Lillian Alling

by Susan Smith-Josephy

  Waldhelm: “Then there was the little Dutchwoman, too—they found some of her clothes on the hillside and a letter addressed to someone in Holland, I believe. It was said that the natives got it, but I think it was lost.”

  Ira Rank: “We met her down the Yukon. It was the Trader that brought her as far as St. Michael.”

  Isobel: “What was she doing?”

  Waldhelm: “She was on foot, walking round the country—a regular rag-bag her clothes were by the time she got to Cape Prince of Wales. They had warned her not to go in winter, but she wanted to walk right up the coast—they said she was working as a waitress at Fairbanks, but her home was in Holland.”

  Isobel: “And did they ever find her?”

  Waldhelm: “No, I don’t think anyone quite knew what became of her—I forget—they looked for her body, but they only got the clothes and the letter.”

  Isobel: “And was the letter never delivered?”

  Waldhelm: “No, I think the native lost it, I can’t remember. It’s a hard country, especially for a woman. She ought never to have tried it all alone, but I guess she was a bit queer, too.”2

  Ruth and Bill Albee heard a similar but more far-fetched story of Lillian dying in Alaska when they were teaching school in Cape Prince of Wales in 1934. There they met Charles Levan, a wireless operator for the government3 who also had the job of delivering mail. One day when Levan dropped by to visit the Albees, he told a tale about Lillian:

  Levan: “Ever here [sic] speak of a Russian woman with a dog?”

  Albee: “A stuffed dog? Why she went up the trail just a year ahead of us.”

  Levan: “Well, I’ll be damned! Say, what d’y’ know about that?”

  Albee: “You saw her in Nome?”

  Levan: “Sure did. We all did. Her and her little stuffed dog. You’d have thought ’twas alive, the care she gave that thing. Plenty of talk about her, too. Bound for the Strait, they said, with a crazy notion of somehow getting across to Siberia. Anyhow, last we saw of her she was heading this way across the beach, hauling that stuffed critter in a little cart behind.”

  Albee: “What do you suppose ever became of her?”

  Levan: “Drowned, most likely. An Eskimo found her tracks later at the mouth of a flooded river between Nome and Teller.”

  Bill Albee: “In the silence, he [Levan] settled back, puffing contentedly. Ruth and I could almost see that strange, fascinating Russian still tramping resolutely north with her stuffed dog, so vivid had she become through repeated hearsay. What irony to have lost out finally when almost in sight of her goal! She seemed too real, too alive to have died that way. Could it be that she hadn’t drowned, after all? Strange things happened in the North. Perhaps some oomiak [a Native skin boat] had just come along and picked her up at the mouth of the river … If so, might she not have reached Siberia in the end? How we should like to know! The chances are we never shall.”4

  The author most firmly planted in the camp of those who believed Lillian had drowned in Alaskan waters was J. Irving Reed, who wrote an article in 1942 entitled “Did She Reach Siberia?” In this article, published in Alaska Life magazine, he claims to have met Lillian in 1929 as she was pulling a cart along the highway just outside of Nome. He told her that she was on the wrong road for the Seward Peninsula and offered her a ride. He tied her cart to the back of his car and put her two bundles, which weighed altogether about forty pounds (eighteen kilograms), on the seat beside her. Then, noticing that her cart’s wheel was broken, Reed drove to a machine shop to get the wheel fixed. While they waited for the repairs, they sat in the car and chatted. Reed said, “I believe in our one-hour conversation there outside the machine shop, she told me more than she had anyone else at Nome. She gave her name as Mrs. Lillian Alling.”5 Once Lillian’s cart was fixed, Reed wrote, Lillian continued on her way.

