Lillian Alling

by Susan Smith-Josephy

  According to the Vancouver Sun article by Stainsby, Lillian wanted to pay her respects.

  When Tooley returned that way later with Lillian Alling, she stopped at the fresh grave, seven miles from the Echo Lake Cabin. She gathered some wild flowers to place upon it, knelt and prayed for the man she had never seen who had died trying to help her.9

  The official report of Ogilvie’s death was the responsibility of Constable G.E. Ashton, who was in charge of the Telegraph Creek Detachment of the British Columbia Police. On July 21 he filed the following report to the Official Administrator at Telegraph Creek:

  Drysdale Ogilvie,

  Echo Lake, Accidentaly [sic] Drowned:

  Sir:-

  I beg to report the death of the above, who was a lineman at Echo Lake for the Yukon Telegraph Line, on July 8, 1928.

  The deceased was apparently looking for a new crossing over the Ningunsaw River above the usual cable crossing and walked on a gravel cut bank which had become undermined by the river and which gave way with him and threw him into the river.

  His body was found by linemen J.F. Christie and C.J. Tooley about a hundred yards downstream from the cut bank lodged against a drift log and was buried nearby.

  His effects were brought in by J.F. Callbreaths [sic] pack train and will be forwarded to you forthwith. A list of his effects is attached herewith.

  Yours obediently,

  G.E. Ashton

  Const BC Police i/c Telegraph Creek Detach.

  [Stamped July 21, 1928, Government Agent.]10

  Scotty Ogilvie was well known in Hazelton and his death was reported in the Omineca Herald of Wednesday, July 11, 1928:

  SCOTTY OGALVIE [sic] WAS DROWNED IN FAR NORTH

  Drysdale “Scotty” Ogilvie came to his death while in the performance of his duty on the Yukon Telegraph line on Friday, July 6, 1928. Scotty has been in charge of the cabin at Echo Lake with C.J. Tooley. Last Friday morning he went out to do his beat, which necessitated his crossing the Linkinsaw [sic] river. The river was high and there was a log jam. He attempted to cross on the log jam. He did not return to his cabin that night and next day his partner (Tooley) and F.J. Christie, lineman at 8th cabin, went out to seek him. They found his body in the Linkinsaw River Monday morning at half-past eleven. Word was sent to headquarters through the Hazelton office of the Dominion Telegraphs and authority was then sent to the provincial constable at Telegraph Creek to decide on the disposition of the body.

  Drysdale Ogalvie was an old-timer in this country. He was around Hazelton in the early days of railway construction and was known and liked by everyone with whom he came in contact. He had a jolly disposition and was also quite an entertainer. These qualifications made him many warm friends, and there will be general regret at his tragic end. He was a native of Glasgow and was forty-six years of age. He had been with the Dominion Telegraphs off and on for the past ten years. “Scotty” went overseas with the Pioneers from this district and gave full service at the front. Of all the boys who went overseas from this section he was one of the few who came back here and stayed.11

  The men of the telegraph line were devastated by Ogilvie’s death, and since he died on his way to help Lillian, it was not surprising that some of his fellow linesmen and operators felt resentment toward the woman who caused his death.12 As a result, most of the subsequent reports have her simply walking away after his death, accompanied by a dog.14

  Crossing a Stream on the Telegraph Trail

  Traveller Winfield Woolf, who journeyed up the Telegraph Trail a year after Lillian, recounted his own experience crossing one of the flooded streams on the Trail:

  For a long time I stood on the bank trying to decide which was the better chance—swimming the rapids or crossing on the cable. First I attempted hanging on to the wire with my hands, but finding this impossible, I returned to the shore. Then I walked upstream looking for a place to ford. The man at the last station had presented me with a shoulder of caribou and a can of tongue. Knowing that I could not now carry these with me, I tried to throw the meat across to the opposite bank. However, it landed short. When I saw what the current did to that shoulder of caribou, I changed my mind about attempting to ford the river. To make doubly certain, I flipped a dime I had in my pocket. The wire won. Before starting out, I sat down to eat the can of tongue, knowing I would need strength for the ordeal ahead of me. Having learned that I could not support myself by my arms alone on the cable, I wrapped my legs around it and, like a South American sloth, pulled myself across with my hands. Right over the middle of the river, my strength gave out. I was so exhausted that the temptation came to me to let myself drop. It seemed the easiest thing to do. But one look down at the white rapids and rocks below gave me the willpower to go on. On reaching the opposite shore, I was so all in that I could go no further that day.14

