Lillian Alling

by Susan Smith-Josephy

  (6) Hutchison, Isobel Wylie. North to the Rime-Ringed Sun. An Alaskan Journey. New York: Hillman-Curl Inc., 1937, page 24.

  (7) Letter from Clifford Thompson to Candy Evans.

  (8) “A Hazardous Trip.”

  (9) Ibid.

  (10) Gillespie. “The Girl Who Walked the Telegraph Trail.”

  (11) Anglican Church, Diocese of Yukon fonds, Yukon Archives, Whitehorse COR 252 f. 11b.

  (12) Ibid.

  (13) Ibid.

  (14) Email correspondence, Lawrence Millman, January 13, 2011.

  (15) Millman, Lawrence. “Chasing Yukon’s Mystery Woman,” Yukon News, December 10, 2007.

  (16) Albee, Ruth and Bill. Alaska Challenge. London: Robert Hale Ltd., 1941, page 172.

  (17) Gillespie. “The Girl Who Walked the Telegraph Trail.”

  (18) Berton, Laura Beatrice. I Married the Klondike. Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2006. Originally published: McClelland & Stewart, 1961.

  (19) Gillespie. “The Girl Who Walked the Telegraph Trail.”

  (20) “Dawson’s Mystery Woman Leaves for Down River,” Dawson News, May 21, 1929.

  Chapter Ten: Floating Down to Nome

  I can only imagine the exhilaration Lillian must have felt at being once more on her way. She was now on the final leg of her North American journey with just 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometres) of the Yukon River between herself and the sea. But to reach that goal, she knew she first had to cross the border into Alaska without being observed by US Customs authorities because she had no papers to legitimize her presence in the United States. Given that she had been forbidden entry into the US at Hyder just a year earlier, she must have been quite nervous as she set off. And it seems pretty definite that she did not check in at the US Customs office at Eagle, Alaska, just west of the international boundary line: my inquiries to the US Department of Labor, which holds Customs records, and with Ancestry revealed no record of anyone named Lillian Alling crossing at this point.

  The river is wide here with a long island in the middle, and it would have been fairly easy for her to slip by, not stopping, perhaps under the cover of darkness, although darkness is scarce in that part of Alaska in mid-May. There are eighteen hours of full daylight followed by a long dusk and a couple of hours of night before the sky begins to lighten again. But, of course, her little skiff was not the only boat on the river, and that also provided her with some cover. Breakup was the signal for hundreds of vessels of every size to be pushed down the river’s banks and into the water. The largest of these were the sternwheelers, averaging 125 feet in length and about 30 feet in width (38 x 9 metres), and although their numbers had declined from a high of two hundred boats in the gold rush days, even during the 1920s and 1930s the British Yukon Navigation Company was still operating six to ten of them on the river during the busy sixteen-week open-water season.1 These flat-bottomed, shallow-draft ships were ideal for work on the Yukon, which flows at a speed of eight miles per hour (13 km/h) after breakup and slows to about five miles per hour (8 km/h) later in the season. Whenever hailed, the sternwheelers stopped at the many settlements, hamlets and individual cabins dotting the shoreline, dwellings that reflected the stories of both Native life here and those whites who had stayed on after the gold rush and come to terms with the isolation of the north.

  In her book North to the Rime-Ringed Sun, published in 1937, Isobel Wylie Hutchison, an amateur botanist from Scotland, described her own experience floating down from Dawson City and crossing the border in 1932.

  We slipped silently off downriver, past the hospital, past the Indian village of Moosehide, through the pine-clad mountain gorges (the scenery beyond Dawson, where the river narrows between steep heights, is very fine) to our rendezvous at the bleak hour of 1 a.m. with the United States custom authorities at Eagle, fourteen miles beyond the international boundary. This boundary between the Yukon territory and Alaska, defined by William Ogilvie, first governor of the Yukon, and recently carefully redetermined, consists, at the point of intersection, of a broad belt cut through the timber which stretches over the hillsides to the far-off limit of the tree line.2

  Eagle, Alaska

  The first structure in Eagle, Alaska, was a trading post that was built beside the Yukon River in 1874, but by the end of the century the settlement had become the supply and trading centre for miners working the upper Yukon and its tributaries. By that time its population exceeded 1,700 people and it was incorporated as a city in 1901. The US Army also built a post here in 1900 but abandoned it eleven years later. A telegraph line between Eagle and Valdez, Alaska, was completed in 1903, and it was from Eagle’s telegraph station that Roald Amundsen announced his successful transit of the Northwest Passage on December 5, 1905. By 1910, Eagle’s population had declined to fewer than two hundred people and it has never exceeded that number since then.