  He concluded his article by stating that he made many inquiries and they all led him to believe that Lillian never made it to Prince of Wales Cape. He stated that her cart was found abandoned at the Sinuk River, 20 miles (32 kilometres) north of Nome. Furthermore, he explained:

  Last summer I was told that her clothes and supplies were found by Eskimos at the so-called “mouth” of the Tisuk River, fifty miles further along the coast. This is a narrow estuary opening into the Bering Sea and blocking her way. Though this strip of water is narrow, it is very swift and deep. It is the outlet of a large lagoon into which empty the Tisuk and two or three other rivers. Facing her on the western shore of this estuary was an old, abandoned roadhouse. Evidently Lillian Alling stripped to her underclothes and attempted to swim across. She probably hoped to find a boat at the old roadhouse and to return in it for her clothes and supplies. Undoubtedly she was caught in the swift current and carried out to sea.

  She took a chance, as many other travelers had done before her, and lost. It is rumored that in Gold Rush days others were drowned at this same place.6

  Although the author of this article was listed as J. Irving Reed, he was probably Irving McKenny Reed since his credits state he was a mining engineer and that was also the occupation of lifelong Alaska resident Irving McKenny Reed. In addition, the photo of J. Irving Reed that accompanies the article matches in appearance and stance a photo of Irving McKenny Reed (1889–1968), who married Eleanor Doris Stoy, a prolific writer and artist, in 1923. They made their home in Fairbanks, Alaska, for the remainder of their lives.7

  I had a number of doubts about Reed’s Alaska Life article. First, in October 1929 Eleanor Reed had interviewed Winfield Woolf, a young adventurer who had hiked the same route from Hazelton to Dawson that Lillian Alling had travelled but who had arrived in Dawson a year later than she did. Then, although the RCMP attempted to detain him there for the winter of 1929–30, he had walked from Dawson to Fairbanks, suffering a severe case of frostbitten feet, and he was in the Fairbanks hospital recovering when Eleanor interviewed him. This interview became the basis for her story “I Walked Empty Handed,” which I found in the Reed Family Papers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. It is apparent from it that Eleanor Reed did not discuss Lillian’s journey with Woolf. Perhaps she was unaware of it at the time of the interview, even though Lillian had arrived in Nome just two months earlier, but it is strange that her husband could have had his interesting chat with Lillian on the road outside Nome without telling Eleanor about the encounter.

  The Rescue of the Nanuk

  In the fall of 1929, Alaskan trader Olaf Swenson piloted his ship, the Nanuk, to his other ship, the Elisif, which had been icebound in the Arctic for several months. On the way back the Nanuk also got jammed in the ice off North Cape. As Swenson had his family on board plus a large quantity of valuable furs, he radioed for assistance, and it was arranged that the noted explorer and Arctic flyer Carl Ben Eielson would rescue the crew members and fly out the furs. The first round trip to the Nanuk and back to Alaska was successful. On the second flight on November 9, 1929, Eielson and his mechanic, Frank Borland, flew into a bad storm over the Siberian coast and disappeared. Local villagers heard the plane crash but did not see it.8

  Diplomatic relations were tense between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1929, but when the Americans asked the Soviets for help locating the downed pilots, the Soviets sent out dog teams and launched planes from Kamchatka.9 The plane was not found until January 24, 1930. A faulty altimeter was probably a contributing factor to the accident as the plane had crashed into the ground with its throttle wide open.

  Second, also in the Reed Family Papers is a copy of a letter Eleanor wrote in March 1939 to the RCMP in Dawson seeking information on the early part of Lillian’s journey—information that had been freely available in newspapers across the north while Lillian was en route. In addition, the Reed Family collection includes a letter dated April 23, 1939, from Eleanor to the editor of the Alaska Sportsman concerning a story that she was writing for them about Lillian Alling, as well as an undated draft of that story written by Eleanor. It forms the basis of t
he article that ended up in Alaska Life in 1942 under Irving Reed’s byline. Finally, the collection contains a copy of a letter in which Eleanor and Irving Reed are attempting to get hold of the November 1941 issue of True Magazine that contained the story on Lillian Alling.