  *

  By some accounts Jim Christie gave Lillian a dog called Bruno, and since Christie was the person who took the only known photograph of Lillian with a dog, perhaps the dog in the photograph is Bruno. Lineman Cyril Tooley, however, said that Christie’s dog was called Coyote and that Christie never gave a dog to Lillian. Author Diane Solie Smith, in her booklet on Lillian Alling, says that it was Tommy Hankin, who worked at the Echo Lake cabin, who gave Lillian his black and white lead dog, a husky called Bruno. According to Smith, Hankin told Lillian to keep the dog on a lead because trappers had left poison out for wolverines. By the time Lillian reached Nahlin, she no longer had a dog. It had either died or run away. Smith wrote that Bruno died at Iskut River, probably after eating the lethal bait. When questioned later by people in the Yukon about her dog, Lillian did mention that she had briefly owned a pack dog that had drowned. Diane Solie Smith makes a good point when she says: “Maybe she wished to hide the mistake of letting him roam loose to sample poisoned bait.”15

  There are many contradictory tales of Lillian travelling with a dog, but it is clear from this picture that she did have a four-legged companion, at least for a while. This photo was taken by Jim Christie and was originally published in the Beaver: Canada’s History Magazine, 1943.

  Clearly, Lillian did have a dog for a short time. She got it somewhere around Cabin Eight or the Nass Summit and no longer had it by the time she reached Nahlin. But bizarrely, the story of the dog took on a strange life of its own and a number of erroneous reports have Lillian travelling through the Yukon and Alaska carrying a stuffed dog perched on the top of her backpack. Even Donald Stainsby, who did such a good job of tracking down the men who met Lillian so many years ago for his otherwise reliable Vancouver Sun article of 1963, perpetuated the myth of the stuffed dog. When Lillian arrived in Atlin, wrote Stainsby,

  [S]he strode into town alone, her stick in her hand, and her knapsack on her back—and atop her pack the lightly-stuffed hide of Bruno. Where or how the dog died are not known. But the hide, stuffed with grass, stayed with her as long as there is a record of her because, as she is reported to have told a hotel keeper in Atlin, “He was my only friend and he will always remain with me.”16

  Stainsby also wrote that when Lillian later launched herself down the Yukon River, the stuffed hide of Bruno was on the top of her provisions, inside the raft. Writer Edward Hoagland perpetuated the ridiculous stuffed-dog story in a book published in 1969: “They gave her a puppy, which died, so she skinned it and stuffed it with grass, continuing to carry it under her arm.”17

  Notes

  (1) Omineca Herald, June 20, 1928.

  (2) Reed, Eleanor Stoy. “I Walked Empty Handed.” Interview with Winfield Woolf, 1929. In the Reed Family Papers, Box #2, Archives, University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

  (3) Miller, Bill. Wires in the Wilderness. Victoria: Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd., 2004, page 213.

  (4) Stainsby, Donald. “She Walked 6,000 Miles to the Top Of The World,” Vancouver Sun, April 27, 1963.

  (5) Reed. “I Walked Empty Handed.”

  (6) Stainsby. “She Walked 6,000 Miles.”

&
nbsp; (7) Reed. “I Walked Empty Handed.”

  (8) Certificate of registration of death, Province of British Columbia.

  (9) Stainsby. “She Walked 6,000 Miles,” pages 25 and 34.

  (10) This letter was on the same microfilm reel as Scotty’s death certificate.

  (11) Omineca Herald, Wednesday, July 11, 1928. Although the newspaper reported that Scotty died on July 6, the official death record states he died on July 8.

  (12) One account has Lillian saying, upon seeing the low river, “How could a man be so dumb as to drown in a dry creek?”—cited in Miller, Wires in the Wilderness, page 224. This was based on an interview with Eric Janze, nephew of Charlie Janze, who was quoting his uncle. Interview by Bill Miller, May 9, 2001.

  (13) Stainsby. “She Walked 6,000 Miles.”

  (14) Reed. “I Walked Empty Handed.”

  (15) Smith, Diane Solie. “The Legend of Lillian Alling: The Woman Who Walked to Russia,” Atlin Historical Society, 1997.

