscene expletives. The justice of the peace fined her twenty-five dollars, a sum she did not have. In lieu of payment, she was sentenced to two months in Oakalla Prison, near Vancouver, a ruling that would accomplish the lawmen's objective of keeping her off the trail in winter.

She duly served her time. Once she was released, prison staff found her a job for the rest of the winter at a Vancouver restaurant, where she saved as much money as she could. Come spring, she set out once more. On July 19, she arrived at Smithers, where a policeman again tried to dissuade her from her trek. She declined, but she did promise that she would check in at each of the cabins on the Telegraph Trail. This she did. Several weeks later, linesmen Jim Christie and Charlie Janze watched in amazement as she walked into the clearing where their two small cabins stood, her face badly swollen from insect bites, windburned and sunburned, slumping from exhaustion and lack of food, her clothes almost in tatters. Yet she would not turn back.

Since they knew they could not dissuade her, they tried to help. Christie gave her his cabin. Over the next three days and nights, she ate well, slept indoors and began to recuperate. Janze gave her a pair of breeches and two shirts, a felt hat and a pair of boots that would fit her smaller feet with the aid of two pairs of woollen socks. Then Christie set out with Alling towards the Nass summit and Cabin 9 on the trail. Meanwhile, linesman Scotty Ogilvie left Cabin 9 to come south to meet her. He never arrived. Trying to cross a river in flood, he tumbled in, hit his head on a snag and drowned. His fellow linesman at Cabin 9 found him the next day, his body wedged against a waterlogged cottonwood tree. Ogilvie was buried nearby. When Aliing passed this way the next day, it is said that she left behind a small bunch of wildflowers.

Lillian Alling: The Real Lillian (part 3)

Excerpted with permission from:

Wild West Women: Travellers, Adventurers and Rebels
Written by Rosemary Neering
Published by Whitecap Books Ltd.

THE MOST DETERMINED PERSON I'D EVER MET: Women Not to Be Deterred
Part 3

Amazed at the story he heard, in awe of her tenacity in reaching this far, he was nonetheless quickly convinced that she would die if she continued her journey north into the rapidly approaching winter weather. He telegraphed the provincial police officer in Hazelton, some sixty miles (ninety-five kilometres) south, and asked for advice. George Wyman, a young police constable, set out immediately for Blackstock's Cabin 2. There, he found a woman about five foot five (165 centimetres) and "thin as a wisp," wearing running shoes and carrying a knapsack that contained sandwiches, tea, a comb, and a few other personal effects.

Guy Lawrence, a forty-year veteran of life on the Telegraph Trail, later described this section of the trail in winter: "Sudden heavy falls of snow would bring the line down in several places, over perhaps a seventy-mile stretch. Between Hazelton and Telegraph Creek, some sections were subjected to phenomenal precipitation during the long winter months. Crews at stations at fairly high altitudes made a habit of erecting long poles beside their small refuge cabins to help find them. Many of the mountain passes were subject to snowslides, which snapped poles and buried the wire under sixty feet of snow for the remainder of the winter." Yet, underequipped as she was, as ignorant as she could be of the hazards that faced her, Alling told Wyman she was absolutely determined to continue north.

Wyman would not let her go to what he thought was certain death. He decided to take her with him to Hazelton. Surprisingly, she put up no fight, turning back dumbly to accompany him. Once back in Hazelton, she told Wyman the bare bones of her story, and declared that she would, somehow, continue. Said Wyman many years later, "She was the most determined person I'd ever met." He conferred with his superior officer, Sgt. W.]. Service, who also warned Alling of the severe winter conditions ahead and told her she would in all probability freeze to death. She was not dissuaded. The men knew that the moment that she was released, she would be back on the Telegraph Trail.




Linesman Charlie Janze and his fellow telegraph workers knew what they were talking about when they warned Lillian Alling of the dangers that could be expected by anyone walking the Telegraph Trail. Here, Janze is shown near the Nass-Skeena divide, on the trail in winter. (LANCE BURDON, PHOTOGRAPHER; BCA D-07630)

Lillian Alling: The Real Lillian (part 2)

Excerpted with permission from:

Wild West Women: Travellers, Adventurers and Rebels
Written by Rosemary Neering
Published by Whitecap Books Ltd.