  When Lillian passed by in mid-May 1929, Eagle consisted of a few stores, some log cabins, a church and a tall wireless mast.

  Lillian had left Dawson a few days before May 21. After a winter of little physical activity to keep up her muscle strength, she must have been relieved that there was no need to row her little craft, because at this time of year the river’s flow would be carrying her downstream at a steady six or seven miles per hour (9–11 km/h). During these long days of early summer she could have stayed on the river until midnight if she wished, then gone ashore to sleep for a few hours and find something to eat, but this does not seem to have been the case. The American anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka, who was on a collecting expedition for the Smithsonian Institution in the summer of 1929, often heard of a “lone white woman” travelling just a few days ahead of him. He also reported that she “stops at cabins for sleep and food.”3 Apparently, she was going downriver no faster than he was, and his job was to spend the entire summer stopping at points along the river to investigate the country and the people. Author Colin Angus, using a craft similar to the one Lillian used, with no mechanical propulsion whatsoever, was able to travel over 900 miles (1,500 kilometres) down the river from Dawson—that is, almost three-quarters of the distance to Nome—in just ten days.4 It becomes obvious that Lillian, for reasons of her own, was travelling at a casual speed, often stopping for long periods of time to camp and rest onshore.

  The Yanert Brothers

  Among the cabins lining the Yukon River on the US side was that of the Yanert brothers—William, who had arrived in 1901 and built the cabin he called “Purgatory,” and Herman, who joined him nine years later.5 In the 1930 census Herman gave his occupation as trapper, but he had worked in the United States as a soldier and cartographer before coming to Alaska.6 Both men had been trained as carvers in their native Poland, and their cabin, which was full of their carvings, was also flanked by two totem poles they had created. However, they were most noted for the large wooden sculptures with moveable parts that they installed along the riverbank. One was a devil with movable arms and a movable lower jaw, and whenever they spotted a boat coming down the river, they brought their devil to life using wires controlled from the cabin.

  The American anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka, who met the Yanerts on June 20, 1929, described the working of this creation:

  When the boat arrives, one of the brothers from the house pulls the wires, the “devil” opens and closes its jaws, and works up and down the hand with the pitchfork. All of which, with the real gruesomeness of the figure, must produce quite an impression. All this the fruit of lonesomeness of two solitary intelligent people, and of all the “hell” they have endured.7

  Hrdlicka’s job on his Smithsonian expedition was mainly to take photos, make notes and collect artifacts. Fortunately, he also kept a diary in which he recorded the weather, the travelling conditions and the people he met. In late June he reported:

  Since the middle of the month there are no more any real nights. The sun—when the sky is clear enough—shines to near midnight, or there is at least the reflection of its light, and then follows only a
moderate dusk, which soon begins to grow slowly into another daylight. Late on such evenings, when the air is peaceful, slight mists rise from the water, the dark banks and islands mirror in the glazed expanses of the stream, and the whole nature seems dozing—just a light doze, no real sleep.8

  Hrdlicka’s diary entry for July 3 notes that the white woman who was travelling ahead of him was using

  [A] boat with a queer wheel contraption … but is secretive. Says she is bound for Siberia. Is Polish or Russian. “Broke” into Williams’ house and stayed there overnight but did not take anything. Everybody speculates about her strange proceedings, but those who spoke to her say she is not insane. “Writes novels,” or “perhaps a criminal.”9

  From Hrdlicka’s description, her boat appears to have acquired some kind of mechanism that it did not have when she arrived in Dawson the previous fall, but perhaps someone had showed her how to set up one of her oars as a rudder, allowing her to face forward while she steered. A more curious aspect of his diary entry is the fact that the Williams he mentions lived six miles from Galena, which is situated at the “Merry Widow Bend” of the river. This means that, by early July when she had already been on the river for about forty-five days, Lillian had only travelled about 845 miles (1,360 kilometres), or just two-thirds of the way from Dawson City to the sea. With this information I began asking myself why she was not taking full advantage of the short summer to reach Nome as quickly as possible. Had she changed her mind about going to Siberia? Was she unwell? Or had the terrors of her trip by raft and skiff from the Stewart River to Dawson City the previous fall left her with such a fear of the river that she only embarked for short distances before tying up for days at a time?