  (16) Stainsby. “She Walked 6,000 Miles.”

  (17) Hoagland, Edward. Notes from the Century: A journal from British Columbia. Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1969, page 223.

  Chapter Six: Telegraph Creek to Atlin

  Photo taken by Marie Murphy. Atlin Historical Society.

  From Echo Lake, Lillian walked north, passing two named cabins—Iskut and Raspberry—as the trail turned northwest toward the village of Telegraph Creek. She had now walked 350 miles (560 kilometres) through the wilderness from Hazelton.

  Lillian’s very brief stop in Telegraph Creek was remembered—and wildly embellished—in 1930 when a California couple, Ruth and Bill Albee, visited the little settlement. When the Albees talked to the locals, they were given a remarkable tale about her:

  The talk veered to a Russian woman of about thirty-five, who, with her little fox-terrier, had stopped briefly at Telegraph Creek the previous fall, and whose mysterious behaviour in shunning everyone there still formed a juicy morsel of gossip among people starved for excitement. Except for her little dog, she seemed utterly friendless.

  Taken together, the rather nebulous bits of description volunteered by our hosts left no doubt as to the woman’s physical charm. She was a small, slender brunette with clear-cut Russian features, nervous hands and jet-black hair coiled beneath the handkerchief she wore, peasant-like, on her head. They thought it doubtful she had come clear from San Francisco, as some said. Yet the bedraggled appearance of her expensive breeches, leather jacket and worn hiking boots certainly pointed to endless miles afoot.

  But what had impressed everybody even more than her startling beauty was the fanatical gleam in her black eyes—a gleam which brooked no fooling.

  After a few days, with winter at hand, she and the dog had silently started north along the Telegraph Trail, leaving a seething mass of rumours behind.

  Some were sure she was a White Russia refugee in a desperate dash to rejoin her husband by crossing over from Alaska. Anyhow, they pointed out, she was headed that way. Others, remembering her constant, furtive glances, were equally certain that she was being pursued by spies. The whole yarn sounded so fantastic that there came times in the telling when we wondered if Telegraph Creek itself were a bit “touched.”1

  Telegraph Creek

  Telegraph Creek, in the territory of the Tahltan First Nation, was established as a major supply centre for the Collins Overland Telegraph. However, the Collins Telegraph was abandoned long before it got that far. The town enjoyed a brief heyday during the 1898 Klondike gold rush, but when it was over, it shrank to a small, quiet village again. It was finally connected via telegraph when the Yukon Telegraph was completed in 1901. Telegraph Creek, in 1928, was a settlement of less than one hundred people comprised of a double row of stores and houses on terraces leading down to the Stikine River. They included a Hudson’s Bay building, Provincial Police station, some guide outfitters and, of course, a Yukon Telegraph office.

  Rumours of marriage in Telegraph Creek

  T.E.E. (Ern) Greenfield, the RCMP officer who assisted Provincial Police Constable George Wyman with Lillian’s arrest in September 1927, later insisted that Lillian made it only as far as Telegraph Creek, where she settled down.

  One year later I received a letter from Lillian Alling at Telegraph Creek thanking me for delaying her a year from meeting her “beloved.” She had reached Telegraph Creek through the Cariboo from Vancouver and had travelled at nights through the Bulkley Valley and Hazelton. Beyond Hazelton she was the guest of the telegraph linemen every forty miles. Finding her beloved had departed from Telegraph Creek, she wrote me that she had fallen in love with a kindly settler there and had married him.2

  But Lillian had not lingered long in Telegraph Creek. She was soon on her way north again, still following the rough trail under the telegraph line. Thirty-eight miles (61 kilometres) beyond Telegraph Creek, she passed by the Shesley Station, and after another 47 miles (75 kilometres) she was at Nahlin. Joe Hicks, the lineman at the Nahlin telegraph cabin, kindly turned it over to her so she could sleep under shelter. Speaking with the Albees two years after Lillian’s visit, he said, “Mighty glad you brought your husband along. I’m sick of getting turned out by lone women just so’s they can sleep in here themselves.”3

