Lillian Alling

Lillian Alling (1896 – after 1929) was an Eastern European immigrant to the United States, who in the 1920s attempted a return by foot to her homeland. Her four-year-long journey started in New York, and went westward across Canada, then north through British Columbia, the Yukon, and then west again reaching Alaska by 1929. It is not known if Alling successfully crossed the Bering Strait to Russia.

Journey Because her first appearance in official records was September 10, 1927, when she was arraigned in Hazelton, details before that, including her birth, emigration, and early journey, are impossible to confirm. Cassandra Pybus speculates that she was Jewish, based on contemporary searches for similar names, emigrating from Belorussia via Poland in the 1920s.

In 1973, retired Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer T.E.E. Greenfield, who had been stationed at Hazelton in 1927, wrote to a local newspaper, the Vancouver Province, with his version of events;

Alling starts out By 1926, Alling had been steadily working in New York, saving up for passage to Russia. Upon finding she still could not afford passage aboard a steamer ship, she instead chose to walk to Siberia. Alling studied books and maps in the New York Library, and had drawn a "rough outline" of her journey.

She first walked to Buffalo, then crossed into Canada at Niagara Falls on Christmas Eve, 1926. When the customs official asked her the routine entry questions, she stated her last place of residence was Rochester, New York, she was a Catholic, she was 30 years old, and had been born in Poland. When she was searched, they found two ten-dollar bills and an iron bar (or pipe) long, which she declared was "protection against men", not wild animals. At each cabin, she received assistance including food, clothing, and even a dog companion named Bruno

Sailing on the Yukon River When she reached Atlin, the dog had died, or November 1928,

quote|Starting out again, she hiked along the Telegraph Trail, over the wild mountain passes, finally reaching Dawson where she worked as a cook, purchased and repaired an old boat, and in the spring of 1929, launched it into the waters of the Yukon River right behind the outgoing ice reaching a point east of the Seward Peninsula. She abandoned the boat for overland travel, reaching Nome and later Bering Strait. |sign=|source=The New Way of the Wilderness, p. 1 In 1975, Dickie republished the story with a new postscript in which he noted that after his True West article, a reader named Arthur Elmore wrote to him, recounting a "peculiar" story Elmore had heard from a Russian friend in 1965. from the Diomede Islands and one Caucasian woman, all standing near a boat. It is not certain if this woman was, in fact, Lillian Alling.

Reporting Contemporary coverage of Alling's journey included 1928 articles in the Whitehorse Star, as "the mystery woman" who arrived in Hazelton from the regularly scheduled steamship service from Vancouver to Prince Rupert, without suggesting that she had started from New York, A colourful retelling of Alling's journey was given by J. Wellsford Mills in a 1948 issue of Shoulder Strap, the journal of the British Columbia Provincial Police; Mills's article repeated the same speculative details, but Cassandra Pybus believes that Mills fabricated most of this history. expanded and republished in the March/April 1972 issue of True West. All the Way to Russia With Love (2002), a play by Susan Flemming with Kathi Langston Away (2007), a novel by Amy Bloom Lillian Alling (2010), an opera commissioned by the Vancouver Opera in 2007; it was composed by John Estacio, with a libretto by John Murrell, and premiered on 16 October 2010. Lillian (2019), a film directed by Andreas Horvath