Lillian Alling (3 page)

Next I asked myself why Lillian Alling decided to go home to Poland and why she set out in 1926. To none of the people she met on her travels did she ever give the reason why she wanted to go home through Siberia. In fact, she never gave a reason why she wanted to go home at all.

Improvements in the economic situation in Poland may have influenced her decision to return. It has been estimated that between one-quarter and one-third of all immigrants from Poland who entered Canada in the early twentieth century returned to Poland either before 1914 or after the war was over in 1918.
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Those who returned after World War I did so in the hope that their newly independent republic would provide a brighter economic future, but those returning directly after the armistice were disappointed because war with Russia continued until the end of 1920, and political instability remained until 1926 when Marshal Pilsudski assumed the role of dictator.

It is also possible that she decided to go home because she felt she was no better off in North America. Although most Polish immigrants had come to this country and the United States to escape the hopeless economic situation in their own divided country, the jobs that many of the women among them found on this side of the Atlantic were not much better than slavery. In the 1920s immigrant female workers earned less than male workers doing the same job. They were fined for minor infractions, and employers sometimes made deliberate mistakes on paycheques. In addition, women employees were often charged for supplies; in the case of the garment industry the costs of thread and electricity were deducted from their cheques. Foreign workers, especially those from eastern Europe, were frequently excluded, alienated and insulted by their fellow workers and their employers.
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To escape discrimination on the basis of their ethnic origins, immigrant women often worked in the ghetto sweatshops of their own communities, which did not guarantee good working conditions but gave them the comfort of using their own language and customs. By far the majority of immigrants—85 percent in the case of Polish immigrants—chose to work for employers of their own nationality.
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Lillian may also have worked as a domestic servant while in North America. Irene Woodcock, who met Lillian in the settlement of Kuldo, near Hazelton, BC, in 1927, recalled some sixty years later that Lillian had said,

[S]he'd been brought over as a domestic by a doctor and his wife in New York City, and they didn't treat her too good. All she did was work, work, work and they never gave her any money, at least, not enough that she could save to get home.
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By using the phrase “she'd been brought over,” Woodcock implied that Lillian's stint as a domestic had occurred when she first came to North America—that is, before she claimed to have lived in Toronto—and she seems to have also believed that Lillian was only briefly here and had only worked at that one job. Although in some ways domestic workers had a good life compared to those who worked in factories, they often experienced sexual, physical or emotional abuse from their employers. Few of these cases were reported. Many domestic workers were also ill-treated financially; in most cases both the cost of their passage to North America and their living expenses were deducted from wages, and since in many cases their wages equalled their expenses, there was little opportunity to save or to send money home as would have been expected by their families in the old country.

What situation Lillian was leaving one can only guess, but if she was leaving an employer, Christmas Eve would have been a good time to do it. She probably had Christmas Day off from her job, and by leaving on Christmas Eve, she would have ensured no one would miss her until the day after Christmas. In addition, she may have felt that leaving the United States would make it more difficult for her employer to locate her. She may also have been spurred to return to Poland by news from her family there. In an article entitled “The Girl Who Walked Home to Russia” that appeared in
The Bedside Coronet
in 1962, author Allen Roy Evans wrote that Lillian had received a letter stating that her father, mother and brother had been sent to a Siberian prison camp. Her brother, Gregor, had been a minor government clerk, and as a member of the bourgeoisie, he would have been out of favour with the Soviets.
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Evans produces nothing to corroborate this story, but it makes sense because Lillian always said her destination was Siberia, not Poland. It also has the ring of truth since she did not acknowledge any ties on this side of the Atlantic. Although she told the Customs officer that she was married and that she was a housewife and planned to continue being a housewife upon arriving in Canada, she also listed no relative or friend as her contact person in Canada and answered “none” when asked to name her nearest relative. This would suggest that either there was no husband, or that she had put her marriage behind her, and that all members of her birth family had been left behind in Poland.

But why would Lillian choose to return to Europe by foot, when boat passage was clearly faster and much less arduous? Perhaps she was trying to return home undetected and she felt Siberia offered her an opportuity to slip into the country or maybe she realized she did not have the financial means to return any other way. In 1926 passage on a ship to northern Europe would have cost approximately two hundred dollars. The average annual wage for a woman in the textile industry in 1926 was eight hundred dollars for a ten-hour day: approximately four hundred dollars below the basic standard of living. Domestic workers like Lillian earned even less. Even if Lillian had worked steadily in the three years that it took for her to walk to Siberia, she could not have saved the money to buy a ticket even in steerage.

Evans said in his article that Lillian walked home rather than taking a boat because a waiter in New York stole her savings.
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We know this not to be true because she was carrying twenty dollars when she crossed the border into Canada. The twenty dollars probably represented months of savings and to Lillian it was a meagre but dependable resource for her long journey home.

 

• (1)
  Weatherford, Doris.
  Foreign and Female: Immigrant women in America, 1840–1930
  . New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1995, page 365.
  
• (2)
  Form 30, Canadian Immigration Service. Report of Admissions and Rejections at the Port of Niagara Falls, Ontario, for the month ending December 1926.
  