THE MOST DETERMINED PERSON I'D EVER MET: Women Not to Be Deterred
Part 2

Alling is one of a handful of western women whose legends grow with time, and whose stories are still told around the coffee cups and beer glasses of the regions where they lived or travelled. These women lived lives of pure determination, often in almost total isolation from other people. Some called them eccentric; some called them crazy. They were as little interested in such judgements as they were in other people's advice on what they should do or how they should live. Regardless of the cost, they lived as they wished.

Lillian Alling worked as a maid in New York, a job that did not allow her to save enough money to buy a ticket aboard a ship returning to Europe. Blocked from the simplest way home, she began to develop another plan. In the New York Public Library, she spread out on the table in front of her maps of the United States, Canada and Siberia. She decided she would walk home, north through British Columbia, the Yukon and Alaska, somehow across the Bering Strait, then through Siberia, the Ural Mountains and home.

The small hill of information available about Lillian Alling's odyssey is dwarfed by the mountain that is unknown. Probably in the spring of1927, she set out on foot from New York, dressed in a stout skirt and shod in sturdy shoes. She seems to have aroused no particular comment among the many who travelled the highways newly built for the ever more popular automobile, or on the old wagon roads or railway tracks, though many must have wondered about this woman who walked alone and steadily west. Later, she said that she had been through Winnipeg, which suggests that she followed a Canadian route along the transcontinental train tracks across the prairies and perhaps through Jasper to Prince George and Smithers, in British Columbia's northwest.

The first absolute fact in the trek of Lillian Alling is that on September 10, 1927, she walked up to a lonely cabin north of Hazelton, the home of Yukon telegraph lineman Bill Blackstock.


Photo credit: Gregory Melle

This photo shows the Telegraph Trail snaking up the hill from the Sheep Creek Cabin, on Lillian Alling's route north. Alling refused to let the rough trail, the weather or the possibility of starvation deter her from her trek. (BCA A-04962)

Lillian Alling: The Real Lillian Arrives in NYC

Excerpted with permission from:

Wild West Women: Travellers, Adventurers and Rebels
Written by Rosemary Neering
Published by Whitecap Books Ltd.

THE MOST DETERMINED PERSON I'D EVER MET: Women Not to Be Deterred

Part 1

New York City in the 1920s hummed with the comings and goings of four million residents, three-quarters of them immigrants or the children of immigrants. Men, women and children crowded the streets of the east side, rode the newly built subways, lived in the tenements and worked in rapidly growing industries, many slaving in sweatshops.

More than a third of the 17 million people who arrived at the American immigration centre on Ellis Island between 1890 and 1930 came from central and eastern Europe to swell rapidly growing Russian, Polish and other immigrant communities. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent civil war chased many Russians from their homes and native land; New York was the destination for a large number of these émigrés. Though they had little to do with the roar of the twenties – the speakeasies and jazz clubs that were part of the fast life of the cities – most were reasonably content with their new country.

Lillian Alling was not. Like much about Alling's life, the facts of her birth and childhood are unconfirmed. She was probably born shortly after 1900 in Russia, or possibly Poland. She came to the United States after the revolution, probably entering with thousands of her fellow Russians at Ellis Island. Some say she was one of the many upper-class and aristocratic Russians who fled Russia at that time; descriptions of her suggest she was well educated and well spoken. One report suggested that she had been sent by her family to find them all a new home, and that, while she was travelling, her family was thrown into exile in Siberia – but this report may have been romantic invention.

Whoever she was, however she arrived in America, she was soon convinced that she did not want to stay. Somehow, she would return to Russia. She never told anyone who recorded her response why she wanted to return, other than to say that she felt alone and unwelcome, despite the large numbers of people in her same circumstances. Perhaps it was the bustle and strangeness of the city. Perhaps it was some more compelling or frightening incident. Perhaps she yearned to rejoin a sweetheart or her family. Whatever impelled her, though, must have been strong motivation indeed, for it drove her to undertake an almost impossible trek, to brave hardship and jail and to continue on when saner heads urged caution.

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