Lillian Alling (14 page)
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 areaâno travel progress reports, no death notice, no obituaryâperhaps 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:
Waldhelm: “Then there was the little Dutchwoman, tooâthey 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 countryâa 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 coastâthey 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 herâI forgetâthey 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 government
3
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 (1889â1968), 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 1929â30, 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.
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 journeyâinformation 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 the 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.
Â
- (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 238â239. - (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.