• (3)
  St. Stanislaus' Parish: the Heart of Toronto Polonia, in
  Polyphony: Bulletin of the Multicultural History Society of Ontario: Poles in Ontario
  . Fall/Winter 1984.
  
• (4)
  Email from Mary Munk, Canadian Genealogy Centre, Client Services Division, Library and Archives Canada.
  
• (5)
  Ancestry.com, Dictionary of Jewish Surnames in Russian Empire, downloaded March 24, 2008.
  
• (6)
  Email from Andrea D'Angelo, Processing Archivist, Archdiocese of Toronto, June 19, 2009.
  
• (7)
  Phone interview with Marc Lerman, Director of Archives, Archdiocese of Toronto, September 24, 2008.
  
• (8)
  Letter from Elizabeth Gray, Textual Archives Services Division, National Archives and Records Administration, May 18, 2010.
  
• (9)
  Pybus, Cassandra.
  The Woman Who Walked to Russia.
  Markham, Ontario: Thomas Allen & Son Ltd., 2002. First published in Australia as
  Raven Road
  . Cassandra Pybus, St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2001.
  
• (10)
  Email from New York researcher Sandra Ceely.
  
• (11)
  State of New York, Department of Health, genealogy request reply received September 1, 2009.
  
• (12)
  Multicultural Canada website: Polish Migration and Arrival.
  
• (13)
  Weatherford.
  Foreign and Female
  , page 230.
  
• (14)
  Ibid., page 231.
  
• (15)
  “Woodcock Remembers Siberian Girl and Telegraph Trail,”
  Yellowhead / Stewart / Cassiar Times
  , April 24, 1990.
  
• (16)
  Evans, Allen Roy. “The Girl Who Walked Home to Russia.”
  The Bedside Coronet
  , Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1962, pages 19–24.
  
• (17)
  Ibid.
  

Despite extensive research in museums, archives and libraries across Canada, I was unable to find any verifiable documents confirming the route, the method of travel or the timetable for Lillian Alling's journey between her December border crossing at Niagara Falls in 1926 and her arrival in Winnipeg the following spring. However, it is possible to piece her route together by examining the usual routes and documented adventures of other foot travellers at that time as well as the legends and stories about Lillian's own travels. Her route would probably have taken her first to Hamilton, then Toronto, directly north to the mining town of Sudbury and then west on what would later become part of Ontario Highway 17 (and still later the Trans-Canada Highway) to Sault Ste. Marie. As no road over the top of Lake Superior existed at that time, she would have had to follow local roads and the Canadian Pacific Railway tracks to Kenora and thence to Winnipeg. (The road over the top of Lake Superior was not constructed until the late 1950s as a result of the Trans-Canada Highway Act.)

In conversations later in her journey she insisted that she walked the entire distance across Canada, and if she walked approximately eight hours per day through the rough up-and-down terrain of the Canadian Shield, it would have taken her at least two months to walk the 1,300 miles (2,100 kilometres) from Niagara Falls to Winnipeg where, according to one source, she arrived around March 1, 1927.
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Winter, however, was not the best time to be setting out on a journey through Canadian Shield country. Sudbury's average temperature in January is -13.7oC and in February -12.7oC, while the average snowfall in January is 54 cm and in February 44.8 cm. Sault Ste. Marie averages -10.5oC in January and -19.7oC in February with average snowfall of 81.7 cm in January and 42.8 cm in February. Alternatively, she may have stayed in Niagara Falls or Toronto from December 1926 until the spring of 1927 before embarking on her travels westward. But if then she walked the entire distance from Niagara Falls to Winnipeg, the date for her arrival there would be much later than March 1, and this would also make it impossible for her to arrive in Hazelton, BC, in September—which she did. It is also possible, however, that she used some of the twenty dollars that she had on her person when she crossed the border to take the train at least part of the way west to Winnipeg. However, even at 1927 train fares of approximately two cents per mile, this may have been too much money for her to spend. On the other hand, she may also have accepted rides as it is known that she did so later in her journey.

An extensive article about Lillian Alling written by Richard W. Cooper and published in the magazine
Western People
in 1985 describes Lillian's journey west from Winnipeg:

About March 1, 1927, she arrived in Winnipeg. Here she felt the most at home, for many Winnipeg people spoke her language. She stayed until the end of March, working as kitchen help in Child's Restaurant on Portage Avenue, where she was known as a good worker who kept to herself. She was next seen in Neepawa, Manitoba, where she stopped with a farm family for a few days, helping around the farm in return for food.

The next reasonably accurate report of Lillian Alling came from Kamsack, Saskatchewan. Then there was a definite report of the lone woman hiker in Wakaw, Saskatchewan, where she checked with the RCMP detachment on the shortest route to Alaska. Police records from Wakaw indicate she arrived about the end of April; she had averaged more than 30 kilometres a day on her journey northwest.

On May 2 Alling set out from Wakaw and was not heard of again until she appeared in Grande Prairie, Alberta, on June 15, 1927. A farmer's wife said the Russian woman was then wearing some new clothing. She worked as household help in a Grande Prairie farm until early in July then again set out on what had now become an obsession. Her farm employer gave her a lift to Pouce Coupe where she crossed into British Columbia.
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