  After the Alaskan settlement of Mountain Village, the Yukon River splits into many channels, sprawling into the marshy land across the wide delta. The water here remains fresh due to the high volume pouring down the river, and the delta gets no swells from the ocean because the Bering Sea remains shallow as far as 10 miles (16 kilometres) out, and this prevents any of the really large waves from reaching the shore.10 However, the rise and fall of the tide can cause serious problems for someone not used to tides, and that is apparently what happened to Lillian.

  The Nome Nugget, catching up with her adventures in late August, reported to its readers that she had lost her boat and been forced to find another way to continue on to Nome.

  …upon arriving at the mouth of the mighty Yukon, the lady pulled the nose of her boat up on the beach while she prepared herself something to eat. In the meantime the tide came in and the boat floated out to sea and was never seen again. This caused the lady to walk back to Kotlik where she arranged to come to Nome on Ira Rank’s boat. It appears that she is headed for Siberia via Cape Prince of Wales.11

  The newspaper does not explain how far Lillian walked from the point where she lost her boat to the village of Kotlik or how long she waited there for transportation to Nome, but from her rate of travel earlier in the summer it is likely that she had arrived at the river’s mouth by the end of July. Kotlik lies on the east bank of the Kotlik Slough at the mouth of the Yukon, but because the channel on which it is situated is somewhat deeper and wider than the neighbouring channels, historically it has provided easy access for large riverboats and barges. As a result, it became one of the primary commercial and trading centres of the lower river. One of the traders who called in at this port was Ira Mahon Rank, a well-respected merchant—originally from Ohio—who also operated a ship named the Trader with which he transported goods and passengers from place to place along the shores of the Bering Strait.12 Rank did not actually take Lillian to Nome as that city’s harbour could not accommodate boats as large as the Trader. Instead he took her to St. Michael, a small island near Nome, which was used to dock the larger boats.

  Nome, Alaska

  Nome, situated on Norton Sound on the shores of the Bering Sea, was established after gold was discovered on nearby Anvil Creek in 1898. Within a year 10,000 prospectors and miners were living in a tent city along this treeless coastline. The city itself was founded in 1901, but the origin of its name is unclear. One story says that the hydrographic office of Britain’s Royal Navy couldn’t find a name for the nearby cape and the cartographer wrote the word “Name?” on the map. Later an engraver mistook that for “Nome.”13 The name may also have been given by the town’s founder, Jafet Lindeberg, in honour of the Nome Valley in his native Norway.

  Although placer gold mining has remained the leading economic activity in this area, by 1910 the population of the town had shrunk to 2,600 people. It suffered a destructive fire in 1905 and ruinous storms in 1900 and 1913, but botanist Isobel Wylie Hutchison, who visited the city in 1932, explained its subsequent state of disrepair:

  The glacial subsoil causes much shifting of the frame buildings which constitute most of the “city,” giving to present-day Nome its somewhat dilapidated appearance. Most of the houses are built of wood, and the street and sidewalks are planked.14

  The only access to Nome in the 1920s and 1930s was, as now, by boat or plane.

  Even before Lillian arrived in Nome, she was expected there and people were curious about her, and on August 31 the Nome Nugget reported that she had finally made it to town.

  The “mystery woman” from Dawson arrived at Nome on the motorship Trader. It will be recalled by Nugget readers that we printed an article a few weeks ago that the lady was marooned in Dawson last winter and planned to come downriver to Nome this summer. It was learned that she obtained a small row boat and started out from Dawson.15

  This short newspaper article is the last documentation of Lillian’s time in Nome that I was able to find. This did not surprise me as she was in Alaska illegally, and although she had taken an inordinate amount of time to travel the Yukon River and make her way to Nome, she must have been in a rush now to leave before sea ice would make a boat trip across the Bering Strait impossible. It was already the beginning of September and daytime temperatures at this latitude drop below freezing by mid-October, remaining there until mid-April. The Smithsonian anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka, observing the people along the river making preparations for freeze-up, wrote in his diary:

  The summer season on the Yukon [River] is nearing its end. This means that soon there will be frosts, that transportation, what little there is of it, will be on “its last legs,” and that everybody who can will now endeavour to get out, which is not always easy or even possible.16

  Once the ice began to form, all maritime traffic would cease.

