Lillian Alling (12 page)
The police were well aware that travellers in the north, especially lone hikers, could easily get into serious trouble if they were not warned of or prepared for the harshness of the winters. In Lillian's case, the Dawson detachment had likely been told she was on her way and had already decided to detain her in town until the spring.
After she checked in with the police, said the
Dawson News
, “she stepped into the City Café on Second Avenue, owned by Adam Rystogi, where she enjoyed her first meal in the gold metropolis.”
8
The
News
also recounted Lillian's method of travel, the distance she had covered, her overall condition, where she slept and what she ate. Even her clothes were a subject of great interest.
Garbed in a pair of brown khaki overalls, a badly torn black coat, with a man's heavy rubber boot strapped on one foot and a galosh on the other, the whole outfit topped off with a faded brown hat, the quaint figure of the daring woman could not be mistaken.
9
As Lillian was prohibited from travelling any farther, she needed a job to replenish her wardrobe and support herself until the spring melt came. Archie Gillespie told the
Yukon News
in July 1965 that one of Lillian's jobs that winter was at the Fournier Dairy and Roadhouse:
As it happened she was able to get a job cooking at a dairy ranch some fifteen miles up the Klondike River from Dawson. The old-timer who ran the dairy, Archie Fournier, needed a cook for the winter, and when he heard of the plucky girl's predicament, he kindly offered her the job for the winter. Lillian Alling was very happy to get the cooking job. She had done this kind of work before so the job posed no problem for her. By accepting this job for the winter she was assured of a warm home, plenty to eat and, besides, she would be able to save most of her wages for the fresh start on her journey the following summer.
10
But Lillian's employment with Fournier seems to have been short-lived and only one of several jobs she held that fall. By December she was working at St. Paul's Hostel in some domestic capacity. A letter from Charles F. Johnson, the principal there, to Bishop Isaac O. Stringer early in 1929 gives one of the most detailed first-hand impressions of Lillian's personality on record.
January 5th 1929
My Dear Bishop,
We have with us what is known as the “mystery woman.” She is a Polish peasant woman who walked all the way from Telegraph Creek to Dawson, arriving here just as winter was setting in. She tried working in several places but people soon got rid of her as she is not much use. We took her in and gave her a home and thought that we might be able to straighten her up and polish the rough corners off her a bit but it is an uphill job. She is uncouth, proud and ignorant and of uncertain temper and there is very little she can do. However, she irons and sews after a fashion so that she earns her board. Every little bit that she does is a real help and relieves the others just that much.
11
St. Paul's Hostel was a residence established by Anglican Diocesan Bishop Isaac O. Stringer in 1920 in order that children from the outlying areas could attend the combined elementary and secondary school that had been established in Dawson City in 1900. Most of the boarders at St. Paul's were the children of mixed parentage, the fathers usually white, so they were “non-status” and therefore not eligible to attend the residential schools in the area. The hostel received no government funding. Instead, support came from St. Paul's Anglican Church in Dawson City (established in 1897 to address the religious needs of the gold miners), missionary societies and local businesses (especially the Bank of Commerce). Parents who could afford to pay also contributed twenty-five dollars per month for each child. The hostel operated at first in a remodelled private home, but in 1923 it was moved to the former Samaritan's Hospital. Both the school and St. Paul's Hostel were closed June in 1952.
While Johnson's letter sheds light on Lillian's general temperament, it also demonstrates how difficult it was for this socially awkward, reclusive woman to spend her winter in Dawson cooped up with other people. Perhaps in some ways this captivity was as difficult as the physical ordeals she had already suffered on her journey. She had been used to dropping into a settlement in the wilds for a few hours to eat and buy supplies. Here, she had to see the same people every day and form relationships with them.
Johnson's correspondence with the bishop indicates his constant worry over funding and staffing,
12
so while he probably kept Lillian on at St. Paul's Hostel for charitable reasons, it is also possible that a shortage of staff made employing her quite necessary. And although he pointed out the inadequacy of the work she performed, he still felt it merited payment. On March 25 he wrote to the bishop to say,
We still have the so-called mystery woman with us, and while she is not much good, she does a certain amount and thereby relieves the others. Don't you think it would be only fair and just if I gave her a check for fifty dollars when she leaves here?
On April 17, less than a month later, Johnson reported that Lillian and St. Paul's Hostel had parted ways.
We are all well here and the work is going on as much as usual. I had to get rid of the mystery woman. The girls got on her nerves and she “ran amuck” amongst them, so I had no choice in the matter. I am disappointed in her, we had hoped to be of some help to her but she would not respond to anything we tried to do for her.
13
Alex Van Bibber, who was living at St. Paul's Hostel at that time, recalled that the children had made fun of Lillian's accent.
14
Lawrence Millman,who wrote a story for the
Yukon News
in December 2007, also tracked down a ninety-five-year-old nun who had worked with Lillian at St. Paul's. Sister Anne-Marie told Millman that Lillian had stolen sugar from the pantry. The nun didn't know why she wanted the sugar, but she did tell Millman she thought Lillian was “a troubled soul.”
15
Ruth and Bill Albee, who travelled north two years after Lillian and who had followed in her footsteps since Telegraph Creek, found that the people in Dawson City were still fascinated by Lillian, but once again the stories they recounted held more fiction than fact:
We found people talking about a mysterious Russian woman whose appearance among them carrying a stuffed fox terrier under her arm had caused much comment two winters before. Were Red spies really after her? Was that why she had tried to keep out of sight, washing dishes all winter in a secluded mining camp?
16
But former
Dawson News
reporter Archie Gillespie had good memories of Lillian. In 1965 he wrote:
During that winter in Dawson she was able to pick up quite a bit of the English language and she made a number of friends who were astonished at her courage and determination.
17
*
After a long winter, the breakup of the Yukon River is a magnificent sight. Everyone anticipates the sounds of ice pans cracking and the water flowing, and the whole town makes bets on the exact hour and minute that the breakup will occur. In her book
I Married the Klondike,
Laura Berton describes the scene:
The sight of the ice moving was a spectacular one. The great cakes, three to eight feet thick, roared down the river, smashing and grinding against each other with the noise of a dozen express trains. Often entire cakes would be hurled into the air until the banks on both sides of the river were piled with them, sometimes to the height of fifty feet. Occasionally, caribou could be seen clinging to the ice blocks as they swept by, or floundering in the water between them. Uprooted trees and the odd empty boat jammed into the ice would go sailing past the town.
18
In 1929 the ice broke up in the Yukon River in mid-May. Lillian wasted no more time in Dawson. She had put in her time there, she had survived being cooped up all winter, and she wanted to be on her way as soon as she could. She had no second thoughts about continuing her journey and no hesitation. Archie Gillespie describes her parting:
After the river cleared and navigation got under way for another season, she was again on her way, still deeper into the north. Only, on this occasion she was much more warmly dressed and much better prepared.
19
The
Dawson News
told of Lillian's departure in their issue dated May 21, 1929:
The boat has been lying off the river bank all winter and this was her means of departure. She gave it out before departing that she was going to Nome and across to Siberia.
20
She was alone again and on her way down the broad Yukon River toward Alaska.
Â
- (1)
“Mystery Woman Reaches Dawson,” the
Whitehorse Star
, October 19, 1928. - (2)
“A Hazardous Trip: Walked Every Step of Way Hazelton to Stewart Crossing,”
Dawson News,
October 6, 1928. - (3)
Gillespie, Archie. “The Girl Who Walked the Telegraph Trail,”
Yukon News,
July 28, 1965. - (4)
Letter from Clifford Thompson to Candy Evans, Research Librarian at the Dawson Museum and Historical Society, August 2, 1989. - (5)
Coates, Ken S. and William R. Morrison.
Land of the Midnight Sun
. Edmonton, AB: Hurtig Publishers Ltd., 1988, page 203. - (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.
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.