  However, if Irving Reed had actually met Lillian on the road outside Nome in 1929, I feel sure that Eleanor would have mentioned this in her correspondence with the RCMP and in her letter to the editor of the Alaska Sportman. In fact, if he actually sat chatting with Lillian in his car as he stated in his Alaska Life article and she really told him “more than she had anyone else at Nome,” there would have been no need for all this research and the Reeds would not have waited fourteen years to publish the story. I am convinced that Irving Reed learned of Lillian’s journey from local legend, articles in BC newspapers and information taken from the books written by Isobel Hutchinson and the Albees as well as the 1941 True Magazine article, and he then embellished it with elements from Woolf’s story and a great deal of fiction.

  Three Alaskan tales, all second-hand or based on hearsay, all telling of Lillian possibly drowning just before she could cross the strait. But did she really succumb to the elements, so close to the end of her journey? She faced obstacles with determination and resilience, and I believe she reached Siberia against the odds.

  Notes

  (1) Hoyle, Gwyneth. Flowers in the Snow: The Life of Isobel Wylie Hutchison. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001, page 110.

  (2) Hutchison, Isobel Wylie. North to the Rime-Ringed Sun. An Alaskan Journey. New York: Hillman-Curl Inc., 1937, page 100.

  (3) US Census 1930.

  (4) Albee, Ruth and Bill. Alaska Challenge. London: Robert Hale Ltd., 1941, pages 238–239.

  (5) Reed, J. Irving. “Did She Reach Siberia?” Alaska Life, June 1942.

  (6) Ibid.

  (7) Elmer E. Rasmuson & BioSciences Libraries University of Alaska, Fairbanks Rasmuson Library, online database.

  (8) Hunt, William R. Arctic Passage. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975, page 294.

  (9) Email correspondence, Blitz Information Russia, April 23, 2009.

  Chapter Twelve: Prince of Wales to Siberia

  The village of Prince of Wales, more generally known as just Wales, is located on the tip of the Seward Peninsula, 111 miles (178 kilometres) northwest of Nome. It has been the home of Inupiat Eskimos for thousands of years, and until the influenza epidemic of 1918–19 killed a large proportion of the population, it had been a major centre for whaling due to its strategic location on the animals’ migratory route. By 1929, the economy was based mainly on subsistence hunting, fishing and trapping. Ales Hrdlicka, the Smithsonian anthropologist, visited the small settlement of Wales a few years after Lillian’s journey. His diary notes,

  Wales is a straggly village, or rather two villages, located on a large, flat, sandy spit, dotted with water pools and projecting from the Seward Peninsula toward Asia … From the hills above it, the natives assure, one can see on a clear day the East Cape of Asia.1

  The Seward Peninsula was once part of the Bering land bridge, a thousand-mile-wide swath of land that connected Siberia with mainland Alaska during the last ice age, which ended about 11,700 years ago. It provided an entryway for plants, animals and humans to migrate from Asia to North America. After the ice melted and the waters rose again, the bridge disappeared beneath a shallow sea that was just 52 miles (84 kilometres) wide at its narrowest point between the continents. Cape Prince of Wales on the Seward Peninsula is the closest point on the Alaskan mainland to the mainland of Russia. Opposite it sits Cape Dezhnev or East Cape in the Soviet province of Chukotka. The Chukchi people who live there have traditionally made their living by fishing and hunting, and they traded with people from other regions in the Soviet Union and with the American mariners and traders who plied their trade in the Bering Strait.

  In spite of strained relations between the US and the Soviet Union in 1929, the Native people of both countries still travelled regularly across the strait each year from June through November—when the water is usually ice-free—in order to trade and buy supplies. This traffic was either ignored or undetected by authorities on either side of the strait. In winter, groups from each side of the Bering Strait would would travel by dogsled, meeting off the Diomede Islands, which lie between the two countries, and camping on the ice. Little Diomede Island belongs to the US, while Big Diomede is part of the Soviet Union; the international dateline runs between them.

  The boats used by the Native people on both sides of the strait were called umiaqs (or oomiaqs or umiaks), walrus-hide boats that were specifically constructed to handle the waters of the Bering Sea. Ruth and Bill Albee, who taught in Wales, Alaska, in 1934, gave a good description of the local boats in an article they wrote for Practical Mechanics in 1938:

  In developing the oomiak, these Eskimos faced the problem of designing a boat for hunting walrus and whales in the stormy waters of Bering Strait with its crushing ice floes and treacherous currents. Since whales often weigh as much as fifty tons and walrus from 2,000 to 3,000 pounds each, they must be hunted by large crews. The boat must be capable of transporting eight to ten men, surviving heavy weather and bringing home the catch.

  The oomiak is dory-shaped for seaworthiness, and from twenty-five to forty feet long. The frame is of light driftwood spruce, each piece carved to shape and the pieces lashed together with rawhide thongs … Each oomiak is equipped with oars, paddles, mast and sail, and usually an outboard motor. The oars are used for long pulls, should the motor fail; the paddles for fast work amid ice floes; the sail to take advantage of favorable winds. Caught far out at sea, with a whale in tow, the crew may utilize motor, sail and oars simultaneously. We found no record of any oomiak crew at Cape Prince of Wales having been lost at sea.2

  In his book Arctic Trader, published in 1957, the well-known Alaska trader Charlie Madsen explained how Native people on both sides of the strait were happy to purchase motors from him:

  When improved models replaced the earlier motors, I was able to barter quite a few outboards to natives along the Arctic Coast, at the Diomedes and King Islands, and Cape Prince of Wales. It became the custom for a number of Eskimos of King Island, the Diomedes and Cape Prince of Wales to unload their families, dogs, cooking utensils and food into umiaks equipped with outboards and sail to Nome for the summer, where they set up shelters outside the town … [These motors] were accepted with wholehearted enthusiasm by Chukchis and Eskimos not only for long journeys but likewise in their hunts for seals, sea lions and whales.3

  However, it was not just the Native people who crossed back and forth between the two continents. Many Alaskan merchant ship owners, such as Charlie Madsen and Olaf Swenson with his ships, the Nanuk and the Elisif, were also regular visitors to the Siberian side to trade western goods for furs with the Chukchi people. As well, some of the North Americans who traded in Siberia moved there and lived with Chukchi women, thereby cementing relationships with the Russian people. Thus, although the Albees’ postman had dubbed Lillian’s plan to seek passage across the strait “a crazy notion,” it was not crazy at all. It was, in fact, quite reasonable for her to expect to travel to Siberia with Chukchi traders who were returning home from a trip to Alaska, or with Inupiat people from Alaska as they travelled to the Soviet Union. Alternatively, she could have hitched a ride with an American trader on a regular trip to the Diomedes and gone from there with Chukchi people to East Cape in Siberia.

  The term Siberia is neither a political delineation nor an economic one. It is geographic and cultural, and usually means the area of the Soviet Union east of the Ural Mountains, continuing all the way to the Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea. It has diverse climates, cultures, peoples, languages, economies and ecologies. The remote Siberian villages in the Soviet province of Chukotka where Lillian would have landed relied on hunting, fishing and trading to survive. During poor fishing or hunting years, it was human against nature, and nature
inevitably won. As a result, in the 1920s, the Soviet government set up a series of trading posts, which assisted with supplying both food and community connections and also provided control over the lives of the people in this area.

  The Chukotka population was not literate in the late 1920s because the Chukchi did not have a written language; this did not begin to change until 1931 when the Soviet government implemented education in both Russian and Chukchi. As a result, in 1929 there were no newspapers in Chukotka,4 although one paper from neighbouring Kamchatka, Poliarnaia zvezda (North Star), an organ of the Kamchatka District Bureau of the Communist Party, District Executive Committee and District Professional Union, was distributed there. However, my checks on its contents revealed nothing about Lillian or news of any foreigner landing on Siberian shores between September and December 1929.5 I have also been unable to find any oral accounts as the region was sparsely populated, and the population later dispersed due to starvation. I could also find no official documents referring to her nor any other trace of her in Russian archives. In fact, I discovered that it is extremely difficult to get any information about the history of the Siberian coast in 1929.