  Notes

  (1) McCandless, Rob. “Sternwheelers, Steamboats, Paddlewheelers,” The Original Lost Whole Moose Catalogue, 1979.

  (2) Hutchison, Isobel Wylie. North to the Rime-Ringed Sun. An Alaskan Journey. New York: Hillman-Curl Inc., 1937, page 61.

  (3) Ibid.

  (4) Angus, Colin. Beyond the Horizon. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2007.

  (5) Ibid., pages 65–66.

  (6) Eley, Thom. “Sergeant William Yanert, Cartographer from Hell.” In the Geographical Review, Vol. 92, 2002, page 1.

  (7) Hrdlicka, Ales, Alaska Diary 1926–1931. Lancaster, Pennsylvania: The Jaques Cattel Press, 1944, page 169.

  (8) Hrdlicka. Alaska Diary, page 177.

  (9) Ales Hrdlicka papers, Box 169, Folder 2, labelled MJ9.56, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

  (10) Angus. Beyond the Horizon. Colin Angus tells how ten days after leaving Dawson, they had gone 1,500 kilometres. Angus and Harvey, as was the point of their trip, used no mechanical propulsion, so their speed would have been similar to that of Lillian.

  (11) Nome Nugget, August 31, 1929.

  (12) Ira M. Rank was enumerated for the 1930 US census on October 2, 1929, just a month after Lillian left for Siberia. It showed he was male, white, single and born in Ohio, with both parents from Pennsylvania, and that he was a merchant. Ira Mahon Rank was listed on the 1920 census as being fifty-two years old, married and the proprietor of
a grocery store.

  (13) Hunt, William R. Arctic Passage. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975, pages 188–189.

  (14) Hutchison. North to the Rime-Ringed Sun, page 83.

  (15) Nome Nugget, August 31, 1929.

  (16) Hrdlicka. Alaska Diary, page 252.

  Chapter Eleven: The Final Walk

  The Swenson Fur Trading Company’s motorship Nanuk frozen in the ice near North Cape, Siberia, in the winter of 1929. Associated Press

  After leaving Nome at the beginning of September 1929, Lillian began walking toward the small Alaskan village of Cape Prince of Wales, the westernmost point on the Seward Peninsula, where she apparently planned to hire someone to take her the 52 miles (84 kilometres) across the Bering Strait to Siberia. Unfortunately, I could find no further coverage of her journey in the Alaska newspapers once she left the Nome area—no travel progress reports, no death notice, no obituary—perhaps because no one passed along news of further sightings. And within a very short time other news had become more important, including the instability leading up to the Wall Street stock market crash of October 1929 and, closer to home, the attempt to rescue the ship Nanuk and the subsequent loss of one of Alaska’s premier pilots and his mechanic, which made local, national and international news that fall and winter.

  What happened to Lillian Alling after she set out to walk to the Cape from Nome, Alaska, has been the source of much speculation. But I discovered that there are just two possibilities: either she drowned in Alaskan waters or she made it safely across the Bering Strait to Siberia.

  Isobel Wylie Hutchison arrived in Nome in 1932, three years after Lillian was there, and hired Ira Rank, who had transported Lillian to Nome on the Trader, to take her on a botanical expedition. There were strong winds on their first night out of Nome, and Rank tied up the Trader in a bay behind Cape Prince of Wales where two miners, Arthur McLain and George Waldhelm, were operating “America’s only tin mine.” The miners were happy to share their food and entertain their guests with stories of the north.1 One of Waldhelm’s tales was about a woman who was walking alone with the intention of travelling across the strait to Siberia. Though the miners incorrectly identified her nationality as Dutch and thought she had been working in Fairbanks as a waitress, it is likely that the woman they discussed was Lillian Alling. Hutchison transcribed their conversation as she remembered it in her memoir, North to the Rime-Ringed Sun, published in 1937: