Lillian Alling
The Journey Home
Susan Smith-Josephy
Copyright ©2011 Susan Smith-Josephy
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, [email protected].
Caitlin Press Inc.
8100 Alderwood Road,
Halfmoon Bay, BC V0N 1Y1
www.caitlin-press.com
Edited by Jane Stevenson and Betty Keller
Text and cover design by Vici Johnstone, maps by Kathleen Fraser
Illustrations by Eric Josephy
Front cover image: Detail of White Pass Dawson City Museum 1982. 202.2
Front cover image of Lillian Alling: Detail of image from Atlin Historical Society, see page 122
Printed in Canada
Caitlin Press Inc. acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publisher’s Tax Credit.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Smith-Josephy, Susan
Lillian Alling: the journey home/Susan Smith-Josephy.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-894759-54-0
1. Alling, Lillian—Travel. 2. British Columbia—Description
and travel. 3. Yukon—Description and travel. 4. Alaska—
Description and travel. 5. Women travellers—Biography.
6. Women adventurers—Biography. I. Title.
FC3817.3.S65 2011 910.82 C2011-904938-4
For Lillian, of course.
Contents
Preface
Chapter One: The Mystery of Lillian Alling's Origins
Chapter Two: Crossing Canada—Spring 1927
Chapter Three: Fall and Winter 1927
Chapter Four: Hyder, Alaska, to Smithers, BC
Map: The Telegraph Trail
Chapter Five: The Telegraph Trail
Chapter Six: Telegraph Creek to Atlin
Chapter Seven: Tagish to Whitehorse
Chapter Eight: The Road to Dawson
Chapter Nine: Dawson City
Chapter Ten: Floating Down to Nome
Chapter Eleven: The Final Walk
Map: Siberia
Chapter Twelve: Prince of Wales to Siberia
Epilogue
Journey Map
Acknowledgements
Selected Bibliography
About Susan Smith-Josephy
Preface
Lillian Alling was a remarkable woman and her adventures intrigued me from the first moment I heard about her. However, I never meant to write a book about her.
I first became interested in Lillian when I read a small blurb about her in our local historical society’s newsletter. Her story seemed preposterous: there was no way a woman could have walked from New York to Siberia. So I did some idle research online and found a few websites. Read some library books. Found some mentions of her in anthologies of women adventurers and volumes about eccentrics. I started making photocopies of the articles I found and checked every reference in every article. Soon I had a two-foot-high stack of paper. I also kept a record of everything on my computer. I told friends about my interest in Lillian, and people started emailing me with more articles and names of people to contact. Finally I put up a website, www.lillianalling.ca, to announce my intention of writing a book. This generated more emails and more letters.
I kept writing to museums, archives and authors who’d written about Lillian and to anyone else who might be interested. I bombarded the local library with inter-library loan requests for related works on the history of the places that she visited and the people with whom she came in contact. I met, via email and letters, people who were experts on trails and trekking, the 1920s, the British Columbia Provincial Police force and so much more. Other writers who had done some research on Lillian mailed me either their manuscripts or their piles of research articles—or both. I contacted descendants of some of the key people whom she had met on her journey, and I was thrilled to learn that they had been told stories about her. These people were kind enough to allow me to interview them, and they supplied photos of the ancestors who had told them the stories. I travelled a portion of Lillian’s route in British Columbia, particularly the Pine Pass area and the road from Hyder and Stewart to Hazelton and Smithers, and took the ferry to Prince Rupert.
And just as the telegraph and other new technologies helped Lillian to travel such long distances and to have her story precede her wherever she went as she crossed Canada and entered Alaska, even newer technologies helped me to find her again more than eighty years later. While this book represents three years of research and writing, without the Internet, it would have taken many more years and dollars and would not have been as comprehensive. Of course, online research is not a substitute for visiting people and places, but Lillian’s journey was so long ago and crossed such a vast area that corresponding via email with people in the places she travelled through seemed like the obvious choice.
Sometimes I was lucky enough to find relevant travel journals or newspaper articles that had first-hand information about Lillian and her trek. At other times I followed clues and leads from secondary sources and articles. I figured out her route by going over old documents, and I wrote to small-town museums and archives along that route to see if they had any new information. Often they didn’t. Sometimes they came up trumps, digging into their old files, copying photos for me, and cheering me on through emails and letters.
Some people have called Lillian Alling crazy, but I came to love Lillian Alling, the eccentric.
I came to know a woman who had drive and courage and single-mindedness. She was a loner and an independent thinker who didn’t like crowds too much, but preferred the wide-open spaces where she could be free and be herself. She was reserved but readily accepted help and was cooperative with authorities. Although she appears to have had quite a temper when she was under pressure, she seems to have stoically tolerated being cornered by people or forced indoors by the weather or institutionalized because she knew she would soon be on her own and outdoors again. To me, she seems to have been a reasonable human being on a very difficult quest.