  Stories of a Russian Countess

  Dietger Hollmann, an amateur historian who followed Lillian Alling’s trail to the Atlin area in the late autumn of 1970, met with Jim Grant, owner of the Highland Glen Muncho Lodge. Grant told Hollmann that he believed Lillian had been a Russian countess. Hollmann also met old-timer Andy Bailey who, in 1928, had been working the Ruby Creek mine, and Bailey gave Lillian an even loftier title: he was convinced that she was the Russian tsar’s last daughter. Hollmann said that on another of his trips to Atlin he met some prospectors and trappers in their eighties and nineties who spent their summer days sitting in front of their small houses and talking to visitors. Yes, they said, they knew the Russian princess. One of the men even claimed to have exchanged a few words with the petite young woman. “A tough one,” he said.4

  Lillian left Nahlin, and just about 30 miles (48 kilometres) south of Atlin she walked across the O’Donnell River using Nate Murphy’s wooden foot bridge. It was Nate’s wife, Marie, who took two of the few known photographs of Lillian Alling. These photos show a young woman in worn clothes. Atlin author Diane Solie Smith said of the photograph that “it is impossible to look at that old black and white image and doubt that Lillian Alling would reach her destination.”5 Although Marie Murphy was known as a hospitable hostess and kept an extensive diary, she made no mention in it of Lillian visiting the Murphy homestead or of providing her with a meal or a night’s lodging.

  When Lillian left the Murphys, she headed for the picturesque town of Atlin. The Whitehorse Star later reported, “Upon her arrival at Atlin she was in a bad way for footgear, and there she purchased a pair of canvas shoes with rubber soles.”6 Atlin was Lillian’s last stop in British Columbia, but the newspaper does not mention how long she stayed there.

  Having purchased her shoes, Lillian apparently wasted no more time in Atlin. Following the lakeshore and then using the telegraph line to guide her, she crossed the 60th parallel into the Yukon Territory.

  Atlin

  The Atlin gold rush came to the Pine Creek area near glacier-fed, 85-mile-long (137-kilometre) Atlin Lake in 1898 after two miners, Fritz Miller and Kenneth MacLaren, on their way to the Klondike, discovered gold there. It wasn’t long before some ten thousand prospectors and miners were hauling tonnes of supplies over mountains and across the lake to a new settlement on the eastern shore called Atlin. Those first inhabitants of the town survived the harsh winters in tents and rough wooden structures. Initially the strike was believed to be in the Yukon, and it took some time to discover that the border between the Yukon and BC ran north of it. Gradually the number of miners decreased, although the mines in this area are still producing today.

  Tourism began in 1903, when hunters a
nd fishermen arrived from as far away as Europe. Starting in 1917, the MV Tarahne provided lake cruises to the massive Llewellyn Glacier, which is believed to be the main source of the Yukon River. In the early 1920s, when Atlin had become established as an exotic destination for tourists, the White Pass and Yukon Railway built a three-storey inn to cater to them. Unfortunately, tourism decreased during the deprssion years and the population sank to a little more than a hundred.

  In April 1928, the first air mail came to Atlin. T.G. Stephens piloted the Queen of the Yukon, a Ryan monoplane and sister ship to Charles Lindberg’s Spirit of St. Louis, landing it on the frozen lake. Although the residents didn’t realize it at the time, the arrival of this first mail plane meant that soon there would no longer be any mail delivered by dogsled.

  Notes

  (1) Albee, Ruth and Bill. Alaska Challenge. London: Robert Hale Ltd., 1941, page 149.

  (2) Greenfield, T.E.E. Letter to the Province newspaper, May 2, 1973.

  (3) Albee and Albee. Alaska Challenge, page 140.

  (4) Hollmann, Dietger. “Mystery Woman—Der weite Weg der Liliane Alling.” Unpublished manuscript (in German).

  (5) Smith, Diane Solie. “The Legend of Lillian Alling: The Woman Who Walked to Russia,” Atlin Historical Society, 1997, page 11.

  (6) “Mystery Woman Reaches Dawson,” the Whitehorse Star, October 19, 1928.

  Chapter Seven: Tagish to Whitehorse

  It was August 24 when Lillian finally arrived in Tagish, her first stop in the Yukon.1 In the long days of August with a good trail underfoot, by averaging nine hours of walking per day she should have been able to travel the 70 miles (113 kilometres) north from Atlin in just two days. But Winfield Woolf, taking the same route in 1929, indicated that this was actually a very difficult stretch of the trail. “Without any trail at all,” he reported, “I went on to Tagish—climbing over windfalls with logs criss-crossed almost every foot of the way.”2