*
Lillian Alling’s tale has been fictionalized a number of times, probably because her spirit resonates with the romantic in all of us. She has been the subject of at least two novels. She inspired Amy Bloom’s Away, though the author is skeptical of the real Lillian’s existence, and Canadian writer Sherry Coffey is turning her MFA thesis into a book about her. Additionally, her life has been covered in the graphic novel Lillian the Legend by Kerry Byrne and in the play All the Way to Russia With Love by Susan M. Fleming, which was staged at the Ottawa Fringe Festival. Ted Eames has written an epic poem about her. A film about Lillian by Daniel Janke of Northern Town Films may be underway. A 1994 French film, La piste du télégraphe (The Telegraph Route) was written and directed by Liliane de Kermadec. In October 2010 the Vancouver Opera Company staged the Canadian debut of Lillian Alling, the opera, to critical acclaim. Most recently her story has been featured in a short skit by the Dawson Museum in the Yukon as part of their Lillian Alling display.
I share Lillian Alling’s true story with you now in the hope that you will enjoy reading about her. I also share it in the hope that someone, somewhere, holds the final clue that can help solve the mystery of what happened to Li
llian Alling.
Chapter One: The Mystery of Lillian Alling’s Origins
One of the two photos of Lillian taken by Marie Murphy in the summer of 1928. Atlin Museum & Archives.
Most people living in North America today, with the exception of indigenous peoples, are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. Many of us are familiar with the immigrant story: the push away from the old country as the result of economic pressures, social and political oppression or religious persecution and the trip across the Atlantic or Pacific fraught with dangers, discomfort, illness and sometimes death. In this myth, the huge step of leaving one’s homeland then surviving the ordeal of an ocean crossing was rewarded by a tidy reception at some immigration depot like Ellis Island or perhaps Halifax’s Pier 21. Then, once the individual was legitimized in the new country of choice, the heroic story culminated in the struggle to settle, raise a family, adapt and succeed. This is the successful North American dream.
Certainly this immigrant experience is usually painted as positive. But for some people, leaving home and facing the overwhelming challenges of a new country can become an intolerable situation from which they must escape. So what happens to those immigrants who do not succeed on the terms of the new country? What of the newcomers who just do not fit in, who reject the culture and mores of their new land? For them the dream has been rendered meaningless or has turned into a nightmare. They must either endure a life of misery in their adopted country or return home. Between 1908, when US immigration authorities began keeping records on departures, and 1920, three out of every eight immigrants returned home to their native lands. And by the Great Depression of the 1930s, more people were returning home than entering the country.1
From the few words Lillian Alling spoke on that subject, it appears that she had a hard time as an immigrant so she chose to return to Europe. Her drive to return home was not that unusual. It was the length and scope of her journey that were different than most. She chose to walk back to Europe and to minimize her ocean crossing to the 50 miles (80 kilometres) between Alaska and Siberia. Did she really walk from New York to Alaska through Canada and eventually end up in Siberia? Yes, she did. Her story, in fact, spans the globe—from Europe, across the Atlantic, across the whole North American continent and then across the Bering Strait to Asia.
Improvements in transportation and communication made her journey possible. The popularity of motor vehicle travel had necessitated the construction of highways and roads. Railways had been built from coast to coast, and even though she never travelled by train as far as is known, the rail lines provided pathways where roads did not exist. The telegraph, and the telegraph lines in particular, gave her a trail to follow through the wilderness of northern British Columbia. But although it is known that she sometimes accepted a ride and she used boats where necessary, for the most part history has recorded that she made the entire trip using the oldest mode of transport: walking.
*
But the story of Lillian Alling’s journey starts and ends with mysteries—both her origins and her fate are unknown. The woman known to history as Lillian Alling crossed from the state of New York into Canada at Niagara Falls, Ontario, on Christmas Eve 1926. She was alone. It was raining that day but mild, the temperature just a little below zero. When the Customs official asked her the routine entry questions, she answered politely in English with an eastern European accent.
“Last place of residence?”
“Rochester, New York.”
“What is your religion?”
“Catholic.”
“Where were you born?”
“Poland.”
According to the border crossing documentation, Lillian also stated that she had lived in Toronto from 1915 to 1921. She said she was thirty years old, married, and a housewife and that she planned to continue being a housewife upon arrival in Canada. Lillian may have meant “housekeeper,” as she was travelling without a husband and had performed domestic work in New York. She said she could speak English and gave her destination as Niagara Falls, Ontario. (She didn’t bother to mention that Niagara Falls was just the first stop on a journey across northern North America that would take her more than 6,000 miles (9,650 kilometres) and last almost three years.) She said she had no known relative or friend as her contact person in Canada. She also gave “none” as the answer to the name of her nearest relative. She was carrying twenty dollars with her.2
Although sometimes on her trek across the continent, Lillian Alling was referred to as Russian, she made it quite clear in her response to the Customs officer at Niagara Falls that she had been born in Poland. Some of the later confusion may have been due to the inability of Canadians to distinguish between a Polish and a Russian accent. However, this confusion also arose because from 1815 to 1919, Poland was divided between Prussia, Russia and Austria-Hungary, which resulted in Polish immigrants to Canada being categorized by early census takers as Russians, Germans or Austrians.
Following the Congress of Vienna in 1815, most of Poland was partitioned and placed under the rule of Russia, Austria and Prussia, the exception being the city of Cracow, which became an independent republic. Eastern Poland became a sovereign state, called the Kingdom of Poland, but it was united with the Russian throne. Although this arrangement was the most liberal of all the partitions, by the end of the century repressive measures by the Russian monarchy had reduced it to nothing more than a puppet kingdom ruled by a governor general who maintained strict control of all military forces and judicial systems. The northwestern portion of Poland, which was awarded to Prussia, fared little better. Constitutional rights guaranteed to the Polish people by the treaty were gradually eroded. German laws were introduced, the Polish language was no longer used by administrative bodies, and schools were taught by German teachers. Southern Poland, which included the kingdoms of Galicia and Lodomeria and New Galicia, was placed under the control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (In 1846 Austria also absorbed the independent republic of Cracow.) Although by the end of the century this area had gained more autonomy than those regions controlled by Russia and Prussia, it had few industries so it was the most economically challenged and had a 60 percent illiteracy rate.
The combination of political and social repression and poverty resulted in massive emigration from all three areas. Although those who came to Canada in the first migration wave were classified as Russians, Germans or Austrians, by 1901 they were being counted as Poles in the Canadian census, and their numbers rose from 6,285 in the 1901 census to 33,652 in 1911 to 53,403 in 1921; most were farmers and rural labourers who formed numerous small communities across the prairie provinces. After Poland was officially recognized as an independentrepublic by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, thenational and ethnic identities of the Polish immigrants were more clearly defined, and while some of them still went to the prairie provinces, a greater number migrated to urban areas, especially Toronto.
Poland became an independent republic in 1919, but the Red Army of the new Soviet government of Russia continued an attempt to dominate the new republic, fighting its way almost to the outskirts of Warsaw. They were finally defeated by a Polish army under Marshal Jozef Pilsudski and an armistice was signed in October 1920. The country remained in economic and political disarray until 1926 when Pilsudski staged a military coup and became dictator of Poland, remaining in that role until his death in 1935. In 1939 the country was occupied by the armies of Nazi Germany.
Prior to 1890 most of the Polish immigrants came from the Kashub region in north central Poland, and they settled in Renfrew County, Ontario, but Poles from Galicia, in the South of Poland, arrived in far greater numbers between 1907 and 1914. As a result, most immigrants from eastern or central Europe were referred to as Galicians.3 Many immigrants in this group found urban life more appealing than agricultural labour and moved their whole families to the towns. Thus, if Lillian came from the Kashub region, she might have immigrated with her parents as early as 1896 when she was an
infant. However, since she spoke with a Polish accent and she said that she had lived in Toronto from 1915 to 1921 and she had no known relative or friend in Canada, she probably came by herself as a young adult in the later wave of immigration from Galicia.
*
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Canadian government kept no official records of people arriving in Canada from Europe. In fact, immigrants were not even required to apply to enter the country. Mary Munk of the Canadian Genealogy Centre, Client Services Division, Library and Archives Canada, explains:
Immigrants from Europe would buy a ticket for a ship sailing to Canada. They would be seen by a medical examiner to make sure they didn’t have any medical conditions such as blindness or tuberculosis. They did not require a visa. If they had a passport, they would have shown it upon boarding, but the Canadian government did not keep their passports.>4
And according to the Library and Archives Canada website:
Passenger lists (RG 76) were the official record of immigration during this period … The [ship’s passenger] lists contain information such as name, age, country of origin, occupation and intended destination. They are arranged by port and date of arrival, with the exception of some years between 1919 and 1924, when an individual Form 30A was used … Many immigrants to Canada came from the United States or sailed from Europe to American ports on their way to Canada. Prior to April 1908, people were able to move freely across the border from the United States into Canada; no record of immigration exists for those individuals.
Not all immigrants crossing the border were registered. Some crossed when the ports were closed or where no port existed. Many families were not registered because one or both parents had been born in Canada or they had lived there before, and they were considered “returning Canadians” rather than immigrants.
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